🆕 blog! “eInk Display for Octopus's Agile Energy Tariff”
I'm a little bit obsessed with building eInk displays. They're pretty cheap second hand. They're low energy, passive displays, with good-enough performance for occasional updates. Here's a new one which shows me what the current cost of my electricity is: Background After installing solar panels, a …
Our 4.8kWh battery took advantage of the negative electricity pricing yesterday.
It charged when power cost ≤ £0.00 and discharged the rest of the time.
Basically filled and emptied twice.
On Xmas eve, our home electricity use cost us… -10p!
Yup, our electricity company paid us a couple of shillings. Not enough for a mince pie, obviously. But the amount we used would have normally cost about £7 (24kWh * £0.30).
NB Octopus can't show negative pricing on its graphs either 😆
@Edent 5 kilos of foraged, frozen blackberries currently simmering their way to becoming jam 🙂 We’ve only just moved to Agile. We don’t have solar/batteries yet, but we use very little power at peak time and can easily shift even more away. Very interested to see what our bill will be next time, but it’s fairly obvious from watching the tariff that we’re going to save quite a lot.
@Edent That makes sense at least. In Norway you have to remember it! Plus the standing charge changes based on peak usage, so if you do turn everything at the same time then you get charged more the next month. So we've ended up with competing incentives...
@Edent Does that include taxes? 😳 Here, the energy prices will be €0/kWh for most of the day (except around dinnertime, when they’ll go up to €0.04/kWh), but you must always pay ~€0.17/kWh in taxes.
@Edent I do like the e-ink but Mrs H wanted something more accessible from her phone, so I built a simple HTML status page to show the pricing and charge strategy my bot is planning. Ignore any battery status more than 12 hours out, I’m experimenting with the time window it uses for forecasting. https://jamesholden.net/power.html
@Edent Nice! Is the process of getting the webpage onto the screen the same as it was in 2020? (i.e. setting a non-https webpage as the screensaver for a Nook?)
Seeing the end result makes me want to play, but I'm wondering if there are "simpler" options hardware-wise. I imagine buying just the screen and hooking it up to a RPi would end up being more hassle 🤷
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