Scheduling high power appliances inline with a smart tariff (e.g. Octopus Agile)

Brian The Snail

Brian The Snail

Brian The Snail

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I've read many posts where people with smart electricity tariffs say they schedule washing machines, dishwashers etc to come on when they consider the cost per kW to be in their favour.

I can understand how this works if you turn on the machine and schedule the machine to run at a certain time, but how does that work if supply to the machine is only switched on when the trigger cost/kW is reached?
 
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I think people normally just use the built in timers on things like dishwashers and washers? I know on mine i can turn it all on and set the program and then 'pause' it for 30 minute chunks of time. So i'd set it up at 8pm and pause it for 6 hours and it comes on during the cheap time.

I do the same but during the day as we've got solar panels so if im going into work i'll start and pause the dishwasher for say 3 hours so it comes on at about 11am when the panels are generating some decent electric.
 
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I use Home Assistant a lot and have my energy show within that. I can see when the cheaapest 1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours etc time are (these are custom and can be set for any time period). I just simply set the washing machine on a delay to come on at a specfic time. This can be laoding in the morning and then putting a delay on the machine.

You don't need Home Assistant to do any of this. If you're on Agile, you can see the price per kWh in the Octopus app and use that to find the cheapest times.
 
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I was interested to see if you can automate appliances to exploit octopus intelligent go tarif ?
are the peak time charging slots it provides are too small in duration to do anything useful with though (apart from time-shifting energy.)
 
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