octopus tracker

t0rt0ise

stripling said:

Chrysalis said:

We review the Tracker formula and standing charge every three months, each time the energy price cap updates, to make sure Tracker prices fairly reflect things like taxes and levies, network maintenance and meter rental, as well as energy regulation.

This is a new policy and as I've recently been bounced around various Octopus staff while trying (and failing) to solve a problem, I discovered that not one single member of staff, including seniors, knew anything about it.

I haven't had much reason to contact Octopus specifically about my Tracker tariff for several years so it's been really disturbing (and frustrating) to discover that even after all these years and lots of new customers joining up, most staff still don't understand Tracker outside of a superficial paragraph and a couple of T&Cs links...  🤦🏻‍♀️

In my experience the only people that understand tracker and agile are via twitter. 

stripling

I agree the Twitter staff are mostly better informed but I still had one on Twitter telling me that my tariff was not a 'contract' and didn't understand that the formula & SC rate are fixed. I had to show him screen shots of my tariff that use the word contract - 'your contract has 15 days left'. 

stripling

We review the Tracker formula and standing charge every three months, each time the energy price cap updates, to make sure Tracker prices fairly reflect things like taxes and levies, network maintenance and meter rental, as well as energy regulation.

I have suggested to Octopus that this now needs to be in every 'renewal notice' email. 

I have yet to encounter even one member of staff who knew anything about it and I've had interactions with about 7 staff members of various levels of seniority the last few weeks. I only found it by accident. 

Keeping up with the repeated Octopus changes and policy overwrites the last few months requires an absurd amount of screen time and stalking of various forums. 

MP1995

JAV39 said:

Does it go above the standard variable price very often? i cant seam to find info on gas tracker, just to get an idea on if worth swapping both or just electric

What looking back won't do is show you the changenin formula and the addition of 3-4p in some regions.

I woukd expect tracker to breach but overall average out 20-30% cheaper unweighted for the year.

spot1034

Two highly unusual and not likely to be repeated factors have led to tracker being so much cheaper than the standard variable over the past few months. One is the rapidly falling wholesale price, which is only reflected in the standard variable months after it happens - that situation is now unwinding and will do so further in July (despite the wholesale price firming up a bit in the past couple of weeks) and the other has been quite unusual weather patterns we have seen during the past few months with repeated storms and high winds and hardly any calm settled weather which, especially in winter, would tend to mean higher tracker prices because there wouldn't be so much wind. The first of these two certainly won't be repeated in the near future, and the second - well you take your chances if you ever bet on the weather, but over time it will tend to balance out. If there has been a lot of one sort of weather in the recent past, it's quite likely that we will see something different as we move ahead.

stripling

spot1034 said:

Two highly unusual and not likely to be repeated factors have led to tracker being so much cheaper than the standard variable over the past few months. One is the rapidly falling wholesale price, which is only reflected in the standard variable months after it happens - that situation is now unwinding and will do so further in July (despite the wholesale price firming up a bit in the past couple of weeks) and the other has been quite unusual weather patterns we have seen during the past few months with repeated storms and high winds and hardly any calm settled weather which, especially in winter, would tend to mean higher tracker prices because there wouldn't be so much wind. The first of these two certainly won't be repeated in the near future, and the second - well you take your chances if you ever bet on the weather, but over time it will tend to balance out. If there has been a lot of one sort of weather in the recent past, it's quite likely that we will see something different as we move ahead.

I think they're running it down bit-by-bit. It'll help get the smart meter targets up for a while then it will lose competitiveness. The future is Agile type time-of-use tariffs - it's a major subject of contemporary policy discussions. 

PHoppers

I joined Tracker v1 in 2019 whilst waiting to have smart meters installed and to go on Agile (back then you didn't need a smart meter to join Tracker). I ended up staying on Tracker v1, in recent years mainly because the daily standing charge remained at 18.06p/day when everyone else was paying 53.95p/day or there abouts. However, a few months ago Octopus ended all legacy smart tariffs and migrated everyone onto the latest version. The latest Tracker is nowhere near as cheap as the original tracker v1, however it still appears to be much better than standard price cap tariff for gas and electric and I would encourage people to switch onto it. 
For those that are concerned about the 100p price cap, I was on it for 4 years, went thru a pandemic and a Russian invasion, both of which caused absolute turmoil in the gas/electric markets and yet I'm pretty certain I didn't pay more than everyone else at the worst times (35p/kwh?). Besides, you can leave whenever you want without penalty

BarelySentientAI

PHoppers said:

For those that are concerned about the 100p price cap, I was on it for 4 years, went thru a pandemic and a Russian invasion, both of which caused absolute turmoil in the gas/electric markets and yet I'm pretty certain I didn't pay more than everyone else at the worst times (35p/kwh?). Besides, you can leave whenever you want without penalty

That was at least in part due to the government assistance, not due to the tracker price cap.  And now there is a delay on leaving as well I think.

bristolleedsfan

PHoppers said:

For those that are concerned about the 100p price cap, I was on it for 4 years, went thru a pandemic and a Russian invasion, both of which caused absolute turmoil in the gas/electric markets and yet I'm pretty certain I didn't pay more than everyone else at the worst times (35p/kwh?). Besides, you can leave whenever you want without penalty

From October 2021 ish product cap of 30p kWh was added to Tracker v1 ......

Spoonie_Turtle

PHoppers said:

I joined Tracker v1 in 2019 whilst waiting to have smart meters installed and to go on Agile (back then you didn't need a smart meter to join Tracker). I ended up staying on Tracker v1 …

For those that are concerned about the 100p price cap, I was on it for 4 years, went thru a pandemic and a Russian invasion, both of which caused absolute turmoil in the gas/electric markets and yet I'm pretty certain I didn't pay more than everyone else at the worst times (35p/kwh?). Besides, you can leave whenever you want without penalty

The summer before the government intervention the electricity price definitely spiked.  The Tracker cap for the July 2022 tariff was 55p/kWh, and it hit that for nearly 2 weeks - I don't know what the true price would have been without that cap.  And it was above the SVT for a couple of months. 

Then came government intervention in October 2022 with the EPG, and weirdly during winter 22/23 Tracker was below the EPG for nearly 5 out of those 6 months.  There was a spike in the true price throughout December 2022 - it was consistently at or above the EPG, with several days in the 50s and 60s+ p/kWh - and a few days again in January 2023.  But other than that it was cheaper than the EPG for most of that winter, which was very unexpected.

However with the potential volatility of the world it's not a tariff for complacency.  I don't currently check the prices daily but I do keep an eye on them at least weekly, and obviously here the alarm would be sounded by other more engaged members should something kick off and prices suddenly rocket.  Tracker is a much simpler tariff than Agile but it definitely isn't a 'set and forget' tariff like a fix would be.  It's no longer the total no-brainer it was when the EPG came in.