Octopus Tracker

QrizB

spot1034 said:

vivalaeric said:

Telegraph_Sam said:

Is your conclusion that as far as your crystal ball can see this tilts the balance in favour of Tracker if one can put up with the uncertainty? For gas and electric?
And for each does the high / medium / low consumption factor influence the decision?
At present I'm on Tracker for both fuels and no EV.
I guess that whatever applies for one region more or less applies to all.

I think it's common sense. If the rate has been 40% cheaper for 10/11 months than the cap and it only goes high at the end of November and in December, why would you lock yourself at the cap rates for the whole year? 

Last year was unusual in that we had a quite significant but short lived cold spell at the end of November and the first half of December. The rest of the season was milder than average.

The November-December hump was more to do with low wind speeds. Cold but windy weather (a "Beast from the East" for example) wouldn't look the same.

noitsnotme

I've just had my latest bill and they have averaged/smoothed the daily usage for both electric and gas (both on Tracker) rather than showing the actual amount used on each day.

I know there was some chat about this earlier in the thread.  Am I right in thinking some people contacted Octopus about it?  What was the outcome?  (I can't see a way to search just this thread).

QrizB

noitsnotme said:

I've just had my latest bill and they have averaged/smoothed the daily usage for both electric and gas (both on Tracker) rather than showing the actual amount used on each day.
I know there was some chat about this earlier in the thread.  Am I right in thinking some people contacted Octopus about it?  What was the outcome?  (I can't see a way to search just this thread).

Usually, if you have prevously been getting daily usage bills but now have a weighted average, it's because your smart meter didn't report complete data for the period.
It probably isn't worth following up, unless you know that there was a very cheap period when you made a point to use more energy (do all your laundry etc) or an expensive period that you deliberately avoided.

Telegraph_Sam

What might cause some confusion is whether the average is taken of the price over each half hour of the day OR if at the end of the month the average is taken of the 30 daily totals. Or both of course. And that's assuming that there was no loss of data.
Not for the faint hearted ..

noitsnotme

QrizB said:

noitsnotme said:

I've just had my latest bill and they have averaged/smoothed the daily usage for both electric and gas (both on Tracker) rather than showing the actual amount used on each day.
I know there was some chat about this earlier in the thread.  Am I right in thinking some people contacted Octopus about it?  What was the outcome?  (I can't see a way to search just this thread).

Usually, if you have prevously been getting daily usage bills but now have a weighted average, it's because your smart meter didn't report complete data for the period.
It probably isn't worth following up, unless you know that there was a very cheap period when you made a point to use more energy (do all your laundry etc) or an expensive period that you deliberately avoided.

I have had quite a lot of blank data slots recently for some reason.  All of yesterdays is missing for both gas and electric (Bright is showing nothing for yesterday but is correct so far for today).  Not sure why it has suddenly started happening?  Is it perhaps a sign of problems with the meters?

masonic

Telegraph_Sam said:

What might cause some confusion is whether the average is taken of the price over each half hour of the day OR if at the end of the month the average is taken of the 30 daily totals. Or both of course. And that's assuming that there was no loss of data.
Not for the faint hearted ..

My understanding is that you would need a complete set of half hourly consumption figures to be billed for actual daily usage, from which they calculate the total for each day, otherwise they'll go by the index readings at the start and end of the billing period.

masonic

noitsnotme said:

QrizB said:

noitsnotme said:

I've just had my latest bill and they have averaged/smoothed the daily usage for both electric and gas (both on Tracker) rather than showing the actual amount used on each day.
I know there was some chat about this earlier in the thread.  Am I right in thinking some people contacted Octopus about it?  What was the outcome?  (I can't see a way to search just this thread).

Usually, if you have prevously been getting daily usage bills but now have a weighted average, it's because your smart meter didn't report complete data for the period.
It probably isn't worth following up, unless you know that there was a very cheap period when you made a point to use more energy (do all your laundry etc) or an expensive period that you deliberately avoided.

I have had quite a lot of blank data slots recently for some reason.  All of yesterdays is missing for both gas and electric (Bright is showing nothing for yesterday but is correct so far for today).  Not sure why it has suddenly started happening?  Is it perhaps a sign of problems with the meters?

You could ask them to try to manually pull the missing data. There are various reasons why the automatic daily pull can fail. They had been detecting this and backfilling, based on reports here.

I was one of the lucky people to experience a firmware issue with the Kaifa smart meters, which they were eventually able to push out a fix for, but missing data doesn't necessarily point to a problem with the meter itself.

vivalaeric

Does it mean it's not worth it? Tracker + manual readings?

masonic

vivalaeric said:

Does it mean it's not worth it? Tracker + manual readings?

Not at all. If your usage is fairly consistent from one day to the next, then it might not make a difference. If you load shift to the cheaper days and avoid usage on expensive days, then if you know you have a problem you can submit manual readings whenever you feel it would be beneficial.

Since Tracker has been consistently cheaper than SVR, you'd have saved however your usage was distributed over the billing period, based on historic pricing.

vivalaeric

masonic said:

vivalaeric said:

Does it mean it's not worth it? Tracker + manual readings?

Not at all. If your usage is fairly consistent from one day to the next, then it might not make a difference. If you load shift to the cheaper days and avoid usage on expensive days, then if you know you have a problem you can submit manual readings whenever you feel it would be beneficial.

Since Tracker has been consistently cheaper than SVR, you'd have saved however your usage was distributed over the billing period, based on historic pricing.

I'm going to switch to Tracker then. I can always submit a manual reading if the rate goes high.