Family cuts home energy bills to zero after solar, battery and heat pump retrofit
A Milton Keynes household will pay no home energy bills for five years under an Octopus tariff, provided it stays within fair-use limits.
By The Guardian
A family of five has upgraded its four-bedroom home with solar panels, a heat pump and battery storage and will now pay no home energy bills for five years under a specialist Octopus Energy tariff.
The Milton Keynes property has been fitted with 17 solar panels, a large battery in the garage, a heat pump and four replacement radiators as part of a retrofit project.
Clare Naylor, who lives at the property with her husband Gavin and their three children, said the change would make a significant difference after the family spent last winter closely monitoring its energy use.
She told The Guardian that they had relied on measures including hot-water bottles and extra blankets to keep bills under control.
Their previous energy costs were around £130 a month.
The home now qualifies for Octopus Energy’s Zero Bills tariff, which guarantees no home energy bills for five years as long as the property continues to meet the scheme’s eligibility requirements and remains within its fair-use allowance.
The tariff is available only to approved homes fitted with qualifying technology including a heat pump, solar panels and battery storage.
Octopus says customers must keep the equipment operating and connected, while electricity use above the property’s agreed fair-use limit is charged separately.
Electric vehicle charging is also excluded from the Zero Bills allowance and is billed separately.
The Naylor retrofit was funded by Santander as part of research into financing energy-efficiency improvements in existing homes.
According to The Guardian, the package would otherwise have cost about £20,000 after available government grants.
That cost is important because the household did not have to fund the full retrofit itself, meaning the savings achieved through the tariff cannot be treated as a straightforward example of the payback available to every homeowner.
Octopus has previously focused much of its Zero Bills programme on new-build homes, but the Milton Keynes project is being used to test how the model can work with existing properties.
The supplier says qualifying homes can generate enough energy over the course of a year to offset much of their consumption, while batteries allow more of that electricity to be stored and used when required.
The trial comes as household energy costs have increased again.
Ofgem’s price cap rose by 4% on 1 October, taking the annual figure for a typical dual-fuel household paying by direct debit from £1,663 to £1,723.
The cap does not limit the total amount a household can be billed, as actual costs still depend on energy use.
For the Naylor family, the five-year arrangement removes that exposure within the terms of the Zero Bills tariff.
They have said the money previously set aside for energy bills could instead be used for family activities, holidays and savings.