Fair enough. I’m fortunate to have a home storage battery, so I can time-shift my energy use to meet their requirements. I then use the free electricity to fully charge my battery. Like you, I am not prepared to sit in the dark for three hours in the evening either!

they always give me a target of 6.2%. I switch everything off and sit in the dark for three hours. It is not worth it. They still charge you for the electric eventually giving you a credit or top up two weeks after the month ends. Only did it this month because of 8 free hours of electric on Christmas Day. Wish I hadn’t bothered.

Thanks, Lee. Interesting stuff. Since September I’ve been getting the full 16 hours every Sunday without doing anything special, although this coming Sunday I’m down to just 4 hours for some reason. Still enough time to fully charge my battery though!

Forgot to mention..

I’ve created a calculation spreadsheet that tracks target and suggests how much “shifting” is required to hit target.

One of my customers needs to buy in 1kwh per week to achieve 16hrs free electricity outside 4pm-7pm.

Ours is 8kwh. You may remember our 0.3% to 0.2% target? Found a way around that too by buying in at the right time 1 or 2kwh.

Seems 6-10th Aug and 1-4th Sep were key dates for Baseline calcs.

Even more impressive..

We’re running 65kwh of batteries and for last two weekends, havd 2x 16kwh packs on loan.

14th Sept – 140kwh – FREE
21st Sept – 110kwh – FREE
28th Sept – 125kwh – FREE

100kwh batteries are lasting us almost a week to provide Hot Water, cooking and heating via AC and oil heaters with a little Solar thrown into the mix.

Even the EV is getting one free charge every weekend so we spend the week running everything down ready for 8am Sunday.

This is likely our cheapest ever Winter should this continue into next year.

Thanks, Lee. Impressive!

EDF did change our Baseline as the 0.2% was based on 99% battery usage at tea time.

So, after the Feb or Mar break, I created some artificial use by forcing charge with 1kw.

When scheme restarted it was a more easily achievable 8% to 4%. This was done by charging with 1.5kwh at 2am while on off peak Economy7.

Buying in 82p during the early hours of each weekday skewed in our favour. In doing so had 16hrs of every weekend ran in June / July with Tennis Sunday – have had around £220’s worth of free electricity.

Like you, we have Solar and since upgraded to 65kwh battery storage. 8am Sunday, car starts charging at 6.6kw, followed by batteries charging at 5kw at 8:03am.

Washer, dryer, dishwasher, Air Conditioning also running to a max of 18kw to prevent blowing incoming fuse led to a Grid intake of between 60 and 105kwh per Sunday depending on Solar output.

This left us Sunday night with washing done, car charged for the week and batteries that with Solar last until the following Sunday.

Hoping for a very cheap Winter with a weekend boost to head into the week following.

My mother got 8hrs, no batteries and no EV and managed 8kwh. Batteries have made a massive difference and we recently added a water tank prior to boiler to preheated where Solar or free Grid available and used 34p worth of Gas since start of June.

Our DD is currently £9.60 with £1700 Credit and offset with 10x £50 referrals.

This is our cheapest year ever and use 9000kwh electricity per year. Used to use 12000kwh Gas per year but with Air Conditioning and Economy7 via batteries, our heating dropped from £130 Jan 24 to £30 Jan 25.

Thanks, Harry. A very merry Christmas to you as well. I agree 100% with you about heat pumps!

It’s been an interesting experiment, Nick, with much useful info gleaned from your website. I will continue to monitor my usage to see what develops. I hope to make some use of tomorrows freeby, but there will be more interesting things getting my attention on 25th!
BTW, EDF are trying to persuade me to buy a Heat Pump. No chance!
Merry Christmas to you!