Octopus Tracker

MultiFuelBurner

Diwils911 said:

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

Gas is so last decade...... electricity is the only future. (One day maybe not in our lifetime lol)

MultiFuelBurner

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! 

So that's what you have saved against Agile from being on Tracker I presume.

Against the SVT or any fix you eyed up over the past few months you would have saved buckets of money.

Pat38493

Telegraph_Sam said:

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.

Some of the features of Octopus compare are subscription only, including the ability to display more than a month of data so the above screenshot is from someone with a subscription - I think it only costs a quid or two per month.

If you swipe left you get a screen that shows a summary of various things including your average rate during the entire displayed period.  You can also choose whether to show a rolling month or the month to date since your last Octopus bill.

If you swipe left on the rates screen, you can see the "best 2 hours, best 3 hours, best 4 hours" coming up and so on.

You can also click to set alarms for when cheap periods are starting and so on.

It looks like Spies is currently on Tracker and has not used the "shifted" functionality to optimise the Agile usage - if they did that, it might be that Agile comes out cheaper, but of course that is predicated on having the motivation and flexibility to shift your load to the cheaper hours of the day (at least away from 4pm to 7pm but also ideally away from breakfast time on a lot of days).

Generally there are some days when it's dead easy to beat Tracker with Agile with minimal effort, but if the tracker rate is on the high side, it becomes more and more difficult and there also seems to be a bit of randomness about it e.g. today the tracker price is less than it was yesterday, but the Agile price is all over the place which makes load shifting pretty hard if you were trying to beat Tracker.

From the image above, if you displayed shifted Go or flexible, the savings would be pretty big in both cases - both tracker and agile will likely beat Go or Flexible by a considerable margin over the period displayed.

You can only pick 2 tariffs at a time but you can compare any two.

Pat38493

Diwils911 said:

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

Octopus Watch does something similar for both electric and Gas but it doesn't have the same flexible comparison things - it is hard coded to compare between Go and Agile I think.  I am not sure if it compares anything at all with Gas, or if it does you need a full year history which I don't have yet.

I generally prefer Octopus Compare, but Octopus watch does have another interesting feature which is 48 hour rate forecasts and wind forecast built into the app.

Telegraph_Sam

@Pat38943. I think I would be satisfied - once the novelty had worn off - if I could content myself with simply having made a saving. against Go, Flexible etc without having to go through the gymnastics of including Agile

Pat38493

Telegraph_Sam said:

@Pat38943. I think I would be satisfied - once the novelty had worn off - if I could content myself with simply having made a saving. against Go, Flexible etc without having to go through the gymnastics of including Agile

You are probably right - with Agile you need a few sweet days every so often where you can take full advantage - e.g. 14th October we used 58KWh for £3.46 and saved £4.47 against tracker in one day.  If you have a day or two like that in every couple of months, you can usually at least match Tracker, but as you say it's a bit of a faff.  It also depends on your usage patterns - e.g. we don't do a lot of miles most weeks in our EV, so often we can jump on any really cheap or plunge pricing to charge the car, and avoid charging it at all on the expensive days like this week.

Telegraph_Sam

And does Compare include standing charges (Vat is perhaps not so important since it is uniform in all tariffs)?

Pat38493

Telegraph_Sam said:

And does Compare include standing charges (Vat is perhaps not so important since it is uniform in all tariffs)?

Yes and you can also choose in the options whether to include or not the standing charges in various statistics like the average daily usage and so on.

Telegraph_Sam

Thats the point. EV load shifting is not everyone's cup of tea and the value of Compare in the right hands would be in demonstrating how less "agile" tariffs compare.

mmmmikey

What price is Compare showing for Agile? Your actual Agile use or some kind of average if you're not on Agile? If it's an average how is it calculated? 

As I mentioned above, unless the average is weighted to reflect what your actual use pattern would be if you were on Agile it is almost completely meaningless.

For example, if you are a customer with gas central heating and using Tracker for electricity, you may well be using the bulk of your energy at peak times which makes sense is that's convenient for you and there's no cost advantage to do anything else. That's when most people use electricity - that is why they are peak times. If you switched to Agile without changing this pattern you would be using electrcity at the most expensive time and could easily be paying an average of 30p/kWh to 40p/kWh. On the flip side, there are people posting here that consistently achieve an average of <10p/kWh.

So unless you're an existing Agile customer using to Compare to your existing Agile use with other tariffs, you might as well be using tarot cards or a how-long-is-a-piece-of-string-ometer. The risk of using an app like Compare is that the penny-accurate figures and well presented graphs fool you into attaching more significance to the data than is really appropriate.

That's not to say I don't think Compare is a good app. On the contrary, it seems to be a very well written piece of software and useful for some comparisons. It just can't give you a reasonable estimate of your Agile costs without knowing how much energy you would use when.

So in a nutshell, my view is that if you're going to use Compare you need to keep in mind that unless you're an existing Agile customer any Agile figures presented are at best a very, very approximate guide and probably no where near accurate enough to do a meaninigful comparison.