A smart tariff that requires you
to be smarter than the tariff.

🤩 The pitch sounds good

Electricity prices change every 30 minutes based on what the grid needs. When it is windy overnight and nobody is awake, prices can drop close to zero. Sometimes they go negative. You get paid to use electricity.

The idea is that you shift your big loads, your washing machine, your dishwasher, your EV, to those cheap windows. You save money. The grid saves money. Everyone wins.

That is genuinely how it works. It is not a scam. The cheap rates are real.

😤 Here is what they do not mention

Tomorrow's prices are published at 4pm today. So every day, at 4pm, you need to check an app, look at 48 half-hour price slots, and decide when to run everything in your house. Starting today. For the rest of your life.

If you forget to check, or you check and misread it, or your device decides to charge at 6pm peak instead of 2am cheap, you pay 81p per unit instead of 2p. On a full EV battery. That is the difference between £1.20 and £48.60 for one charge.

People who get it right consistently are running Home Assistant. That is a self-hosted home automation server. With custom YAML scripts. On a Raspberry Pi. In their cupboard. Under the stairs.

If that sentence meant nothing to you: congratulations, you are a normal person.

📉 And then the prices went up anyway

The cheap windows exist. They are real. But so are the expensive ones. And over the last couple of years, those expensive windows got longer and higher.

People in the forums started comparing notes. Many found that after all the effort, their average unit rate was not that much better than a fixed deal. And a fixed deal requires zero effort whatsoever.

The forums are full of people announcing they have switched away. And then switching back. And then switching away again. And asking each other whether it was a mistake.

That is not a hobby. That is homework.

🔌 The device problem

Smart chargers are supposed to handle this automatically. Set it, forget it, charge during cheap hours.

In practice, the charger loses its internet connection overnight. Or the app update breaks the scheduling. Or the 3G signal in your garage is unreliable and the fail-safe kicks in. The fail-safe charges the car immediately. At peak rate. While you sleep.

One peak-hour charge is enough to wipe out a month of careful scheduling. People have written this up in extraordinary detail. The internet has feelings about it.

💡 What should actually happen

The concept of time-shifting your energy use is correct. The grid does have cheap periods. Households with big devices can genuinely save money and earn from flexibility.

The bit that is broken is that it currently requires the household to do the work manually. Check the prices. Set the timers. Monitor the devices. Catch the failures. Do it again tomorrow.

Nobody signed up for that. They signed up for a cheaper energy bill.

FlexMyPower automates the dispatching. Your devices shift when the grid needs them to. You do not check anything. You get paid at the end of the month. That is it.

It works on top of any tariff. Including the dynamic one, if you are already on it and want to keep the cheap overnight rates. You just stop being the person who manages it.