Octopus Flux // An Energy Tariff For People With Solar PV // Paid To Export Energy // SEG // FiT

[Music] foreign [Music] Geeks video my name is Dale and in this video we're going to sit down and have a little look at the new octopus energy tariff called octopus flux so thanks for tuning in to this video and again apologies for a little bit of the mess still trying to work on decorating the the study here in the new house but I wanted to talk about this octopus flux tariff so a few subscribers have mentioned this uh to me and a couple of people reached out to me on Facebook in terms of what do I think are this new octopus flux tariff is it saying I'm going to be moving to and is it something that they should consider so I thought if you weren't aware of this tariff I'd bring it to your attention something this is with octopus energy who I've been with for many years and constantly talk about the octopus go tariff but this flux tariff is really one of the the first tariffs I've seen that's specifically focused at homeowners that have both solar and battery storage and essentially how you can hopefully maximize um the benefits of having solar and battery storage and the costs of electricity and how you can kind of buy and sell from the grid hopefully good rates to make their return on investment even more valuable to you especially with energy crisis energy crisis I mean is it energy crisis but the energy price is continuing to go up my octopus go tariff comes to an end next month and again the price is going up again so it was originally five pence off peak then it was seven and a half Pence off peak now it's going up to um 12 Pence I think it is or 12 and a half or 15. I can't remember um but yeah prices are going up the off peak cost is now what the peak cost used to be pretty much when I first joined octopus go so if you have options then you know this octopus flux tariff might be a goer so let's pop over and uh look on the screen together talk to you a little bit about what the Tariff is all about and whether I think it's something that you should consider if you have solar and battery and the reason why I say that is one of the requirements is that you do have um solar and battery storage well at least solar for sure you have to be able to send um your certificate across so it can't be just to be solid you've installed yourself and you must have the certificate to prove that it's um MCS is an MCS certificate that you issue over to um octopus so they know you've got a legit system and you've been authorized by your local dno to be able to potentially export energy back to the grid so let's pop on the screen and look at this Optimus flux tariff together okay so this is it I put a link in the description so you can get to this yourself but basically it's optimus.energy forward slash smart forwards that forward slash flux and here you can see as usual nice little um graphic here to welcome us to the Optimus flux page and as I mentioned in the intro the whole idea of this is that if you have solar and Battery you can charge though the battery up at some good off-peak costs but the main focus of this tariff is really that you have the ability to export your energy at better rates than we're currently seeing with like the seg rates which tend to be like five pence per kilowatt when you're exporting them so as you can see here octopus plus flux is an Import and Export tariff optimized to give you the best rates for consuming and selling your energy and support the grid during Peak so you can see here that you've got um what they call them they're super cheap rates which are for three hours so between two and and five now that's different to the octopus go tariff that I'm on at the moment where I have super cheap rates from half past midnight to half past four so having four hours whereas here we have uh three hours but a different time and so that's probably where you're going to charge your car charge your batteries and what have you and then there is a peak rate which is between four o'clock and that's seven o'clock isn't it October with the 24 hour clock um but that's obviously where most people coming home from work you're cooking your dinner you've got your oven on got your cooker on and you're consuming lots of energy so obviously that's when you want to be using your battery and if you've got lots of battery um storage you might decide to sell that back to the grid during that time so if you want to you can put your postcode um in here and you can see what the rates are so obviously rates very little to it based on your geographical um location but um let me just bring up what my rates are and uh that I can give you just a rough example of what that would look like so let's have this posted in the Spectrum geek's Discord channel from earlier okay so here we can see that what my rates would be is so the day rate so in between 5 AM and 4 P.M I'm paying I'll be paying 34 Pence per kilowatt hour in terms of importing it but anything I exported during the day I get 22 kilowatts so that's much better than like as I mentioned before the typical five pence that you get if you're on a battered tariff on the seg then the flux rate and which is that what they're calling their super super cheap rate um we're importing the early hours of the morning is actually relatively high so 20.4 Pence particular hours obviously less than your day rate but that is more than the rate you know you're paying on the go tariff but if you do any exporting in those early hours of the morning which is probably going to be from your battery because you're not going to be generating much solar at that time of the morning you get paid that 9.4 Pence per kilowatt hour and then the peak rate where um you're gonna then have to pay 47.5 Pence per kilowatt hour to import and which is pretty much the current kind of normal day rate on the Optimus go which we're moving to but you will get paid 36.5 Pence per kilowatt hour and for anything you export back to the grid so this is where I think during the summer months you might have a little bit of solar Surplus that you can sell back but if you filled up your battery all day and you don't need the battery to get you through all of the night