Switching to Octopus Agile

A warning to anyone who is thinking of switching to Octopus Agile but were previously a customer of Octopus.

Don’t do it via the website - it completely mucks everything up. Their system cannot cope - you need to phone them!

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Have you got smart meter?

I have dumb meter with Bulb and thinking of switching. Advice I see elsewhere says to get smart meter installed first before switching: https://www.speakev.com/threads/fast-switch-to-octopus-agile-with-a-dumb-meter.148100/

The last thing I want to do is to charge my EV while stuck on their regular 18p rate.

No I don’t. As I don’t have an EV it makes little difference to me. Their cheapest tariff for my area is 14.7p (inc VAT) - that is more than I am paying at the moment though.

I did ask the question and they say they hope to have it all done within 6 weeks. If you use a referral code you get £50 credit so that can ease the pain.

I’ll get the meters done by Octopus.

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Thanks for using my referral code @borpin, very much appreciated.

In other news, I replied to your note about the daily graph and have made it permanently linked via:

Thanks. Integrated into HA :grinning:

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Can you switch the graph to points? Using bars for averages tricks the eye into believing the bar contains all the values (but for a median 50% will be higher). Neatly demonstrated with this gif: Exploding barplot - Animation (with R-script and example data) | Zenodo (download to play).

I had a shot like this (median and interquartile range):

I’m happy as is :grinning:. I just want a graphical representation of cost per half hour for a wall mounted kiosk to inform the household. Ideally, the current block woul be highlighted, but it is fine for now. Not really interested in any comparison/median/mean etc.

Fab… I’ll tell you what i’d like to do in HA… is extend that ‘next’ Agile cost into some sort of table so that the family can see the price of the upcoming next few hours.

Ah well, got other jobs on the to-do list before returning to HA.

I did a blog post on my potential savings by moving from Ecotricity to Octopus: Domestic data science – energy use – scottishsnow. 30%, without any use-pattern change. If I can cut the peak use that’s another £200 a year saved (undercut by potentially buying it at cheaper times).

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I’m much the same. On the last 4 months data, my effective p/kWh would be around 10p on Agile as opposed to 14p (in VAT).

If only I could get the swap completed.

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We’ve signed up with Octopus. We have a working 2nd gen smart meter, so hopefully the change will be smooth…

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Hey I’m a new user. Trying to help my parents make a decision on signing up to octopus export tariff either fixed or agile. They in reality won’t change their consumption pattern much but have recently installed PV with battery on roof. Very little experience any guidance would be appreciated.

Edit duplicate post deleted. BT - Moderator

Having looked at the export figures for a while, the fixed export seems a better bet than agile export.

The only time agile goes over 5.5p is when you’re likely to need it most 4-7pm.

Hopefully this is confirmed in the figures and graphs.

Also. Fixed means less worry about changing behaviour. I’ve not having to chase different pricing.

Hope this helps.

Welcome.

The only real way to know is to measure the use over a month and then compare against what you would have been charged if on Agile.

In increasing order of cost;

  • emonTX & PiZeroW
  • emonTX and emonESP sending data to a local install of emonCMS.
  • emonTX, ESP & send data to emoncms.org. (potentially the easiest)
  • emonPi

In all cases a 5V DC power supply & CT sensor as a minimum are required. You mention Solar, you will also need the AC/AC power supply to determine the direction of flow (otherwise you will think you are consuming when you are exporting) & a second CT to measure the Solar energy.

What you can do via automation, is make the most of the battery.

Even if there were no PV system present, they’d want an AC-AC adapter to enable the hardware to
yield real power measurements. (which is what they get billed for) Otherwise, the results would be an approximation of apparent power. :wink:

Yes they would but for these purposes probably a good enough approximation - yes?

Apparent power is always greater than real power unless the load is resistive, i.e. contains no reactive devices. In addition to that, without an AC-AC adapter, an emonTx/emonPi sketch assumes the voltage to be a fixed value, which is far from true. i.e. mains voltage drifts up and down 24/7.

Given the mains voltage can and does change, and that most devices in one’s home contain some form of reactive component, e.g. a motor, the error will vary depending on the load and the actual mains voltage. If the intent is to monitor only the PV production, then once the PV power factor reaches unity, (which doesn’t happen straightaway after sunrise) the reactive part of the scenario goes away, but there’s still the assumption of the mains voltage as a fixed value.

The bottom line? Since the OP mentioned a PV system and you mentioned the need for the adapter
to be able to determine the energy flow direction, he’d be good to go. Without the AC-AC adapter,
an emonTx or emonPi would be no better than the commercially available products that use a CT, but no AC-AC adapter to sample the mains voltage.

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