Octopus saving sessions

MultiFuelBurner

ballisticbrian said:

Has anyone got any info this time round on the calculation in the preceding hours?

There is no preceding hours calculation anymore.

Just the average of the previous 10 week days at the same time period for a saving session run during a week. If a session is run at a weekend it's the proceeding 4 weekend days to work out your average use as a baseline.

TheElectricCow

MouldyOldDough said:

So why does everyone not just automatically get opted in? 

Anyone who is opted in but actually uses more energy during the session will go against the total reward payment Octopus would receive from the ESO (National Grid) for the demand reduction. 

Obviously Octopus aren’t charging their customers if they opt in and increase consumption, but they would still have to bare the cost of this themselves. On a large enough scale (i.e. a higher increase in usage than decrease) they would actually have to pay money back to the ESO rather than receiving anything to pass on to the customers who took part.

Add into this the fact that the events by design must take place when demand is highest, the loss of income would quickly spiral if, for example, a DFS event took place on a particularly cold day where many thousands of customers with no intention of taking part turned on their electric heating for an extra hour in the evening. 

While the rules do permit automatic opt-ins for all, it makes much more financial sense to only have the people who have actually indicated an intention to take part included in the overall results. It also helps for gathering data on overall engagement with the scheme that you wouldn’t be able to determine from usage figures alone.

bagand96

Email and push notification received this morning at about 11am.

Alnat1

bagand96 said:

Email and push notification received this morning at about 11am.

Same for me at 11.38

TheElectricCow

Never been able to get the Octo-app to give me notifications of any kind despite all settings set to allow them, not so much an issue with the whatsapp working but I’d prefer not to have to use thatsapp in the first place.

Not had any Octo-emails this year apart from one telling me the results were ready a few days after they first became available on my accounts.

Thankfully nothing saving session related seems to get past the people on this forum, so following the saving session threads is a pretty reliable way of getting notified anyway.

Netexporter

Never been able to get the Octo-app to give me notifications of any kind despite all settings set to allow them

Have you tried turning the notifications switch off and on again?

MultiFuelBurner

Netexporter said:

Never been able to get the Octo-app to give me notifications of any kind despite all settings set to allow them

Have you tried turning the notifications switch off and on again?

Reminds me of.....

TheElectricCow

Netexporter said:

Never been able to get the Octo-app to give me notifications of any kind despite all settings set to allow them

Have you tried turning the notifications switch off and on again?

I gave that a go after the last session hoping it would sort itself out, both with the in-app and device settings, but apparently no change. Might try reinstalling it later on but if that doesn’t fix things will probably just settle to leave it at that as I spend far too much time faffing about with apps as it is.

Chrysalis

The good news is that this has been added to the app now, so its really easy to opt in on there.

The bad news is, I opted in yesterday on the app and about 18 hours later I got a email and notification from the app, so for some reason Octopus are notifying their customers way later than when they are told by the grid.

With them jumping on whatsapp, I have the feeling Octopus are probably phasing out using emails for this.  I hope the mutterings of them doing some alerts exclusively by whatsapp are false.  They seem to want to push people to social media platforms.

Qyburn

MultiFuelBurner said:

Of course if you refuse to opt in until you get an email that is your prerogative.

I was expressing a preference, no need for you to go overboard.

I've opted in each time after seeing the sessions mentioned here, which is obviously fallible. The Octopus app doesn't give me notifications for some reason.

I prefer email as I have no need for WhatsApp so would have to set that up specially. Octopus has explicitly said their "free electricity" sessions will be notified by email, and furthermore it seems they do send emails for at least some of these saver sessions. So it's really not clear why you're so scathing about the idea.