Octopus Tracker

pfpf

MultiFuelBurner said:

pfpf said:

MultiFuelBurner said:

To be clear my post was about load shifting electricity there is no agile for gas

of course. but how does missing data effect Agile?

Others have contacted Octopus and they will repull the data and rebill. 

thanks all and as i thought, its just this "repull and rebill" thats now got me confused. sorry MFB.

Qyburn

mmmmikey said:

During a power cut the meter will (should!) record zero usage. Sorry if this sounds a bit 

Thanks, I had wondered whether that would be the case, or whether the power cut slots would be completely missing rather than present but recording zero.

So your explanation begs the question, why do Octopus average the data following a power cut? They will have all the h/h readings, and the total of all those entries will match the consumption shown by  the change in index readings.

la531983

Gas prices continue to dive, at the moment trading at their lowest point since the 17th July

northernstar007

la531983 said:

Gas prices continue to dive, at the moment trading at their lowest point since the 17th July

could we see a 3p price arriving 

Pat38493

Octopus have finally issued several bills and appear to have got me back to my normal billing cycle.

However - as far as I can tell they have forgotten to bill me for my Tracker electricity usage between 27th November and 11th December - this was the period when I had switched from Agile to Tracker but it was in the same billing month.

I don't see a particular need to chase them so I will just wait to see if they eventually realise.

mmmmikey

Qyburn said:

mmmmikey said:

During a power cut the meter will (should!) record zero usage. Sorry if this sounds a bit 

Thanks, I had wondered whether that would be the case, or whether the power cut slots would be completely missing rather than present but recording zero.

So your explanation begs the question, why do Octopus average the data following a power cut? They will have all the h/h readings, and the total of all those entries will match the consumption shown by  the change in index readings.

I'm guessing there are checks and balances in the system that detect loss of input power in case of tampering - i.e. something happens in the meter in addition to the zero reading, and that somehow feeds through in the data Octopus get. If you turn off all power on the output side of the meter (e.g. at the isolation switch on any/all consumer units) you'll also get zero readings but Octopus cope with that and everything carries on as expected with the billing.

(p.s. I probably should have caveated my previous comment with "I think" as it's possible not all meters work the same way)

mmmmikey

A thought has just occurred to me re: Tracker billing. Unlike most other billing methods the day runs from 00:00 GMT to 23:59 GMT in winter but 00:00 BST to 23:59 BST in summer - i.e. the billing changes with the clocks. This means that in order to calculate a daily bill Octopus need to use the 1/2 hour data - i.e. they cannot just rely on the meter readings at the start and the end of the day (the index readings). I'm guessing that if anything invalidates the 30 minute data then that's what forces them to recalculate, and this potentially has a knock on effect on following days which is why the whole month is averaged out and a fresh start made for the next billing period. Or something like that :-)

masonic

pfpf said:

...but......if you have noticed my last couple of posts on this thread iv'e had averaged out bills for both Gas and Electricity around 3 times each in the 12 months iv'e been on tracker. as i said, its not such an issue with Gas but there's no point me actively "load shifting" if a couple of missing 30 minute entries results in me getting "averaged" bills. it's not a complaint as such as i am happy with the "averaged" unit rate but load shifting becomes pointless if its a hit/miss situation.
how does this sit with Agile?

Regarding Agile billing, this works differently than Tracker or mainstream tariffs. The half-hour consumption figures alone are used to generate bills. In the case of missing data, the billing system just grinds to a halt. The data needs to be obtained by manual intervention. If the data cannot be obtained at all, then the fallback is to bill the period using SVT. Though I'm not aware of that ever happening in practice.

masonic

mmmmikey said:

pfpf said:

masonic said:

pfpf said:

masonic said:

pfpf said:

my bill arrived today, iv'e had a couple of months where all is "as used". before that had a couple of issues with Gas "averaged", but this month have the electric averaged. some cheap days in the last month that i used a lot and vice versa on dearer days.
how do i find where the missing reading/s are? i'll have to try and work out what the difference is.

p.s my app shows all daily use but i know one 30 min missing reading and it's averaged.

Guy Lipman's site is the best place to check for missing data: https://energy.guylipman.com/sm/admin?source=octopus

thanks. we had a 2 hour power outage (area wide) on the 28th Dec, this is the missing data. do they ever automatically re-issue bills? can i do anything to get the bill re-issued?  i suspect the difference will be relatively small, i'll need to try and work it out.

If there was no data recorded for that period then they will not be able to recalculate your bill based on your daily consumption.

ok. maybe i did miss-understand. the power cut situation may be different to missing data?

During a power cut the meter will (should!) record zero usage. Sorry if this sounds a bit simplistic, but this is the best way I can think to explain - imagine the meter is keeping a spreadsheet of data. 

Suppose there's a power cut at say 17:15 to 18:15. The meter should enter whatever was used between 17:00 and 17:15 in the 17:00 to 17:30 cell, zero in the 17:30 to 18:00 cell and whatever was used between 18:15 and 18:30 in the 18:00 to 18:30 cell. That is, data should be recorded for each time slot even if that data is zero. The meter has a small internal battery to keep it working to make this possible.

That is not the same as the meter stopping recording at 17:15, in which case there would be nothing recorded until it comes back on again and there would be blank cells in the spreadsheet - i.e. missing data. This would only happen if the meter was faulty. Hope this makes sense?

It's been commented elsewhere that smart electricity meters (as opposed to gas) do not have a battery backup, so if you experience a power cut, they go down too. So there would be a gap in their records, rather than a record of zero usage. I found it quite surprising that this could be the case, but it came from a trustworthy source.

Qyburn

Which raises the question, how does the smart meter data deal with time changes? Did it return 50 readings, with the period 01:00 to 02:00 appearing twice, on the day it changes BST to GMT? And obviously 46 readings when it changed GMT to BST.