It's just blooming typical, nothing I/we needed to do last night to use electricity beyond the usual and I'm out in the car today so can't take advantage of that 3 hours.
If I
ever even
consider taking advantage of a daytime "free electricity" offer from Octopus again, just shoot me.
It went like this.
The session last night was certainly useful. No solar, so nothing to lose. I plugged the car in and set the home battery to export from eight till nine so it had capacity to charge from nine till ten. I ran the washing machine and the dishwasher during the free hour, as well as charging the home battery and one or two other things. So far so good.
The car didn't charge, and when I looked at the schedule I had, it showed nothing before 11.30. I checked a few times and that remained the case. OK I thought, I'll just let it happen. Then the car started to charge at 10.30, swallowing up the battery export that was going on at the time. No thanks, stopped that. But no harm done, I caught it quickly.
Come 11.30 I put the wet clothes in the tumble drier, so I'd get that at 7p. Fine. Went to bed. Hunky-dory. Woke up to an empty home battery. Damn. I'd forgotten to reset the battery to charge during the off-peak period. I'd been using grid power at 30p for three hours, from 5.30 am till the sun picked up the house load at 8.30.
I should just have left it, and let the home battery charge on whatever solar came in above the export cap, but I really didn't anticipate how sunny it was going to be. By the time the free period arrived the sun was splitting the sky and everything I had on - home battery, washing machine and tumble drier - was simply coming off my export. I realised within ten minutes I'd made a rookie mistake and although I let the washing machine do its cycle I switched everything else off to let the solar export. In fact the home battery picked up enough on just the excess generation above the export limit to have done me for the evening.
Again the car didn't charge, so I just unplugged it. I don't think I managed to use a single unit during the three-hour window, all I did was use up some power I could have exported. As of course has happened every other time I tried that game, you'd have thought I'd have learned.
The Friday evening session was worth having though.
