Octopus Tracker

masonic

peter3hg said:

This will also weed out those who don't understand the tariff as is the case with you.

This is a very good point, and in fairness to This Is Money, MSE, and others who have reviewed the tariffs, it is a good thing that they emphasise the risks, such as prices going above the capped tariff price, which is a risk, even if it hasn't materialised so far. But if prices were to be elevated on Tracker of an extended period, then that would very soon also feed into the cap, which is now adjusted quarterly, and likely (as we have seen this year) the price cap won't fall quickly when wholesale prices do.

Telegraph_Sam

I seem to remember that when I got my original Tracker "quote" it was of little more than academic interest for the reasons quoted. An obvious step would be to get a breakdown of the inputs behind the two prices to check that you are comparing apples with apples, which in the circs is perhaps debateable.If there is a built-in margin that could partly explain it

double_dutchy

Just been out for the day and came back to read 50+ posts on this Tracker thread! All very informative and amusing!

Happy New Year to all the Octotrackers out there

masonic

double_dutchy said:

Just been out for the day and came back to read 50+ posts on this Tracker thread! All very informative and amusing!

Happy New Year to all the Octotrackers out there

Yes, that's enough community outreach from me for one year. Happy new year all!

Telegraph_Sam

@hubb: Reverting to the question of the "quoted" monthly costs. I have never understood why everyone doesn't choose variable D/D as a matter of course. The alternative, basing one's fixed monthly D/D on someone else's guesstimate of what future bills are likely to amount to, and building padding into the account, makes basing tariff comparisons on monthly payment amounts pretty meaningless. And to have £272 swilling around aimlessly in the supplier's bank account, strikes me as criminal (!)  This in addition to all the arguments over how much padding to incorporate depending on the season. Makes mere price forecasting look like a doddle.

ecraig

Telegraph_Sam said:

@hubb: Reverting to the question of the "quoted" monthly costs. I have never understood why everyone doesn't choose variable D/D as a matter of course. The alternative, basing one's fixed monthly D/D on someone else's guesstimate of what future bills are likely to amount to, and building padding into the account, makes basing tariff comparisons on monthly payment amounts pretty meaningless. And to have £272 swilling around aimlessly in the supplier's bank account, strikes me as criminal (!)  This in addition to all the arguments over how much padding to incorporate depending on the season. Makes mere price forecasting a doddle.

Budgeting generally concludes a specific amount each month whether it’s for household fuel, food, entertainment, petrol etc. 
we naturally have it in our brain to assign X amount, and whether we gain the 2p interest for that energy or (i dunno) Octopus does makes not much sense. 

Perhaps if we dislike companies profiteering so much from “our money” we should only keep 4 days worth of fuel in our car, and insisted our employers pay us daily, seeing as we turn up every day (why should they have the audacity to hold our salary for a month!?)
Personally I feel the “half and half approach” works well. If I lived in a mansion or had a commercial contract I would be paying variable. But right now I’m living in a humbled world with a humbled salary and humbled energy bill so I don’t really care if the energy makes a couple pence in interest - considering I throw away a bit more than couple pence worth of vegetables every week. 

Telegraph_Sam

Budgeting in these hard times obviously makes sense. I used to use Tonik before they went under. They were notorious for getting customers to load up their accounts with credit. Till it was too late.

BellaBlondykeTheThird

Well that was a fun end to the year on the Tracker thread. 

Happy New Year everyone.

Cheap cheap electricity and gas today for the start of the year and none of these superstitions of doing washing on New Years day as I have three loads to get through.

Reading another thread I have a couple of teenagers and I won't be washing their bedding at 20/30oC and with tracker being 13p kWh today they deserve a disinfection cycle to clean or good knows what !!!!!!!!!! Minimum 60oC for 2 hours and some extra bleach lol.

Might just stick the teenagers in with the bed clothes.

BellaBlondykeTheThird

Thanks to those that have taught me here how to calculate the cost of energy tomorrow.

Half price electricity tomorrow taking the new price cap into consideration.

Hazey77

Archerychick said:

masonic said:

Archerychick said:

pfpf said:

pfpf said:

just using 24/12 as an example.

i only have the Octopus App and my monthly bills, no other forms of cross checking.

whenever iv'e randomly checked usage/cost on a particular day i have always found it to be accurate. i do check more closely on the bills.

according to the App. i used 13.74kWh of electricity, this was the day that it was 7.77p. the App says i used £1.5462, quite a difference to what is should be. just having a look at some of the recent cheap days and nothing adds up. of course i'll look closely when the bill arrives but is anyone else seeing this difference?

edit. just using a second day 29/12 used 13.36kWh, cost £2.095. unit rate was 12.1p

edit2. the gas doesn't add up either. have they somehow added the new formula?

scrap all that. the daily cost includes the SC which i am sure it never used to. indeed the App says it doesn't.

Yes app excludes SC and VAT. It would be very helpful if the graphs included this because it makes for easier comparison of spend by month, that said, I run a spreadsheet with all the data in.

The output of the App on my phone appears to be inclusive of both VAT and SC. Even though it says it is not inclusive of SC. This could be a recent change.

Interesting! Just checking mine now it no longer states VAT is excluded. My daily charges shown don’t include the SC though - maybe they’re slowly introducing that through to us 

Having only just joined Tracker I'm on the December 2023 tariff. Looking at the app I can see that the daily cost is exactly the kWh cost plus the SC.