Hi,

Like most here I'm on the Cape Town home user tariff.

I made two enquiries to Cape Town - one was about upgrading my supply from 60A to more - partly because I'm considering an electric car and partly in order to be able to have a larger PV install.

They basically said I have to apply to find out how much that might cost.

I then also asked about time of use tariffs.  They didn't exactly answer that question but sent various tariffs where there is some reference to time of use.  The spreadsheet isn't clear but there is a commercial small user tariff which maybe has a lower off-peak rate.

Did anyone look at this to see if there is some opportunity in here somewhere?

Thanks,
@Elbow

Your tariff is determined by your type of supply and in some instances usage (ie. Small Power User Low and High usage). For domestic use changing size of supply won't allow to change to a Small Power User Tariff as these are reserved for commercial.

Wrt. changing your supply I'm not sure it would be worth it. Firstly you can easily charge one electric car on your 60A supply unless it's already over-subscribed. Trickle charging will happen at 10A or 20A in most cases and will be more than enough - we have an adjustable charger with 10A, 20A and 32A options but our car only allows up to 16A and we use the 10A setting 95% of the time.

Changing to a 80A supply will only allow you to increase grid-tied system from 3.5kVA to 4.6kVA (single-phase) - rather build an off-grid system with no size limitation - that's what we did and we charge the car off solar almost exclusively. If you can't charge off solar, then even less reason to change it, as you'd just plug it in over night.

6 hours ago, PeterP said:

Your tariff is determined by your type of supply and in some instances usage (ie. Small Power User Low and High usage). For domestic use changing size of supply won't allow to change to a Small Power User Tariff as these are reserved for commercial.

Wrt. changing your supply I'm not sure it would be worth it. Firstly you can easily charge one electric car on your 60A supply unless it's already over-subscribed. Trickle charging will happen at 10A or 20A in most cases and will be more than enough - we have an adjustable charger with 10A, 20A and 32A options but our car only allows up to 16A and we use the 10A setting 95% of the time.

Changing to a 80A supply will only allow you to increase grid-tied system from 3.5kVA to 4.6kVA (single-phase) - rather build an off-grid system with no size limitation - that's what we did and we charge the car off solar almost exclusively. If you can't charge off solar, then even less reason to change it, as you'd just plug it in over night.

Hi, 

Thanks for the input.  My i3 supports up to 32A AC charging - need a suitable EVSE like OpenEVSE.  Which is a lot relative to 60A main breaker with geyser taking 15A, oven similar.

But you are right that it would hardly ever be necessary to charge so fast.  At 10A my car would be empty to full in 10 hours.  And at that rate it’s practical to supply from panels.  With OpenEVSE you can fine tune charging rate to match available power from the panels.

The query to the council was more curiosity as anything else since elsewhere its common to have a low rate in the very off-peak times.