How best to maximise Heat Pump/Solar Panels/EV

OVO Energy’s Charge Anytime add-on is available on most of their electricity tariffs, but not all of them. My understanding is that Charge Anytime can typically be added to:

• Simpler Energy
• Better Smart
• Green Energy Fix

But it cannot usually be added to:

• Economy 7 tariffs
• PAYG (Pay As You Go) tariffs
• Non-smart meter tariff  
  However check this with OVO before you rely on my understanding. The key requirement is that you have a compatible smart meter and either a smart EV charger (like Indra or Ohme) or a compatible EV (certain models, like Hyundai, Kia, VW, etc., with direct control through the OVO app).

Because tariffs can change over time, I recommend checking the OVO app or your online account, or contacting OVO directly, to confirm if Charge Anytime is currently available on your specific tariff.

My EV has a 65Kw battery giving me a range of 250 miles when it’s cold and 280 miles when the weather is warm. I do 10,000 miles per annum so with Chsrge Anytime my likely electricity cost to run the vehicle is going to be £180 assuming OVO does not increase its Charge Anytime rate and, leaving out the cost of public chargers.

I would put my money on finding a tariff to support Charge Anytime if your vehicle usage is much the same as mine or more. I would use the solar to defray your home energy  bills and monitor the cost of the heat pump over the next year. If I am wrong you can always switch your tariff.

Without knowing your home energy profile (what’s typically used and when), it might be difficult to fully assess at present.

As BobTom mentioned, there are add-ons for your EV (check compatibility) and also for your Heat Pump (again check). 
Apart from those, you might want to determine your higher energy consuming appliances and think if you can move your usage and use an off- peak tariff.

Hey ​@JulesSteele 

Congratulations on the move 😊 & welcome to the OVO Online Community!!!

Brilliant advice here from our community members. Just wanted to add the following you may find helpful:
 

Really helpful input as always ​@Peter E! 😊 Food for thought...

Hi ​@JulesSteele, some great advice here, and it’s always so difficult weighing one thing against another!

One very Good Thing in your favour is that you are currently on the old FiT scheme, and hopefully you’ve got quite a few years of that left? It’s generally more generous than SEG, is guaranteed for the life of the Fit contract, and is inflation linked to a certain extent. It “imputes” an export figure (a rather low 50%, in fact most homes export rather more than that) rather than actually measuring it.

The only slightly Doubtful Thing I would add to the excellent advice in the above posts is that, although you don’t specifically mention it, and I don’t think others here have either,  attempting to recharge an EV solely from solar panels requires that the panels are generating a minimum of 6 Amps, i.e. around 1.4 kWh; any less than that and as far as I am aware your panel output may be ignored so far as sole car-charging purposes are concerned, i.e. without additional grid or other input.  This is an aspect you may want to check out if it’s at the back of your mind? Up here in sunny Sunderland there are months when indeed I can get more than 6 Amps from the panels at certain times on certain days if I’m lucky, but today for example 10 AM 8th May at the moment I’m not getting much more than 1.5 Amps from what is a fairly small array, it’s barely keeping up with recharging my overnight storage battery. And for the period Oct to Mar, forget 6 Amps!  But I wouldn’t be without my solar panels, even minimal output helps, and presumably they would still help towards EV charging, just wouldn’t very often handle sole charging of EV on their own throughout the various seasons.
 

Long story short, you won’t regret having the panels, heat pump, EV etc., any minor headache and head-scratching will transmute into the fun of getting the most from the kit, and it will always be a challenge, but a very satisfying challenge!

Let us know how you get on and what you decide, it’s the only way we can all benefit from each other’s experiences…all the best

​@waltyboy 

Some good points here which actually highlights ​@BPLightlog’s point that it is highly dependent upon how you use energy. I've stuck to my usage pattern (the only one where I have HH data for) and the first point that the simulation told me is if you are only paying a small amount for charging the car don't use the panels for that. Even if you have a battery to time shift the energy. You have pointed out the impracticality of doing that anyway when you need a minimum of 6A to keep a charge going.

The second thing is that choosing discounted energy increases the payback time of the panels because you are no longer comparing against the SVT.

I've started looking at how adding a battery changes the dynamics of the simulation by not letting excess energy be sent out at a low rate SEG but instead, storing it for use later to displace higher rate energy when it's possible to use it. To be honest that bit is doing my head in and I'm having to take breaks adding to my pergola in the garden.

