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:
 

This is what I call the Big Problem and it doesn’t have a general answer.  ​@BPLightlog  is absolutely right in that it depends on not only how much you use but also when you use it. The issue with having multiple tech to save money is that, for each new layer of tech you introduce, it tends to become more expensive and there are diminishing returns. 

When I first got an EV in 2021 I was charging on OVO’s SVT. Instead of opting to buy a smart charger for about £800 (then, £1,300 now) to be compatible with Charge Anytime I changed to the Agile Octopus tariff and now I get my in-house electricity for a yearly average of 19p a unit and my car charging rate comes out at 13p because the rates from midnight to 5am are substantially lower. I avoid the peak rates (4-7pm) like the plague and it’s easy for me to do that. Changing to Agile has saved me about £550 a year and makes my electricity costs directly comparable to OVO’s Fixed Rate tariff plus the Charge Anytime add on. With Agile I have no restrictions on when I charge other than those which are self-imposed.  It’s also only £25 a year more expensive for the total cost of electricity so for me it’s a direct equivalent.

If I want to add solar panels to cut down the remaining £1,100 of electricity costs then I would probably have a 3.5kWp array which will just fit on my south facing roof on the south coast at a cost of about £6,500. It was a lot cheaper than that before the last bout of inflation but it is what it is. I carried out a calculation comparing my actual day by day usage to that likely to be generated each day taking into account the time of day and the season. It turns out that my direct usage is about 35% and the remaining 65% would have to be exported as SEG. I could get a higher SEG rate if I tied myself into panels installed by OVO and I’ll consider both cases.

OVO panels, SEG = 20p, OVO Tariff = 25p, Saved Use (@25p) + Export = £763, Payback time = 10 years to include the extra £1,3000 on a smart charger to get same overall cost of electricity. If you already have a compatible charger or a compatible car (always an important factor) then the payback is nine years.

General solar, SEG = 10p, Agile Tariff = 19p, Saved Use (@19p) + Export = £458, Payback time = 14 years.

These figures are highly dependent on how much and when you use electricity but unless you carry out a detailed calculation then you are unlikely to know how much solar panels are going to save you. I’ve not included charging the car by solar as the car is quite often not there most of the day. It probably doesn’t change the calculation much as in my case I would be losing a SEG export rate of 10p but gaining by not paying the car charging rate of 13p. Very slightly better off.

The above examples assumes that the SEG rates will not change during the payback time which, given that large solar farms are coming on stream, is unlikely. You will find that for any supplier offering SEG rates the T&Cs say that they are not fixed and can be varied. Octopus have now moved users to Time of Use rates, favouring export in the morning and the evening and lower rates in the summer and midday.

The Big Problem is trying to find the combination of Tech and Tariff that maximises the return but even if you do find an optimum case you may find that if you are including solar (which restricts your choice of Smart Charger if your car is incompatible with the supplier) then even the difference between summer and winter and the way you use electricity can change the answer.

So, whereas the first £550 of yearly saving (changing the tariff) was done for free and the savings were immediate the next £434 saved per year with solar will have an upfront cost of £7.8k and a payback time of 10 years or a £6.5k cost and a 14 year payback time. Obviously, if you already have solar then you can do your best to incorporate it and you will save more.

I’m currently looking at whether just energy shifting with just a battery might work but batteries are very expensive for what you get and I would say that the payback time is probably longer than the lifetime of the battery.

Peter

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