Octopus Saving Session

JohnPo

Just noticed a lot more bonus points than usual added to my account, so just wondering whether those folk who were keeping an accurate calculation of what they thought was owed think it corrects the previous under payment?

bristolleedsfan

northernsparky said:

I’m not sure what’s gone on - but it looks like something on the calculation side, changing from the usual £2.25 to a £3 reward is at fault.  The question is will Octopus correct it, or leave things as they are?

I had this reply via Twitter  "It looks like OctoBot hadn't quite got the calculations right and we've given it a bit of a telling off. We've looked into what everyone's owed and your OctoPoints wallet has now been corrected too"

masonic

JohnPo said:

Just noticed a lot more bonus points than usual added to my account, so just wondering whether those folk who were keeping an accurate calculation of what they thought was owed think it corrects the previous under payment?

Yes, they've credited me with the right amount to cover the previous shortfall.

TheElectricCow

Bonus payout seems right for my estimations.

And now with the events concluded that brings my total up to £212.18 over 8 sessions, with 5 Octopoints to spare. Guess I’ll just save those for later. 

Estimated cost of electric used to reach those earnings is £84 so even with a generous allowance for that profit has been at least £120 plus all the bonus productivity to my housework in the process, along with a few good long oven cooked meals that I wouldn’t have normally eaten.

Can’t complain about those results one bit, especially when for most of the sessions shifting usage has really not been any great imposition to myself.

Hope we get to see some good data out of all of this once everything has been tallied up on National Grids end - cannot possibly imagine any potential future sessions will be subject the the same IDA calculations again especially if such events became more mainstream, but I do hope there’s enough value in the idea to run another similar scheme at some point.

vic_sf49

vic_sf49 said:

Hmm, what's going on here then? Seems like it's not just my account that's a bit off from my predictions.

My guesstimate on the previous session was within 1p, whereas these results are adrift by £6.92.

Ah well. We'll see if they get corrected or not. I agree that they've used the usual £2.25 factor, rather than £3.00.

Yay. Bonus points equating to £6.82 added to my account. That'll do!

Might cash them out now.

tlcgrantham

masonic said:

JohnPo said:

Just noticed a lot more bonus points than usual added to my account, so just wondering whether those folk who were keeping an accurate calculation of what they thought was owed think it corrects the previous under payment?

Yes, they've credited me with the right amount to cover the previous shortfall.

Same here. I’m glad they’ve played fair and corrected their mistake quickly. Exactly what I’ve come to expect from Octopus. 

Shedman

Apparently some people 'gamed' the system to increase their savings....surely none of the upright citizens on this forum would have dreamed of doing such a nefarious thing 😱😉

https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/money/bills/power-rinsing-gaming-national-grid-energy-saving-scheme-british-gas-customers-2253691

Spoonie_Turtle

Shedman said:

Apparently some people 'gamed' the system to increase their savings....surely none of the upright citizens on this forum would have dreamed of doing such a nefarious thing 😱😉

https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/money/bills/power-rinsing-gaming-national-grid-energy-saving-scheme-british-gas-customers-2253691

The example given was c.100kWh in the IDA period*.  Yikes.  There's a whole spectrum between that and no load shifting, just cutting usage in the session.

The anticipated average of £100 indicates they expected some decent usage in the IDA period, surely.

*For those who can't see behind … or get around … the paywall, it was this:

"customers shared tactics in a thread on the Octopus Energy subreddit, with one saying: “To make some real money, what you need to do is use as much energy as possible during the in-day adjustment period, so if the session is 5 to 6pm, during 1 to 4pm you use whatever you can. I am now managing nearly 175,000 points per session, £220. This far outweighs my electric cost of around £45 per session.”

When questioned about how they managed to reach a usage of £45 – which equates to over 100kWh of electricity, around 10 times the typical daily electricity usage of a UK household – the user said they had a triple-phase power supply, two electric vehicles, a battery storage system, an air-source heat pump, an immersion heater and underfloor heating."

TheElectricCow

Well now that would surely be a most heinous crime! To think some awful energy consumers out there had not only actually read the official documentation published online by NG openly explaining the clearly exploitable way in which the energy savings were calculated, but then also were truly evil enough to actually use that information to their advantage and get free money for it??

On a marginally more serious note, that whole article rubs me the wrong way. The information it provides is slightly inconsistent throughout and all of the source links throughout just go to other completely unrelated articles with no mention of the thing being referenced.

In fact the only actual evidence shown of someone “gaming the system” in that article is entirely based on a different news outlet quoting a random reddit forum post. If the standard for news reporting these days is repeating what someone else saw on reddit, there might just be bigger problems facing the country than rising energy costs. 

masonic

The article begins 'A number of households in Britain have been accused of “gaming” the National Grid’s energy saving trial to shave up to £100 or more off their bills', it doesn't appear to disclose who has made this accusation.

I followed a couple of links in the article, one supposedly being about "one person claim[ing] to have earned as much as £175 per session", but linked article didn't support this claim at all. If the article had been written by an AI, then it would definitely have to categorised as a bad response.

The article even admits that load-shifting was an objective of the scheme, but doesn't delineate between legitimate load-shifting and so-called "extreme" load-shifting. If that's defined as using 100 kWh over the course of the 3 hour adjustment period, then very few people are going to be in a position to do that without blowing their main fuse.

Looks to me like a few people have been bragging on social media and it has spiralled out of control from there.