Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Electric Cars

/Soapbox
Taxes from N Sea Oil revenues helped pay for the NHS. It remains a mystery to me how so many folks consider a nationalised health service such a great thing (vs what other advanced nations do) and / or conflate “NHS” with national health insurance.
https://www.aetnainternational.com/...e-quality-in-europe-and-scandinavia.html

/Electric
Amazing to see Tesla’s success in 2021 in the UK - those company car benefits are having an effect!

The NHS performs far more than just basic health care there have been periods of time when NHS was part of the DHSS and linked to the provision of Social Services, Benefits and Pensions etc.

One must not confuse the principle of an NHS 'free at the point of access' with the actual execution and management of the NHS by successive Governments and the Civil Service. The NHS as a massive employer at 1.3m employees, generating considerable dependant economic activity. For example its payroll alone generates considerable purchasing power that is spent in the much wider economy. It's pension costs provide good pensions for its staff in retirement reducing the level of potential support thru addition pension benefits like pension credits over and above the basic state pension.......cant look at the NHS cost base in isolation without identifying its wider impact on our economy. For example how many Geriatric beds are tied up with long term stays because not enough retirement home beds or lack of home support infrastructure that increase NHS costs and reduces its efficiency.....the list goes on.

Possibly been mentioned previously, but just heard the government charger grant will end in March if anyone is thinking of installing a charge point.

I'm facing a new electricity Tariff in 10 weeks I've been trying to work out what type of tariff makes sense.

From June to December we purchased 5500 kwh of electricity, and generated 1900 kwh, giving a total of 7400 kwh available. Charging the M3LR took 1440 kwh, so about 19% of the available power.

One way of looking at it is that in the summer charging the Tesla is "free" using PV generated power, as long as we charge during the late morning/early afternoon.

Does an EV tariff make sense, given that 80% of our consumption is not charging the Tesla?

Oh, and we have a 3kwh storage wall plus a "Sunny Boy" diverter to push owner to the immersion heater when we are not using all the power we generate.

Ideas anyone, Especially Tim and the other "electrical specialists" here? I'm somewhat out of my depth....

All thoughts very welcome...

I don't really know Peter, I guess a lot of it depends on how much charge you need to put into your car overnight.

AIUI, the EV tariffs give you cheap electricity overnight. The Octopus tariff for example gives cheap power only in a window from midnight to 04:00, so if you have say a 7KW charger this means you could bung in 28KWh in that time so enough for around 100 miles or so depending on how much you enjoy your performance.

I'm with Ecotricity, for ethical rather than financial reasons, and I'm on a single tariff of £0.36p, but at 4miles/KWh it's still significantly cheaper than the Land Rover which works out at about 25 p/mile and I'll still get a lot of free motoring in the summer.

In 2021 I consumed 5.29MWh overall. I generated 3.78MWh of which I was able to use 2.81MWH leaving .97MWh to go to export, which earned me nothing as I'm not on a FiT scheme and would in theory be available for EV charging. At 4 m/KWh that's in theory enough for 4,000 miles of motoring but of course I'll still not be able to use all of it. One interesting aspect is that of my 2.81MWh of home-produced consumption, over half of it (1.62MWh) came from my 7KWh battery, so it's clear that having a battery is excellent for increasing one's ability to use locally generated power.

Also interesting is that the new Lidl in Stroud has got a PodPoint charger which does 50KW charging at a cost (currently) of only £0.25/KWh, so it's cheaper for me to pop over to Lidl to get a charge rather than doing it at home when there's no spare solar power available. Downside is of course that I have to sit outside Lidl for half an hour while it charges.

Difficult to advise, don't base this year on the last few years you are more likely to make more use of your Tesla by the simple effect of going out more (maybe) with cheaper overnight tariff you can run other stuff like your AC washing machine etc

One of the advantages of having a solar array is that you should be able to download all your data from the portal to which the inverter is connected. This will give you generation and consumption data at 15 minute granularity.

So you can get a bunch of data into a spreadsheet to do a bit of modelling using different scenarios to see how your overall costs would be impacted by different rate structures. A good chance to brush up your knowledge of VLookup functions

Whether or not you could derive any useful conclusions is of course a different matter. The challenge of all this is figuring out which pattern of usage fits your lifestyle and daylight patterns - mainly in terms of when you can charge. This is where many working people find an overnight rate setup is more beneficial. There's no point producing loads of power off your panels if the car's stuck in the office carpark.

The following two charts are of fairly typical days, 6 months apart. The 15th June 2021 was a lovely sunny day and I produced 13KWh more than I could use or store in my battery, so this would have been an ideal day to charge the car. The 15th January this year was a typical grey winter's day with practically no generation so if I had to charge the car it would have been from the grid.

Very interesting, thank you for sharing. This is an area that has passed me by and I do need to get more into it.

Some interesting stats I read today. It is estimated that over 6.5million houses don't have access to off road parking (16% rural homes and up 60% city homes)

Yes it's another Emporers New Clothes scenario - they just pretend they are ready to launch it sans any forethought for the infrastructure and suck some people along with it.

Having been conned into buying diesel and sold out I'm hanging out for Hydrogen if petrol becomes too rarified.