What are tariffs?
Electricity tariffs are the prices you pay for using electricity at home, often based on factors like how much you use, when you use it, and sometimes aimed at encouraging energy-saving habits.
Our chargers will work with any tariff from any electricty provider, however there are some tariffs with specific compatibility requirement.
What are smart tariffs?
Smart electricity tariffs, are like personalized plans fo r your electric car's energy needs; they help you save money by offering different rates for charging at specific times, making it more cost-effective and convenient for you to power up your electric vehicle. As well as allowing energy providers to balance the load on the grid.
Some smart tariffs require specific compatible chargers or vehicles. Our chargers are not compatible with any particular smart tariffs at the moment, but we do offer Agile Octopus integration. Here you can find a guide on how to set up Agile Octopus in the Simpson app.
Octopus Go is one of Octopus's beta smart tariffs, specifically designed to help electric vehicle drivers charge up on greener, cheaper power overnight.
Octopus Go customers get cheap electricity between 00:30 - 04:30 every night, so they can charge up their EV for a tenth of the price of a traditional car, and keep charging costs as low as 3p per mile.
Octopus Go offers a fixed price for the rest of the day (hours between 04.31 and 00.29) [Check your Octopus Go daytime unit price and standing charge here].
Intelligent Octopus Go evolved from the Octopus Go smart tariff: You have access to a low price between 11:30pm - 5:30am for the whole home, and it smart-charges your car at the cheapest and greenest times overnight. Occasionally Octopus smart charge your car outside of the off-peak window, all smart charging is billed at the off-peak rate.
Intelligent Octopus Go will pair directly with your car or charger, using Kraken’s machine learning to find the best time to charge. Use the Octopus app to tell them when you need the car charged and how much charge you need and Octopus make sure it’s ready for use.
S&P recommend selecting the Intelligent Octopus Go tariff in the tariffs section of the Simpson app.
Agile Octopus is one of Octopus's beta smart tariffs, it is directly impacted by wholesale market volatility.
Agile prices can spike up to 100 p/kWh any time - although a typical household in Winter '22-'23 paid around 35 p/kWh average.
This tariff is best suited to customers who can shift large amounts of their energy use to avoid these expensive peaks, often by using smart home technologies like solar and batteries.
You can use the Simpson app to automatically schedule charges for the cheapest 8 hour period!
Smart charging with Charge Anytime unlocks the cheaper charging rate of 7p per kWh. It helps move the UK energy system towards a smarter, greener way of using energy. If more people use energy when the grid is greener, together we can rely less on fossil fuels to keep power flowing at peak times.
Similar to the Intelligent Octopus Go tariff, the OVO Charge Anytime tariff requires a compatible vehicle to work with our chargers.