New Octopus "Charge Pack"

[stevedundee2]

What do people think about the new Charge Pack add-on from Octopus: https://octopus.energy/help-and-faqs/articles/charge-pack/

It aims to make battery grid charging and discharging economically efficient, same as predbat. The guaranteed minimum saving is better than I get through predbat. On the other hand, predbat is doing other useful stuff like stopping my battery discharging when the car is charging through Intelligent Octopus Go. Maybe as both are based on price, if the car is charging so would be the battery.

Perhaps predbat wouldn't want to support it because it eliminates most of its raison d'etre? It's just another way of doing the same thing. Thoughts?

Steve

[gcoan]

Charge pack is effectively a replacement for Predbat, it optimises your battery, charging at cheap periods, discharging at expensive periods, and with Octopus charging and discharging additionally to support the grid.

It controls your battery all the time, not just in grid strain periods.

Therefore wouldn't work alongside Predbat as they'd be conflicting.

[stevedundee2]

That's what I thought. I like the sense of ownership over what happens to my battery that comes through using predbat, but also I like the sound of a guaranteed minimum saving of £12 pm. I get less than that under predbat at the moment, but that's partly because I configure for self-sufficiency and therefore don't have predbat importing just to export etc, as I suppose Charge Pack would do. So I could stop configuring predbat for self-sufficiency and I suppose I'd get similar financial results. The difference would be that Octopus would import / export according to the greeness (via price) of the grid supply whereas predbat does it ... well, seemingly randomly within the cheap rate / peak rate periods the last times I used it that way .

Too many choices!

[upton68]

Here is a review from a user.

[stevedundee2]

That's interesting. The results will very much apply specifically to the period he was testing in, of course. I'm sure the charging behaviour would vary, especially in the winter, but the guaranteed £12 protects against a financial hit arising from that. Like him, I think I'd feel uncomfortable seeing the system using grid when there is plenty of (free, green, sun-provided) energy in the battery. I suppose at this time of year the grid is also green but...