you might choose to export some of your battery back to the grid and get paid 36.5 Pence and then when you import it again overnight you could pay just a 20.4 pence per kilowatt hour and as in most of these Tire Associates are standard standing charge which is 45 Pence per day so that gives you an example what it'd be like for me um if I went on to this tariff now um a little bit more information about um what's the requirements so again you have to have solar panels um to be able to get onto this tariff as mentioned before you need to have your MCS certificate so if you've got solar panels already and it was installed by an MTS certified installer you will have that MCS MCS document if you don't then you're not going to be eligible for this tariff if you don't have solar right now as you can see here um octopus are partnered in various different companies with heat pumps and sailors and batteries and what have you so you can um you know reach out to someone to start getting things installed and as I say here you don't have to have your install by octopus you can have it from anybody and that will work um really fine so again in terms of what you need so let's say you have got solar and your MCS certificate and ideally a battery then you obviously have to be in octopus Energy customer so first of all you can sign up and use the link in the description and you will get 50 pound credit towards your first bill as will I and then once you get enough space Energy customer then you can sign up to move over to the Tariff in the future just kind of join on a standard tariff you do have to have a smart meter so either a smetz 2 meter which in a more modern building you'll tend to have that as standard if your house is built kind of after say 2018 something like that or you have to have a valid secure Smets one smart meter so secure is the brand of the Smets one smart meter so you need to have Smart Meters for this to work and obviously that's how octopus are able to find out you know how much or importing exporting back to get the right payments everything done obviously then you sign up to the terms and conditions as you would um and you know then you can get put onto this turret and start hopefully reducing your energy bills and making a bit of money if you have um you know the ability to export out to them so as mentioned before you can get a an estimate in terms of installing solar at your property so again if you if you're interested in selling you haven't done it already yet and you haven't decided who you're going to reach out to you know octopus energy do have the option to provide that for you so that's basically what the um tariff is all about um one of the things that's required um again is the solar panels you don't have to have an electric vehicle so that's one of the restraints currently for octopus goes you have to have an EV so this turret here is kind of filling in some of that Gap where people don't necessarily have an EV but they have solar panels and that they have a battery storage but they help me out to get an octopus go since they changed the rules so now octopus flux might be um an option and obviously if you have the feeding tab so if you have um a um the older solar where you benefit from the feeding tariff um there may be um some issues in terms of um how you're getting paid if you're currently on seg um you won't have an issue you can just move over to octopus flux without any issue so um I don't think there's any limits on what you can export no there's no limits so you know how much you can pump back into the grid from either your battery storage and your um solar you can benefit um from it that shouldn't be a problem so let's jump back and I'll tell you what I think of this tariff and who it might be good for or who it may not be good for okay so as those of you subscribe to channel now I recently moved so I don't currently have solar on this property at the moment whereas I had my nine kilowatt solar array before but I did bring my battery with me so I'm not currently eligible for this tariff um but let's pretend that I was still at my previous setup so where I had the nine kilowatt solar array I have my Tesla powerwall 2 battery storage and I was on the feeding tariff and obviously my primary goal was that I didn't export anything as much as possible so I would put all of my Surface energy into recharging my battery heating my hot water with my my energy Eddie and charging out EVS with the zappy so um what I basically did I had a little look um at my previous year's stats for the last year and even if you do um you know use as much solar as you can into you know your different devices during the summer if you've got a you know reasonable solar array you are going to generate a surplus more than you can use and you'd put back into the grid so unless that's happening during the day rate with the octopus flux so for me uh we'll forget about the feeding tariff and all that sort of stuff we'll come back to that in a moment but if I was using the energy that I generated like I had done previously still on the octopus go tariff so charging the battery up in the winter um on the off-peak when I didn't need it and obviously same charging cars off peak as well then my total export for the previous year was 895.8 kilowatt hours of energy that I put back into the grid that I couldn't use in my EV charging heat and hot water and charging up my power wall again and so if I was on this tariff last year um my total pay from the export would have been 213 pounds and 74 Pence something like that that's how I told him paid for all of the energy that I exported at um if I was on the octopus flux tariff and I personally wouldn't have exported anything from my power wall because I like to use you know my power power when the Sun goes down so I wouldn't have had any surplus that I could have sold back out of my battery and that wouldn't mean something that I would have considered now I even though obviously 200 and basis quite 214 pounds is pretty good um I wouldn't have done this because let me just uh check my numbers because I was on the feed-in Tariff so what that meant was um I also get paid for Generation which doesn't change if you're on the