It has become obvious though that if you are starting with a clean sheet then the EV comes first, find a compatible energy supplier for the charger that you already have (there are enough of these - you really don't need to buy another charger at £1000 a pop) and then see if you can usefully add solar. You can split the cost of the solar between half going green but also have some return on the investment. If it's only a business case you are interested in then you're going to have to wait possibly 15 years to get your money back if you choose Agile. If you choose OVO then the SEG is higher for the panels and the the price you are mitigating is higher (25p) as the Charge Anytime orice of 7p only applies to the car and the payback is about 9 years.

After that I don't think there is a lot else you can do and I think it is highly unlikely that a battery will mitigate enough costs to make the payback time less than its life. That might work better with Agile but not with OVO. We shall see.

Peter

Hi ​@Peter E, thanks for your interesting and very full comments, and good luck with that pergola!

I’ve very much adopted the lazy man’s approach to using our small storage battery (100 AH, 24 volt): it runs the entire house for 16.5 hours from 1600 to 0830, at an average of 120Wh or so, day in, day out for 365 days a year. It re-charges from 0900 to 1545 at a steady 11 Amps,  so around 280Wh.  Except for Dec and Jan (when total monthly generation is only around 20kWh) the solar panels mostly cover that every day: it’s our normal daytime loads over and above total solar panel generation that mostly account for our average monthly purchase of 20kWh electricity (we don’t yet have an EV).

As you and others rightly point out, it all depends on one’s consumption patterns and levels.  Our small two-person retired household annually buys only around 250 kWh of electricity and 650 kWh of gas, so our small battery’s savings of £100-odd over a year are a big deal for us.  It’s been double that for 2024 into 2025 actually, with the recent PowerMove incentives, but of course that scheme is changing after May ‘25.  Without solar panels the calculations would be a lot more arduous, (pergola style!), and would involve fancy-Dan techniques to track tariffs and usage  patterns etc.  Together with its accompanying small inverter the payback period for my simple approach will be about 6 years I reckon…it’s been going trouble-free for nearly two years now, so hopefully the kit (the cheapest I could find) will keep going! It’s set up never to discharge more than 85%, and the inverter never to run at more than 30% of its rated capacity, and as far as I know these ceilings have been rarely even approached: occasionally the ‘fridge/freezer and the small chest freezer might kick in at the same time together with whatever else we may have running then too, but hitting its peak of 350 Wh or so is quite rare, and well below the 600Wh maximum I’ve set. So I’m hoping that being gentle and steady will prolong the life of the system,

As you say, sorting out the costs of any EV charging is definitely the first priority, with everything else coming after that, but based on my own somewhat limited experience I would indeed recommend a serious look at a (smallish) storage battery, possibly even without any solar panels, when the main priorities have been sorted.
 

Cheers again, all the best; I too have been gainfully employed recently in the garden, nothing as interesting, though, as pergolas, but fencing and gates.

EDIT I’m a huge fan of OVO’s Charge Anytime add-on, actually, for when we do eventually manage an EV:  overnight charging for our neighbourhood and our own particular circumstances would not be recommended (our garage is a lock-up across the street, and I like to have the car put away for the night) and so many EV specific tariffs seem, naturally enough, to be based around a nighttime charging regimen.

Thanks ​@waltyboy for your perspective on that. I definitely see that some people do have success with multiple tech but there isn't any guide that I can see that gives people a ‘road map’ to see if it is likely to work for them. If I can sort the battery issue (given your encouragement) then I might go full blog and see if I can define what looks like success and what looks like failure depending upon the initial conditions but it's darned complicated and beset with conditions

As an example the match between a heat pump in heating mode and solar power is very poor. But if you use the same heat pump to cool the house in the summer it’s almost a perfect match. However, those people who installed an ASHP under the old MCS requirements will find their HP won't run in cooling mode as it wasn't allowed then. But it is allowed now, but then again, cooling the house with an ASHP is not that effective, especially if you have underfloor heating, which was recommended at the time. However an A2AHP is very effective at cooling but slightly less effective at heating.

Runs back to the pergola …

Peter

Returning from the pergola which is now complete I've been able to untangle the Gordion Knot (or at least some of it). I'm pleased to say the brain damage sustained wasn't too bad but the results aren't easily explained and it really needs to be a blog and I'll talk to ​@Emmanuelle_OVO about producing and publishing that.

A brief summary would be solar is very doable particularly with a good SEG rate but a home battery is very much a mixed and confusing bag with some surprising restrictions.

More later

Peter