Considering a move to smart meter / tariffs. Had some questions!
Just wanting to make sure I understand things correctly, and I'm not going to massively regret the "minimal effort" it takes to change over haha.
Smart meter install is easy enough and (afaik) there's no downsides to doing it so no worries there I think.
I don't have an EV or (currently) any solar, but we do now have several 1kwh power stations for various reasons (we were buying them anyway for a variety of purposes so we have them regardless).
I work nights from home, so the pc/office stuff is using up 200 to 500watts from 6pm until 6am every day.
Server and networking is 75 watts 24/7.
Both of these can be put on power stations so they run from battery during 4-7 peak time and recharge the battery late at night.
We dont have a dishwasher. Washing machine happens during morning/midday at the moment but we can set it to run at night.
Heating and water is all gas.
I have a portable electric heater and portable AC. Rarely use either, but if I do it's usually at night when it's not worth putting on the gas heating to heat the whole house just for my office room.
We can't move dinner, so cooking will still happen at 5-6pm most days.
Pretty much covers everything I think. Fridge and freezer will be doing what they do, can't change those easily.
- The 'economy7' style plans seem to be not worthwhile, cos you only get like 5 hours of cheap power, and the whole rest of the day is more expensive than a standard plan. And we have no EV or powerwall for a huge chunk of power offset.
Cozy is much the same, the cheap times are spread out a bit more but the bulk of the day is still expensive.
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Agile seemed most tempting cos most of the day is at least below average price, so you only need to avoid 3 to 4 hours a day (instead of avoiding 18 hours a day, which is a lot harder). Can agile be fine if you're not micromanaging and sweating over the half-hour timetable every day? Can you just default to avoiding 4-7 as much as you can (but cooking will be most of it and still happen) and still benefit significantly?
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Eon Next Smart tariff seemed good too, as it's just like agile with only a short 'on peak' time and the rest is cheap. I'd heard their customer service isn't great though? But otherwise it seemed (on paper) to be a more consistent agile.
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Anything I'm missing, any huge pitfalls etc? Is this just a waste of time for my purposes?
Hopefully this made sense. Figured before I went too deep into it all I should get some thoughts from the people who already know what they're doing!
Posted Oct 11, 2025, 7:36 PM UTC