Energy savings
AlphaESS inverter joined to Octopus half-hourly meter reads and tariff prices.
Solar & battery installed by Heatable
£150 off solar £75 off a battery £150 off a heat pump £150 off air conditioning £50 off your Octopus bill Referrals
Saved on bills is the gap between what you would have paid and what you actually paid. Total benefit is that saving plus the export payments.
Where the benefit came from, by day
Solar and battery are separated by costing three worlds for every half hour — no panels and no battery, panels alone, then what actually happened — and taking the differences. A negative battery day is one that spent more storing energy than it gave back; it returns when the battery discharges. Export earnings sit inside the solar bar rather than beside it: the panels-alone world already sells its surplus, so that income is part of what solar is worth.
View as table
| Day | Solar | Battery | Total | of which export | Solar kWh | Imported | Exported |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sat 7 Nov | £0.00 | −£0.20 | −£0.20 | £0.00 | 0.0 | 3.8 | 0.0 |
| Fri 6 Nov | £4.03 | £2.58 | £6.61 | £0.17 | 13.4 | 31.7 | 1.4 |
| Thu 5 Nov | £3.66 | £3.59 | £7.24 | £0.16 | 12.2 | 39.8 | 1.4 |
| Wed 4 Nov | £1.72 | £4.35 | £6.07 | £0.13 | 5.4 | 32.6 | 1.1 |
| Tue 3 Nov | £3.32 | £3.25 | £6.56 | £0.17 | 12.2 | 32.6 | 1.4 |
Cumulative benefit
Running total across the selected window.
Saturday 7 November 2026, half by half
Energy arriving above the line, energy leaving below it, and the price you were paying on the same timeline. Charging through a cheap window and discharging through an expensive one is the shape to look for.
Inverter versus meter
The two measure at different points in the circuit and will never agree exactly. A few percent of drift is normal; a consistent double-digit gap means one feed is wrong and the solar/battery split should be treated with suspicion. The headline figures come from the meter either way.
| Day | Meter import | Inverter import | Drift | Meter export | Inverter export | Drift |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sat 7 Nov | 3.76 | 25.84 | 588.0% | 0.00 | 2.75 | — |
| Fri 6 Nov | 31.68 | 28.51 | -10.0% | 1.41 | 0.05 | -96.4% |
| Thu 5 Nov | 39.84 | 36.85 | -7.5% | 1.35 | 0.06 | -95.6% |
| Wed 4 Nov | 32.60 | 29.31 | -10.1% | 1.12 | 0.06 | -94.6% |
| Tue 3 Nov | 32.58 | 29.35 | -9.9% | 1.40 | 0.07 | -95.0% |
Return on investment
Measured across everything on record (7 Apr 2025 to 7 Nov 2026), not the range selected above — annualising a fortnight of summer would roughly double the apparent return. The yearly figure comes from the trailing twelve months, so it covers a full seasonal cycle.
£18,990 put into FTSE All-World (VWRP.L) on 7 Apr 2025 and left alone would have been worth £27,315 on 6 Nov 2026 — a gain of £8,325. The system has handed back £4,529 over the same dates. That is the real closing price of a real fund, not an assumed rate; it is an accumulating class, so dividends are in it. No dealing costs and no tax, both of which would only make the fund look worse. The energy bills are already in this, which is the part that catches people out: £4,529 is not profit, it is the bill that did not arrive. Hold the money instead and you pay that bill in full — so the two sides are the financial benefit of each world over the same dates, with the electricity accounted for on both. Gains are compared with gains: an investment still has its £18,990 at the end and this system has hardware with a finite life instead. Two things the comparison leaves out, both of which favour the panels — these savings are not taxed, and they rise with the price of electricity. And 1.6 years is far too short a run for a stock market to mean much: this is what happened, not what tends to.
Left in a savings account at 4.50% instead, it would have earned £1,375 over the same period — the risk-free version of the same question. That rate is a sustained one rather than a headline best-buy: the base rate was 3.75% in October 2026 and the accounts paying a flat rate with no stepped bonus were around 4.3%. Interest on a balance this size runs close to the personal savings allowance, and past it for a higher-rate payer, which this does not deduct.