How to use smart meters to save money on electricity

Smart meters can help you fight those rising electricity bills

Energy monitors can give you a much clearer picture of where your energy is going. The Home Wizard It displays water, gas and electricity costs and/or temperature with a simple dashboard graphic. There's a free app, but if you want extras like solar consumption (if you have PV-solar) subscriptions are available, €59.95, Homewizard.com.

FINDING a power deal can be deeply confusing. Still, with 12%-14% price increases almost across the board and the PSO levy of €42.25, the hunt for an affordable package is a serious business. With electricity-only smart deals ranging from estimates of €1200 to €1600pa (estimated based on a usage of 4200kWh pa and available bonuses), it’s up to you to finesse your usage around the characteristics of a suitable deal. Here are six hacks using smart meter deals (some of which can be aimed at a standard meter too) — to take your power back in straightforward everyday savings.

EV magic

This is not a new hack, but it’s a classic. Whether you have a traditional immersion or a heat pump, those overnight hours are the time to heat your hot water on reduced tariff rates. With a properly insulated tank, the water will be nicely hot for the rest of the day, and even in an ancient open-fed gravity system with an immersion switch, you’ll only need a little indirect heating when the CH pops on in the evening to have a toasty full tank.

The air fryer is perfect for heading the family away from the kWh guzzling behaviour of a standard electric cooker. The 4.5L wan SD10513BLU in duck-egg blue is pretty enough to leave on show, offering 1500w of cooking versatility and eight pre-set cooking options; from €60, Amazon.ie.

There are two smart-meter tariff opportunities, and they can be combined to cut your annual water heating bill by hundreds. You’ll need to find a power plan that offers low overnight rates from 11pm to 8am for the winter season.

The best of these tariffs hover around 15c/kWh to 18c/kWh — easily half the rate of many peak daytime smart rates. A good example would be Energia’s Smart EV Plus because of the second component within the four price bands. The EV charging period with Smart EV Plus is from 2am to 6am, but (spoiler alert) you don’t need to just use this for the car. No evil bot will hunt you down. Set the water to heat in that overall, nine-hour period of reduced kWh pricing and/or during the EV-charging period.

EV tariffs are exceptionally low — some barely touching 8c/kWh. Obviously, you will need a switched timer, typical of modern heating controls. Look for deals with longer night boosts aimed at EVs and/or extremely low nighttime rates.

Standard tariffs

What about the argument for standard 24/7 tariffs? There was a fear that with smart meters, we would be strong-armed into tariff bands. Given certain lifestyles, yes, time-of-use would work to save us all money. However, if the reality is that you’re at home with young pre-schoolers by day, and/or working remotely from home in an open plan space with your aged parents in the annexe, a reasonable price on daytime kWh may mean more to you than fiddling with nighttime savings.

Only around 11% of smart-meter users have thus far opted for smart time-of-use tariffs. With heat pumps (HP), in freezing weather, the unit will be running continuously (with a modest night-time setback) to perk the home to 20C/21C. Those 12%-14% electricity price increases can really hurt. Many HP users have realised that the promised savings of having a heat pump were due to comparisons with “E” BER-rated homes run on old storage heaters.

If you don’t have an EV and are not using night hours excessively, look at what a standard 24-hour tariff around 25c/kWh might offer. Project what a typical week might cost you using suppliers’ products (including discounts, VAT, and any standing charges). Alternatively, take a day/night tariff deal.

Shower timers might seem a little dictatorial at home, but demanding as much as 10kW per minute, a long shower every day in a larger household can put a considerable drain your household budget. The Flkwop timer is a simple suction model available for under €7 from a range of suppliers on Amazon.ie.

Just jump

This is no time to be loyal to one electricity supplier. If you haven’t checked your deal against what else is out there in 10-12 months, listen up. If you’re entrenched in a one-year contract, it may still be worth jumping ship and taking that €50 kick in the utilities and the loss of a cash bonus to break it. As a new customer, percentage cuts to kWh pricing and joining bonuses can be very generous. Before you hop on the comparison websites, which are excellent tools, take a closer, forensic look at your energy demand. Six bi-monthly bills will at least give you the annual kW/h count. The Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) has found that the average Irish household uses 4,200kW/h of electricity per year. Where does your usage sit and why? Are you unwittingly wasting power? If you’re hunting for domestic villains, start with an older vented clothes dryer and the good old electric shower. The most powerful feature in reducing a power bill is often not the electricity package, but our usage habits.

Dive deeper

Discounts on kWh can be as generous as 30%, and with a smart meter, you’re getting an additional advantage with digital monitoring tools that allow you to interact more fully with your power usage. It’s vital to take in all the elements of a price plan. This can be an exhausting chore when you’re busy with life in general.

For meticulous energy consumption data readings beyond the standard search engines, try EnergyPal.ie. It’s a free, independent services that analyse your smart-meter data to find the most suitable energy plans based on past usage. You deploy the smart-meter data by downloading your HDF file from the ESB Networks website (available to anyone with a smart meter) and opening it directly on EnergyPal.ie. The tool does not collect or store any personally identifiable information (PII), and your usage remains entirely private, processed only within your browser. You do not have to create an account or upload any personal details to EnergyPal.

Battery budgeting

Solar-PV batteries remain an expensive inclusion with a new system, but in winter (when the solar gain inevitably drops off), they offer a neat trick. Take full advantage of it. That EV tariff you might not even need in a deal, looks quite different when you consider that it could charge both your BEV/PHEV car and charge up a domestic battery. No supplier is bothered about what sort of battery you’re juicing.

If you’re paying as much as 9c/kWh on the EV tariff, in one hour, you’ll have spent just 54c to download 6kWh to your domestic battery. That can then be deployed over the course of the next day to reduce the grid use by as much as 40% if you have a 6kWh battery or better. We will need to put in a timed setting for “self-consumption” on the solar inverter (the part of the system talking to the grid and changing DC from the roof to AC domestic current). This could be done via an app or directly on the physical display. Check the instructions for your model. I change back to a summer setting in summer.

Embrace time-of-use terms

Rejecting smart metering out of hand doesn’t make sense. It offers unsurpassed insights that can become actions. According to ESB Networks, electricity consumption data collected by smart meters is considered to be personal data with all the importance surrounding data protection laws in Ireland, including the Data Protection Act 2018 and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

In terms of our climate obligations, time-of-use tariffs charge us more at times when there is the greatest draw on the grid. This is typically the hours of 5pm to 7pm, when we all come charging home.

Smart metering, with its additional real-time usage tools, is no longer more expensive. Just looking over Electric Ireland’s day/night meter plans and its three-band Home Electric + SST Saver plan — the annual cost based on its estimated annual bills (EAB) shows the smart-meter bill now has a slight edge.

The Bord Gais 24-hour tariff is identical for standard and smart meters. What is true is that while you do not have to go into a smart-meter plan when you have a smart meter, once you do, you cannot go back to an analogue-meter plan. Don’t run with the smart-meter naysayers before exploring deals online.

Power play