Hi Mick, and all of the OpenEnergyMonitor community, I am a new customer to Octopus Energy after my successful switch from British Gas. I had my meters fitted this morning (13 October) and I am now waiting for them to get all synced up to Octopus which I hear can take anywhere between 10-14 days on average.
I switched from BG onto the Super Green Octopus Tariff and I am now in a fluster as to whether I (single person living alone) would benefit switching to Agile over say for example the Go or Tracker Tariff. I do not own any Solar Panels, Battery Storage facility or an Electric Vehicle and I would be happy to switch such things as my B rated Washer Dryer (for washing or drying or both), dishwasher and any fan heater or my electric towel rail (which is also connected to gas central heating) to outside of the 4-7pm peak times but I am unsure if I would also be best to move my Oven/Induction hob (and relevant appliances such as cooker hood/microwave etc) out of these hours too. I did have a recommendation from someone I watched on YouTube to switch to Agile over Tracker for the savings that âcouldâ be made over the 18 hours of the day outside of the expensive peak times, and another fella recommended considering the Go Tariff for its standard rates during the day and 5p/kwh rates at night.
For someone who is trying to be careful with energy usage and not go mad, would the Agile work for me? I am at home most if not all day (some days all day some days part of the day), and I try to be careful with what I use and to remember turning lights off when not in the room they are in, trying to not use energy for the sake of it (so to speak) and switching off appliances etc that I dont use frequently. I leave the three way socket for my TV/Sky Q box and Apple TV box plugged in as I heard they wonât use much energy and I do like to watch my apple TV for youtube etc. I also leave my BT Homehub router and the Openreach Fibre modem plugged in (as recommended by BT) to keep my wifi going when I am at home so I can use my smartphone or laptop etc when at home saving on data usage on my EE account.
I am happy to answer any questions, if you wish to ask any. I welcome any advice or hints at all. Thanks
It sounds to me, reading between the lines, that you would benefit from knowing just how much energy you use over the course of each hour or half-hour of the day.
You can get a rough idea by doing it manually - noting whatâs in use, reading your meter and processing the numbers - before the âofficialâ data becomes available to you, and that might give you a reasonable idea of what various appliances draw in normal use.
Of course, having come to a website that has âenergyâ and âmonitorâ in the name, you got to expect me to recommend putting something like our emonPi next to your meter so that youâll get an accurate minute-by-minute record of your usage, from which you could make an informed decision. Whether it justifies the cost is a decision only you can make.
I wouldnât trust any recommendation that was based on somebody elseâs way of life and usage patterns.
As @Robert.Wall rightly says, everyone has different usage patterns, so hard to make accurate estimates.
But with Octopus Energy being so flexible with their tariffs you can try Agile for nothing. If it doesnât work for you just jump back onto their standard tariff. They donât impose any penalties or fees for this.
Once youâre on Agile you could download the fantastic OctoWatchDog app:
And then see running daily average unit rates.
If you find these lower than 13p, stick with Agile.
If youâre higher than 13p, jump back to a standard tariff.
(or whatever break-even figure you want to put on it)
From my experience, things like Sky boxes and other âalways onâ stuff donât bring too much to the table, I wouldnât worry too much about them.
Its the big ticket items; cooking, tumble drying and washing that make a dent in your usage. So if you can move those away from 4pm to 7pm then youâll be on your way to making savings.
But as Robert said, if you invest in an emonPi (or maybe use your new smart meter) and begin to understand your own daily usage patterns you will be in a better position to then make changes.
You will be able to do that quite easily once your data is flowing - no need for anything else - just a machine to install emoncms on. Then you can get your half hour data and see what your equivalent tariff would be.
I look at this graph and the most important part is the bottom right figure - equivalent to 11.8p/kWh. Octopus fixed rates were about 14p/kWh last time I looked. This is for 2 of us, highish baseload use (too many computers ), minimal movement of use out of peak period.
Thank you @zarch! It was super helpful to be able to download all the data in one easy CSV file. Iâm using this to see how much I could save by (and thus whether itâs worth) programming my heating system to make best use of the Octopus Agile tariff (heating when itâs going to be cheapest). I was able to load the data into a Jupyter notebook in seconds using Pandas.
), minimal movement of use out of peak period.
