Best Electricity Plan for new EV Owners

Maybe in a disciplined house but where there's multiple adults only one of whom pays the bill it's a different story.

It just wouldn't suit the profile of my house where people use the electric shower, electric cooking, washing machine / dryer at completely random times.

My plan expires soon so I'll weigh it off and see.

I've a battery so it skews the argument in favour of charging it at night and covering the load until the solar kicks in.

@waterwelly

This household has 5 members of which 1 pays the bills and the other 4 don't take any notice of when to use electricity. You guessed who that 1 is 😂

Forget about educating the other ones, it's up to you to make sure the system handles whatever they do. So have a big battery and a powerful inverter and they can do whatever the hell they want. Get rid of those electric showers though, they should have stayed in the 1980s

Their power is up to 10kW. It is almost impossible to have an inverter / battery big enough to handle several long showers a day using those showers. A far more elegant and comfortable solution is to have a pump fitted in your hot press, this will mean all your water outlets (all showers, baths, taps) will have powerful water

Also the main reason I don't run out of battery this winter compared to last winter is replacing a condenser dryer with a heat pump dryer. The former used 5kWh per cycle, the latter 2kWh. Sometimes we use 3 cycles a day 😐️

We do 70-110kw a day during the winter with EV and heat pump. Could probably ensure 10kw per hour, maybe even 12 per hour in the EV window, so 30-40KW inside the EV window, I still have 50-60% of the usage outside that window. With 16c night rate all night, I get 80% of it or more at night rate.

@waterwelly - "Once the solar season kicks in I can be drawing ~3kW from a battery and on average ~3kw from panels.

So electric showers are at, say 1/2 price."

Doesn't work like that. You could dump battery and PV output into the grid at say 25c, that means a total of 1 hour of electric showering costs you €2.50

Far cheaper to heat water with night rate or even gas, and then have a pumped shower

@waterwelly - "Yeah but if there's no hot water left then you are on day rate for it. "

Yes. That's why you could consider having a very large hot water cylinder. I upgraded mine from the standard Irish 120l to 360l over 7 years ago and got 40 solar thermal tubes installed too. Just before my eldest daughter was a teenager. Now I have a wife and 3 teenage daughters and I was correctly expecting a huge use of hot water 😁

I was only looking at the costs of each type of dryer today for my mother. I might be way out here without sufficient research but have you calculated in the approx €500 extra to switch to the heat pump model?

I have a 10.8kW battery and EV and a 'management' system that cannot revolve around 2-5 when I am usually asleep. You list a collection of criteria that needs to be in place to be able to facilitate availing of such a short out of hours window of cheap electricity - a pump in the hotpress; heat pump dryer; huge battery (DIY only!); powerful inverter; 360L tank; storage heaters. It is not that there is little management to run this, there is no adequate management process available if you do not have the perfect set up as per you list. You state the savings are huge. I have done my figures - it would cost me a lot to switch to a 5c 2-5am tariff (currently on the Flogas community? plan), either via running costs or set up upgrade costs. You are advocating too simplistic a view on this.

Agree about electric showers. They cost a fortune. Some houses have two of them and complain about high bills 🤣

A pumped shower is more powerful anyway. Far better.

The shower is all about how much time you spend in it. Using a bit more than charging an EV, so 10 mins per person wouldn't be a massive amount.

You're very handy with the tech, Unkel, just install a programme that switches to cold water only after 10 mins.

Back in the day I use to trip the switch after about 10 mins, unknown to them, told them the house couldn't sustain 9kW for long and would trip. Not sure if they believed me , but it certainly reduced the time in the shower..🙂

Ours is a about 20 KwH annually, that's for charging the car 2, maybe three times a week and running a heat pump for the night, also no electric showers

If any help in terms of you checking your condensor usage. Have family of 4 here - with one of the teens appearing to believe that changing clothes twice a day and that every item of clothes, including say hoodies on over a t-shirt and a light top, is limited to one wear. We have a heat pump dryer and I have an energy plug on it to monitor it since start Sep. Very little outside drying unfortunately with weather and us not being around at home to manage the in and out since then.

Anyway, usage: 44.5kw in Oct. 41.25kw in Nov. 12.13kw so far this month (with 2 loads to go in today so can assume low 40s again).

I'm getting away lightly with my condenser dryer it uses 2Kw per hour, it's used for 1.5 hours a day as the heavy clothes, towels etc are left out and dried with the dehumidifier which uses 300W.

I meant left out on a clothes horse in the kitchen, no point in hanging them outside the day is too short. The dehumidifier is fantastic for the house in general.

Ageee the humidifier is fabulous for drying clothes. Leave mine on a clothes rail in a small, warm bedroom and run the dehumidifier 2-6am and clothes are dry in the am