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<\/a><\/p>\nI managed to maintain a 6% Peak\/Off-Peak ratio, which is huge improvement on last month’s 12%.<\/p>\n
There were 3 days that were overcast, and on the rest I managed to have only minimal peak usage.<\/p>\n
The Peak usage on the sunny days is largely balancing the load between solar and battery as it takes a little while to switch from charging to discharging when the sun goes behind a cloud or comes back out again.<\/p>\n
I was playing around this month with exporting the battery towards the end of the day, some methods worked better than others – more on that later.<\/p>\n
Electricity costs for the month of May: \u00a3106.08 for 2025, \u00a3184.51 for 2024 and \u00a3394.20 for 2023 – yet more great on-going savings.<\/p>\n
Electricity demand for the month of May: 1764kWh for 2025, 1791kWh for 2024 and 975kWh for 2023.<\/p>\n
The additional savings for this year are almost entirely down to the Solar and Battery as I was on the same tariff last May as I am now, I used about the same amount of electricity, yet it cost me about 42% less.<\/p>\n
The off-peak\/peak\/SC values for May were \u00a30.075\/0.2794\/0.4785 for 2024 vs \u00a30.07\/\u00a30.2896\/0.47605 for 2025, so not a huge difference and the same as last month.<\/p>\n
This can also be seen in the month on month usage vs cost graphs:<\/p>\n
May Solar:<\/p>\n Actual production for May far exceeded the forecast for every day, often by way more than double.<\/p>\n The various arrays produced the following levels of energy: Garage 341.87 kWh, Office 267.90kWh, East 247.52kWh, West 289.10kWh for a total of 1152.39kWh which is again my best month to date, beating last month by 104.56kWh.<\/p>\n A very good month for solar production, I also managed to export 437.28kWh for a total saving of \u00a365.59.<\/p>\n The import costs of \u00a3106.08 less the export savings of \u00a365.59 means my net cost for May was \u00a340.49 for 1764kWh of demand making my average rate \u00a30.0232\/kWh.<\/p>\n May Gas:<\/p>\n Gas costs for the month of May: \u00a331.89 for 2025, \u00a325.07 for 2024 and \u00a3192.58 for 2023.<\/p>\n Gas usage for the month of May: 480kWh for 2025, 365kWh for 2024 and 1575kWh for 2023.<\/p>\n \u00a36.00 more than last year, 31% more gas consumed and on the Octopus Gas Tracker tariff vs the Octopus Standard Gas Tariff, so similar to last month.<\/p>\n Gas prices have started to fall again this month, I would have paid a lot more had I still been on the Octopus Standard Tariff, which was \u00a30.0699 per kWh for May \u00a343.68 ((480 * 0.0699) + 10.18) or an additional \u00a311.78 for the month.<\/p>\n The heating was off for the entire month, so gas was only used for heating the hot water.<\/p>\n Again all visible in the usage vs cost graphs.<\/p>\n As mentioned earlier I have been playing around with exporting back to the grid at the end of the day as most days I still have charge in the battery.<\/p>\n The reasoning here is that if I force discharge the remainder of the battery I will be paid \u00a30.15\/kWh, but it will only cost me \u00a30.07 to replace it when I start charging, so a net gain of \u00a30.08\/kWh.<\/p>\n Initially I was discharging just before the off-peak rate kicked in at around 22:30, however the house then ran off peak electricity for this hour at \u00a30.29\/kWh, effectively costing me \u00a30.14\/kWh, not what I had in mind!<\/p>\n I then switched to force discharging at the start of the off-peak period at 23:30, so any house usage would be at the off-peak rate and this worked much better.<\/p>\n On sunny days I am able to discharge around 5kWh for an additional \u00a30.75 saving each day.<\/p>\n I have also added a couple of automations that stop my Zappi from charging the car if I am exporting to the grid by putting it in ‘stopped’ mode as again it is more cost effective to export and then charge at the off-peak rate than to charge from the solar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" May 2025 updates May Electric: I managed to maintain a 6% Peak\/Off-Peak ratio, which is huge improvement on last month’s 12%. There were 3 days that were overcast, and on the rest I managed to have only minimal peak usage. The Peak usage on the sunny days is largely balancing the load between solar and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1260,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-1259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-solar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/myhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/myhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/myhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/myhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/myhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1259"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/myhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1320,"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/myhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1259\/revisions\/1320"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/myhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/myhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/myhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/myhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a> <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a> <\/a> <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a> <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a> <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a> <\/a><\/p>\n