Octopus Tracker

QrizB

Pat38493 said:
In fact tomorrow, there is not even a single continuous hour where the agile rate is lower than the tracker rate.  I think something must have happened between 10am and 4pm that pushed it up more as normally there would be more slots below tracker rate.

IIRC Tracker has a bigger fixed offset, but a smaller wholesale-rate multiplier, vs. Agile.

When wholesale rates are high, Tracker has the edge.

Telegraph_Sam

I was coming round to the view that it was incorrect to compare Agile and Tracker on a short term basis, but rather long term with perhaps rolling averages to smooth things out. On this basis day to day comparisons could be misleading.

Pat38493

Telegraph_Sam said:

I was coming round to the view that it was incorrect to compare Agile and Tracker on a short term basis, but rather long term with perhaps rolling averages to smooth things out. On this basis day to day comparisons could be misleading.

That’s true.  It’s more just an observation not a reason to panic.  Since I’ve been on agile it’s pretty unusual to have almost every slot above the tracker price.  More a point of interest than a reason to take action.

mmmmikey

Telegraph_Sam said:

I was coming round to the view that it was incorrect to compare Agile and Tracker on a short term basis, but rather long term with perhaps rolling averages to smooth things out. On this basis day to day comparisons could be misleading.

A couple of observations....

1. If you're using Agile as intended (i.e. shifting load to take advantage of the cheapest slots) prices are far more volatile than Tracker prices - for example, in October my daily average rate varies from 0.65p/kWh to 23.02p/kWh which makes daily comparisons almost meaningless, so I'd agree that longer term rolling averages are the way to go.

2. In order to do a meaningful comparison you need to compare a weighted average of Agile prices specific to your personal consumption pattern to the Tracker price. Different Agile users achieve very different daily averages depending on how they're using it. This is easy enough if you're an Agile customer because you can compare your actual daily pattern and average cost with the Tracker rate. But if you're trying to do it the other way round (i.e. you're not currently an Agile customer) it's very difficult and prone to all sorts of errors as you need to make same kind of assumption about when you're going to use energy (if this makes sense?)

Telegraph_Sam

That might be a convenient excuse for me as a Tracker elec and gas customer to avoid doing the research, star gazing and number crunching that is required to do the job properly. If there is no off the shelf software / website that simplifies the task I will continue to use the trend of opinions expressed in this thread as a substitute. Long may they continue.

Pat38493

Telegraph_Sam said:

That might be a convenient excuse for me as a Tracker elec and gas customer to avoid doing the research, star gazing and number crunching that is required to do the job properly. If there is no off the shelf software / website that simplifies the task I will continue to use the trend of opinions expressed in this thread as a substitute. Long may they continue.

As said above, Octopus Compare attempts to do this..  The way it works is that you have to specify the threshold value of peaks that you want it to shift to the cheapest periods and you can tweak the value and look at graphs to see if what it's doing seems to look plausible.  It's obviously not going to be 100% accurate but it should give you a reasonable idea.

You need some Octopus history for it to work as it gets your usage data from the Octopus API.

Spies

This is what it suggests I've saved over the course of a year, which isn't as much as I would have thought! 

Pat38493

Spies said:

This is what it suggests I've saved over the course of a year, which isn't as much as I would have thought! 

Which tariff are you actually on?

Telegraph_Sam

I like the colour scheme...
Does it say what your "savings" amount to (cumulatively)?
And how easy would it be for example to run Tracker against the conventional alternatives, svr, Flexible etc? I suspect you would not want to display more than 2 tariffs at a time in order to keep things simple?
Same query in respect of comparison with a fixed rate.

Diwils911

OctopusCompare focus solely on the electricity, any way to add the gas as well ? 

Or a suggestion of another app which connects to the API showing the same data for gas and Electricity ? 

Thanks