Octopus Energy Wheel Of Fortune. Anybody "won"?

Umiamz

ASavvyBuyer wrote: »

No, you don't get the free spins if you have a smart meter. We have an Octopus smart meter so we can be on Octopus Go and since it changed their is no need to enter meter readings; so no spin of the wheel.

Yes, you do still get free spins. They'll tell you the direct URLs for the wheel if you ask them but you only get one 'spin' per fuel per month.

MikeM

Many Spins No Wins !

Like much gambling perhaps - 'just a bit of fun'

As it is only software it could easily be 'rigged'

Pat_A

First ever spin - won £1

pooch

Pat_A wrote: »

First ever spin - won £1

Fisrt ever post too, I see. Congratualtions! :T

roddydogs

But did you actually get it?

ABOone

Er, no! And I wouldn't recommend Octopus Energy to my worst enemy. Customer service is the poorest of any utility I have been with.

Blot

Er, no! And I wouldn't recommend Octopus Energy to my worst enemy. Customer service is the poorest of any utility I have been with.

.

Are you sure you are talking about the right Octopus ? the one I am with could not be better.

bikeman17

18 months no win

fat-pudding

I won a quid, it's in my account history when it was credited in May 2019.

stronk

Thread necromancy, I realise, but I was just looking for this information and found the MSE was one of the top results and no clear information was available. The answer to the original question is that although there are 12 segments on the wheel, which would seem to imply a 1/12 chance of winning any of the displayed prizes, this is deliberately misleading. In fact they set the number and value of prizes that can be won each month and give these away at random using an unrevealed algorithm (they again misleadingly have an article on their website that even says it includes the code behind the system but this only reveals the code that displays the wheel gizmo, not the underlying prize randomisation code). They do reveal on their site that there's only 1 top prize of £512 each month and a few (no precise number) £64 prizes, then an unspecified number of £1 prizes. They say they allocate around £5000 per month to the prizes, so the best way of looking at this is to estimate how many attempts they probably give to all their customers combined and divide this into £5000. They have around 250,000 customers according to Ofcom. Let's say 1/3 of these (83,333) submit readings each month on average and these customers maybe get just under two attempts each (say 150,000 attempts). Your expected win per month is 3p, so you'd expect to win £1 once every 30 months and never (once every approx 1,000 years) win any larger prizes.

As a comparison, loyalty schemes for most providers (supermarkets, travel companies, etc) are valued around 0.3p up to around 1p per £1 (some are as high as 2p or a little over, but that's rare). Say you spend around £150 a month on energy, Octopus is offering just a tiny fraction (0.06) of the value of a typical loyalty scheme. Granted, this isn't a loyalty scheme, it's just a clever psychological manipulation to make you give them regular readings (which means they can handle their cashflow better, which saves them money). Or as another comparison, say you're valuing your time spent playing their game. If it takes 10 seconds, your time is valued at £10.80 an hour, which doesn't seem terrible until you factor in the additional time spent actually getting hold of readings more frequently than is really necessary from your perspective. Then the valuation will drop to pennies per hour.

Summary: you will save time and money by ignoring the gimmick and just submitting readings when it suits you. If you like Octopus and want to help them out, then by all means submit monthly readings (or if you have to very carefully manage your own cashflow and always want accurate bills). But the 'free spin' game really is a waste of your time.

The values above will vary a bit as I have used estimates where data is missing. But they are within the right order of magnitude. The fact that a multiple of 9 wouldn't really change the conclusion is a case in point really.