Octopus Agile

masonic

Slinky said:

Has anybody swapped from an Economy 7 setup to Agile? How long did that take to go the other way?

I went to Agile from E7 when my meter was first installed. It is the same as switching from single rate and your meter can remain on an E7 profile.

Slinky

masonic said:

Slinky said:

Has anybody swapped from an Economy 7 setup to Agile? How long did that take to go the other way?

I went to Agile from E7 when my meter was first installed. It is the same as switching from single rate and your meter can remain on an E7 profile.

So did that go through straight away then? Do you still have an E7 meter?

Our old meter was E7 but we went to single rate when the smart meter was installed by EDF, before we had the solar installed. We struggled to find suppliers who would give us single rate with a dual rate meter (left by the previous occupants) as we didn't have storage heaters and couldn't use 30% overnight.

TroubledTarts

Slinky said:

I've bitten the bullet and asked to move onto Economy 7 from Agile. Should take a couple of weeks for the meter to be re-programmed to be dual rate, but that 7 hour charging window overnight at 13.52p is a better option for us than trying to find 3 cheap slots overnight to progamme the battery to. Our inverter limits us to 3 slots at a time. Should have done it weeks ago. On a grey day we can get by on the capacity of our battery.

Has anybody swapped from an Economy 7 setup to Agile? How long did that take to go the other way?

Reading the T&C's you should be able to return to Agile or another smart tariffs 30days after your switch to economy 7.

In practice it depends who you speak to in Octopus CS they might let you back under the 14 day rule or just because they are feeling nice. Random answer generator would be appropriate here.

Slinky

TroubledTarts said:

Slinky said:

I've bitten the bullet and asked to move onto Economy 7 from Agile. Should take a couple of weeks for the meter to be re-programmed to be dual rate, but that 7 hour charging window overnight at 13.52p is a better option for us than trying to find 3 cheap slots overnight to progamme the battery to. Our inverter limits us to 3 slots at a time. Should have done it weeks ago. On a grey day we can get by on the capacity of our battery.

Has anybody swapped from an Economy 7 setup to Agile? How long did that take to go the other way?

Reading the T&C's you should be able to return to Agile or another smart tariffs 30days after your switch to economy 7.

In practice it depends who you speak to in Octopus CS they might let you back under the 14 day rule or just because they are feeling nice. Random answer generator would be appropriate here.

Sorry, I wasn't clear with my question, it was more the mechanics with it being a dual rate smart meter, rather than the T&Cs of the smart tariff that I was concerned about.  I think with the high costs of gas likely to be continuing for several more weeks/months as Europe and the UK restock after a cold winter, it's unlikely I'll be wanting to switch back to Agile in the immediate future.

masonic

Slinky said:

masonic said:

Slinky said:

Has anybody swapped from an Economy 7 setup to Agile? How long did that take to go the other way?

I went to Agile from E7 when my meter was first installed. It is the same as switching from single rate and your meter can remain on an E7 profile.

So did that go through straight away then? Do you still have an E7 meter?

Our old meter was E7 but we went to single rate when the smart meter was installed by EDF, before we had the solar installed. We struggled to find suppliers who would give us single rate with a dual rate meter (left by the previous occupants) as we didn't have storage heaters and couldn't use 30% overnight.

Yes, as is the convention, my Agile contract started from the beginning of the day I signed up. I don't still have an E7 profile as I was required to switch to single rate to join Tracker, and now I've left Octopus for a Tomato TOU tariff, I have no reason to change back to E7.

northernstar007

been on agile since oct now getting fed up with the high prices and no end in sight, using 120kwh per month, very tempted with jumping on a E7 for electric but deffo sticking with my gas fix ends boxing day at 5.52p kwh

TheElectricCow

Slinky said:

I've bitten the bullet and asked to move onto Economy 7 from Agile. Should take a couple of weeks for the meter to be re-programmed to be dual rate, but that 7 hour charging window overnight at 13.52p is a better option for us than trying to find 3 cheap slots overnight to progamme the battery to. Our inverter limits us to 3 slots at a time. Should have done it weeks ago. On a grey day we can get by on the capacity of our battery.

Has anybody swapped from an Economy 7 setup to Agile? How long did that take to go the other way?

I had Octopus swap my single rate to E7, and then later eventually ended up switching to Agile - in both cases the actual switching was done same day with no issues, albeit on the switch to E7 it did take a few attempts to get through to someone at Octopus who both understood the request and was able to action the change. The process for switching to Agile is entirely automated if done online, so naturally doesn’t suffer from the same issues as when dealing with humans.

E7 uses two of the actual meter registers (the incrementing numbers that form the meter readings), while Agile is based on the 30 minute usage data stored separately in the meter, so the two essentially operate on different systems of readings which shouldn’t interfere with each other. While on Agile, my meter remains on the E7 profile and the two registers still continue to operate as normal, switching and recording usage separately at the normal E7 times.

Slinky

TheElectricCow said:

Slinky said:

I've bitten the bullet and asked to move onto Economy 7 from Agile. Should take a couple of weeks for the meter to be re-programmed to be dual rate, but that 7 hour charging window overnight at 13.52p is a better option for us than trying to find 3 cheap slots overnight to progamme the battery to. Our inverter limits us to 3 slots at a time. Should have done it weeks ago. On a grey day we can get by on the capacity of our battery.

Has anybody swapped from an Economy 7 setup to Agile? How long did that take to go the other way?

I had Octopus swap my single rate to E7, and then later eventually ended up switching to Agile - in both cases the actual switching was done same day with no issues, albeit on the switch to E7 it did take a few attempts to get through to someone at Octopus who both understood the request and was able to action the change. The process for switching to Agile is entirely automated if done online, so naturally doesn’t suffer from the same issues as when dealing with humans.

E7 uses two of the actual meter registers (the incrementing numbers that form the meter readings), while Agile is based on the 30 minute usage data stored separately in the meter, so the two essentially operate on different systems of readings which shouldn’t interfere with each other. While on Agile, my meter remains on the E7 profile and the two registers still continue to operate as normal, switching and recording usage separately at the normal E7 times.

Thanks for this useful info.

I'm presuming that having a two rate meter can make it difficult to get single rate quotes from other suppliers. I tried getting a quote from Tomato recently, and they thought we still had the two rate meter which was actually swapped out by EDF nearly 2 years ago.

EssexHebridean

With things not looking at improving much for the foreseeable, I am now considering hopping on to a fix until the conditions for Agile improve again. In spite of still shifting as much as possible, we've seen every day so far this month bar one over the SVR, mainly because of the higher priced during the 7 - 8pm timeslots. While I am extremely happy to hold off on cooking tea until 7pm, holding off on it for a further hour is a step too far! 

TroubledTarts

EssexHebridean said:

With things not looking at improving much for the foreseeable, I am now considering hopping on to a fix until the conditions for Agile improve again. In spite of still shifting as much as possible, we've seen every day so far this month bar one over the SVR, mainly because of the higher priced during the 7 - 8pm timeslots. While I am extremely happy to hold off on cooking tea until 7pm, holding off on it for a further hour is a step too far! 

You've done well to hang on this long to be honest.

Gas prices at 140/therm I read earliermbut haven't checked that yet so no wonder electricity is so expensive we have been burning gas far too much to produce electricity since 2nd Jan.