Plan comparison 'Current' and active plan not identical

[johnrogers]

Hi there,

First of all, let me say, love your work on PVOutput. It has been instrumental in helping us monitor our usage in order to save on power bills!

One of my favourite features is the plan comparison (“Plan Cost”) feature, however I am having trouble figuring out why the “Current” plan does not show the same data as the plan that I have active:

I have been through and loaded every tariff plan I have, to ensure that the “Red Living Energy with Demand” tariff is the only one that is enabled. The rest of them are disabled.

In order to actually perform the comparison, I can simply select the current plan (the one that should be showing as “Current”), and another plan, like so:

However with this method I have to perform sums because the saving amount is off, as it’s compared to the “Current” plan.

Could you perhaps shed some light on what I might be doing wrong here?

Note that I have changed plans mid-way through the month that the graph represents. My hunch is that “Current” reflects the price of each day added up with the respective tariff that was active on that day. This seems rather counterintuitive though - I would expect it to take the credit/debit from each day and run it through the only “Enabled” tariff plan.

[bulletmark]

I had this same problem with I first tried the plan comparison tool. You need to go to daily view, select all days, and then press “Recalculate” to update all the days with the current tariffs.

[johnrogers]

Thanks for your reply. If I recalculate days that were using a different tariff, with the current tariff, doesn’t that mean I will lose historical balance data (and by lose, I mean make it inaccurate)? Sounds like it defeats the whole point of having tariffs?

Edit: right, I think I get it now. Is the correct procedure to:

• Ensure that tariffs that should be used during recalculation, even historical tariffs, are Enabled.
• Recalculate dates.

I was under the assumption that only one should be enabled at at time, it seems that Recalculate only takes into account tariffs that are Enabled, and ignores ones that are disabled. So if you have only one enabled, and you calculate a date in the past that used to use another tariff, it seems to use the currently Enabled tariff anyway.

Why is recalculation even required? I was under the assumption that setting tariffs in the settings would adjust balances, is this not the case? I guess it isn’t. Should I go back and recalculate all of my historical data now that I have set previous tariffs to enabled?

[bankstownbloke]

@johnrogers

In order to actually perform the comparison, I can simply select the current plan (the one that should be showing as “Current”), and another plan, like so:

The “Current” data is using the daily summary data of the last 90 days - i.e. the debit/credits you see on the “Your Outputs” page.

Clicking on the plan name to compare pulls down the actual 5-minute data for the last 90 days and performs the calculation against the plan tariff.

To compare like for like generation/consumption data, select at least two plans, including the “current” plan.

[bankstownbloke]

@johnrogers

I was under the assumption that setting tariffs in the settings would adjust balances, is this not the case?

Tariff changes don’t affect historic data that has already been saved to the daily summary, i.e. the data used by the initial “Current” graph.

[B-Man]

@johnrogers

If I recalculate days that were using a different tariff, with the current tariff, doesn’t that mean I will lose historical balance data (and by lose, I mean make it inaccurate)? Sounds like it defeats the whole point of having tariffs?

im a little confused with this too.
I only have one plan enabled as mine is the same the whole year. I don’t have different plans for different parts of the year.
When I compare plans I add the plan as disabled and compare it as is.

when I change plans I
add the new plan and enable it (save)
load the old plan and disable (save)
Recalculate the days from when the new plan came into affect as I never seem to have time to update the plan when it changes.
(I don’t put any dates in) as it seems like its a reoccurring yearly thing rather than starting from that date…

as for the actual comparing it only does it in 31 days so even trying to set 21 days (the time I have been on my new plan) it still shows the last 31 days. so my current and the actual plan it is on is slightly different until its been the full 31 days if i am comparing the last month data.

[B-Man]

@bankstownbloke

The “Current” data is using the daily summary data of the last 90 days - i.e. the debit/credits you see on the “Your Outputs” page.

Clicking on the plan name to compare pulls down the actual 5-minute data for the last 90 days and performs the calculation against the plan tariff.

To compare like for like generation/consumption data, select at least two plans, including the “current” plan.

so if you have the no recalculations ticked you compare the 2 plans you add to the graph where as without it ticked you compare to the current plan?

[bankstownbloke]

@B-Man

so if you have the no recalculations ticked you compare the 2 plans you add to the graph where as without it ticked you compare to the current plan?

Best to leave unchecked, without the calculation the selected plan’s tariff rates are applied to the saved time periods for peak, off peak, shoulder etc - and would be inaccurate if the plans have different time periods.

Also, it doesn’t work for standby cost compare, since 5-minute data is required for this calculation and checking the option does not load 5-minute data.