u/Begalldota

Every negative post seems to gets a massive algorithm boost, let’s try something positive 🎉

11kWh of energy used to hold the 21c that the house entered this period at, even through 6-9c outdoor temperature plunges. Not a buttoned up new build, but a 1970s detached with some retrofit insulation and a 5kW heat loss.

Cost on a 3.8p off-peak tariff: 42p. £3 on a standard tariff!

Following up https://www.reddit.com/r/SolarUK/comments/1wh6nsf/dont_sleep_on_agile_outgoing/, I actually did the switch to agile myself at the beginning of last week.

Shown in the pictures is two complete weeks, the first on the 12p fixed rate and the second on Agile. There was only a difference of 1.5kWh in export between them (127.9kWh @ 12p, 129.3kWh on Agile). Needless to say I'm pretty impressed with the result, increasing the average export price paid by 58% up to 19p a unit.

I managed the process by setting up a few automations in Home Assistant, with a morning battery dump down to ~15% (from an overnight charge), a priority feed in for the first part of the morning then switching to recharging the battery through the afternoon before dumping the battery back down to ~32% during the evening peak. All I've had to do manually is check the prices each day and adjust the timings of those three events to match the peaks + solar forecast.

Obviously the Tuesday when prices spiked up in the evening up to 40p a unit was incredible, but as you can see even the weekend (when prices dropped as low as 1-2p during the afternoon) was still decent - 32kWh of export for an average price of 15.5p, still easily beating the flat 12p rate.

NOTE: This is not the place to ask for or post referral codes. Ask a friend or politely message privately.

Like I suspect many people who got an AHSP installed, I actually left the gas connection in place after install because we use (a tiny amount of) gas for cooking on the hobs.

That’s cost £100+/year in standing charge since, but Fuse has an 18 month(!) fix to bring down the standing charge to ~£45 a year - the unit rate is probably 1-2p higher than the best fix you can get, but that doesn’t impact me at all because it’ll cost us about 10p a month extra.

They are also running a £100 referral payment, this means that my gas usage is effectively free and covered for the next 2ish years - a saving of £210+ compared to the previous tariff. I have no idea how this makes financial sense for Fuse, it honestly feels like I’ve robbed them.

Again, I know how valuable this could be for this audience so I wanted to bring attention to it. Please don’t turn this into referral code/code request spam, it will be removed.

I had a solar (7.44kWp) and battery (~9.3kWh) system installed in March 2025 and then a heat pump in May 2025, in addition to the two EVs we already had, so 2026 is the first representative year in our household with more or less everything running on electric.

The beginning of the year kicked off with the heat pump keeping the house at 20c+ 24/7 until May, which actually
only cost about ~£100 between a 6.9p off-peak tariff and support from solar. Hot water cost around £3 a month at the start of the year and is currently at around £1.60 a month - it is 99% of the time only generated in off-peak.

I’ve deliberately prioritised export since around March-April, with the import tariff now being IOG at 4p (3.8p come October) off-peak and the flat 12p export rate, including dumping the battery to the grid at the end of each day - in the summer this is more or less the entire battery. I’ve also had an assist from Axle VPP, around ~£100 in extra revenue so far (and included in these numbers).

A rough calculation where an equivalent household does ~13,500 miles in a fossil fuel car, produces ~7000kWh of heat and does hot water with a gas boiler as well as uses 1900kWh of domestic electricity at the price cap shows that they would have spent £3,000+ so far this year.

I don’t expect us to be net negative for the year, though that depends on how lucrative Axle is through the last quarter, but I don’t think our net spend will be any higher than around £100 even if it’s poor.

I was quoted £2k+ by a couple of specialists, which just wasn’t viable for an old 28kWh - but I love the car and I really couldn’t afford to just chuck it in the bin anyway. I had a garage take the motor out and then worked with someone who is very familiar with changing bearings on industrial motors (+ had all the tools!) to do the work ourselves.

The process wasn’t too bad but it definitely needed two people and we would have benefited massively from a hoist to help get the rotor out.

For anyone who wants to do this themselves, the two main sources of info I used for this were a YT video: https://youtu.be/n8tuOEz3MJI and the document linked here: https://www.ioniqforum.com/threads/diy-guide-drive-motor-bearing-replacement-ioniq-28kwh.55574/

2nd month in a row where we’ve been overcharged thanks to smart charge sessions that aren’t recorded. £4 last month, around £10-13 this month (which is 25% on top of my actual consumption) - a common pattern where the first charge period of the day usually fails to be detected.

So I’ve turned on approval required via the Ohme app and set Home Assistant to auto approve when it reaches 23:30 - zero chance of getting overcharged, and none of the incoming changes will impact that. I’ll check back in before winter to see if it’s any better, since there’s no benefit to me getting early periods before then.

I recommend anyone using the Ohme integration takes a good look at their bills because from what I can see it’s a mess.