TOU Setting up and comparison

Problems
#1

I have just been informed of my power provider that they have changed me to TOU ( yes them gathering all that data on the smart meters have now allowed them to make even more money by setting some bad TOU periods)

setting it up
Peak - 6am - 10am and 3pm - 1am all days.
Shoulder - 10am - 3pm all days.
Off-Peak - all other times.
All time periods are local time.

I cant seem to set peak from 3pm to 1am. after I save it that entry disappears

Also any way to compare my previous years power usage in quarters from the previous plan to the now TOU plan?

#2

Wow, that is bad.

Are you are hitting “LOAD” for the specific plan, then making your changes, then going back up and clicking “SAVE” on the plan “NAME”? I miss that one a bunch, and just hit the save at the bottom and everything disappears. (I think I also hit Save at the bottom after, but not sure you need to do that.)

For the TOU Peak time, are you making 2 entries? 15:00 - 24:00 (or 23:59, not sure which one), then 00:00 to 01:00?

Manage Plans

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#3

The tariff rates does not support wrapping around the next day, it would need to be split into 2 rates.

  • 15:00 to 24:00
  • 0:00 to 1:00

Since there is only 2 peaks available, one of these need to be moved into a High Shoulder with the same tariff as Peak.

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#4

You can compare the different plans on the same usage data / time period, but not different plans with different time periods.

The aggregated data saves balances with the current active plan at that time so you can just look at the billing periods for the current and previous quarter for comparing.

#5

B-Man - I see you are with SCE as am I. I got the same letter from them indicating that I was going to be moved off of my old TOU plan (Peak=2pm-8pm which worked very well for me as I was still overproducing between 2-4pm) to one of the other TOU plans OR I could switch to another Tiered plan. It may have to do with the timing of when your system was installed, but the Tiered plan was a bit better for me than one of the new TOU plans. SCE has a tool on their website that lets you compare the different plans estimated costs based on your historic usage. I would probably start there.

#6

I ended up trying that and it had worked. i did have to use 23:59 rather than 24:00
any way to upgrade it to be able to wrap around or choose the heading of each entry?

the downside is it doesn’t allocate that to the peak usage.

#7

I’m on Origin. lennybig is SCE.
I don’t think they do any other TOU plans.
In SA TOU has only just started happening in the last few years and i guess now with all the smart meters they have worked out what suits them the best… since we have already adjusted our usage to suit solar we cant change anything to get more of a benefit.
It might be ok/ better during summer by a little bit but winter will be costing us alot more.
Since we got solar every new power plan we have moved to is worse.
(quite hard to compare actual gains due to increased power tariffs on the solar plans but still ahead by having solar than not having solar)

#8

Sorry about that. I must have been reading on my phone and not carefully enough. SCE is the same. Lots of plan changes over the years and they all seem to negatively affect the amount of savings you can achieve from PV. That said, I’m still doing pretty well after 10 years. I recouped the cost of my system after 7 years and have saved about another 50% of the system cost since then.

#9

Yeah I cant complain. The system paid for itself in ‘2 years’ based on the solar tariffs rather than the discounted plans you can get if you didn’t have solar. so maybe 2.5 year payback. I guess they hope most don’t look into it and they can gain an extra few million by changing a few numbers around.