flux tariff um but I get paid for deemed export with the feeding tariff so what I would have got uh instead was 220 pounds so I'm slightly better off staying on the feeding tariff and not giving up my kind of deemed export piece which you'd have to do if you went with flux so for me if you're on the feeding tariff I don't think it makes sense to look at octopus flux because even if you don't export anything and you use it all you still get paid for deemed export so I think this only really makes sense if you've got a massive amount of battery storage that you may then choose to sell back and you are on the seg so you don't have the freedom tab you're already getting paid for what you export so that's my opinion if you're on the feeding Tafe stay on the feeding tariff if you're on seg then you might want to consider flux now the other thing to think about here though also is again I'm comparing this to Optimus go that um obviously the off-peak rates are higher for charging than they are with go and the fact that obviously it's a slightly smaller window to charge up your electric vehicle and charge your battery up as well so I'm kind of on the fence really at the moment in terms of octopus flux because I think that while it is good that this is being introduced um it's going to cost you around currently I think about you know at least five pence per kilowatt hour extra off peak to charge your electric vehicles and um you know power up your batteries um and then obviously when you export it um I don't think it offsets because you're only going to get in a few Pence more so yeah if I haven't done all the numbers I'd be interested to know from you if you're watching if anyone's going on to Optimus flux I do need to sit down um and look at the numbers for the future because obviously when I do get solar again I won't be um on fit so this might be something it is worth considering just for the small amount that I may export in the future even though it will be a smaller array so while I do think that octopus flux is a good tariff and something to look into I think definitely if you don't have electric vehicle it's probably gonna make sense to go with octopus flux and get paid you know was it like more about four just over four times per kilo hour than what you're probably getting paid on your seg deal but if you have electric vehicle I think you probably need to sit down do more of the numbers and compare something like the octopus go tariff where you have you know that four hours um cheaper cheaper rate versus you know still a cheaper rate with flux but not as cheap um so yeah let me know in the comments if this is something you're thinking about let me know if you think that more people should be offering um something like this again I think it's good because if you haven't got electric vehicle and you want to be able to charge your battery up and stuff and you haven't had to get on go now flux gives you an option to have some form of off-peak charging and most of the energy providers now have been asking to have proof that you have electric vehicle before you let anyone to those off-peak tires so this is a step in the right direction um and the rates you know aren't too bad for Xbox I think it's a good place to start um and like I said better than the standard seg but I still think there might be um some maneuvering room in the future depending on how successful it is so thanks as always for watching I hope this video was helpful especially if you weren't aware of this tariff before um and you were thinking of switching from SEC or something or you're trying to quantify how solar and battery storage might help your return on investment and the only other thing I will just mention that I do think is worth keeping in mind is obviously your battery it has a certain Lifetime on it now based on who you buy it from you're either going to have a typically in best case a 10-year warranty with unlimited um charging Cycles or you may have a warranty that's limited to a certain amount of charging Cycles so again if you are helping offset energy on the grid and obviously getting paid for it you are impacting potentially the life of your battery in terms of your putting it through more charge cycles than you would done if you're just using it and to power your home versus offsetting selling some of that back to the grid so I don't really know right now off top of my head how you'd quantify that and build it into your calculations but it is something I think that you should consider before thinking yay I can get massive battery storage and deplete it all and you know that will get me paid back faster it will get you pay back faster but maybe the battery won't last quite as long um it probably is a simple way of working that out if you just think about the size of your battery if you'd only bought them just for getting payback for export and so if you look at exporting during those Peak rates and you can get about 36 and a half Pence you know so if you've got a nine and a half kilowatt battery you bought just for this purpose multiply that by the 36.5 Pence per kilowatt over a period of time what would be the payback for the battery maybe it does make sense um those are numbers I've not yet done but I will probably think about them as I start to think about adding to the Tesla battery storage putting it would give energy or um maybe a pile and Tech kind of self-build kind of setup but I'm wondering now so before I went around forever about things that you are interested in I'll close the video now thanks very much for watching as always please like this video if you have done it really helps me and the YouTube channel get more people aware of the spectrum Geeks Channel take care of yourself and until the next video goodbye for now [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Spectrum Geeks

Views: 7,273

Keywords: spectrum geeks, octopus energy, octopus flux, solar pv, export tariff, paid to export solar energy, battery storage, renewables, solar panels, best ev tariff, best energy tariff, octopus go, renewable energy, octopus energy referral, solar energy

Id: AQhy3zME4l0

Length: 21min 10sec (1270 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 19 2023