Hi.

Like you, I’m connected to Vector’s network.

I have a smart meter at home, and I barely read emails from my power company. – In February they sent me an email explaining that as of 1st April I would be switched to Time of Use billing, meaning that whether I wanted it or not, I now have Peak and Off-Peak power rates. – If you have a smart-meter at home, then you do too.

Apparently regardless of which power company you buy your power through, all Vector connected customers with smart meters underwent a mandatory change to their method billing on the 1st April. If you didn’t have Time of Usage billing before, they will now split your bills out to Peak and Off-Peak charges. This just so happened to coincide with when we were all told to live for most of April at home and not to go anywhere.

Peak Hours are: Monday to Friday (incl): 7am-11am and 5pm-9pm.
Off Peak Hours are: any other time of day, and all weekend long.

PUBLIC HOLIDAYS, if they fall on weekdays remain as a mix of Peak and Off-Peak, with the same time splits as above.

I’m sharing this because the differences between Peak and Off-Peak charges on a per unit basis can be significant. – In my case, I’m paying around 15/c per kWh used off-peak, and just under 25/c per kWh peak. A savings of ~10/c per kWh (or a saving of 40% of the Peak, per kWh usage-costs, by changing various timers or behavioural patterns may be worth exploring).

Anyway, I was surprised to find out that they’d done this, so I thought I’d share this in case you didn’t know about this either.

Cheers,  Chris (Grapevine Admin).