Octopus Tariff Comparisons
By Chris Gilbert
Octopus Tariff Comparisons
Changing Tariff
At some point in November, we were experiencing consistently higher prices on Octopus Agile, and I decided to switch tariffs for the rest of the winter at least. Octopus have an “Intelligent Octopus” tariff that charges 7.5p kWh between 11:30pm and 6:00am each day, and around 30p kWh the rest of the time. This tariff is not supported by our V2H charger yet - they specifically say it’s not supported. However, it is supported by our Tesla, so we can safely use the tariff and take advantage of the super cheap rates at night for the V2H charger as well.
This offset usage suits us well, especially during the winter where the differential in price is higher than we were getting with Octopus Agile.
Calculating Optimal Tariffs
Finding Your Usage
The first place to start is with Octopus’s own app. This will give you your real smart meter usage, and let you summarise it by week or month. If you get the Octopus Home Mini it will also display your live usage (otherwise you’ll have to wait up to 24hrs to see it in the app).
You can also ask for an in-home display, which will show live usage regardless of whether you have the home mini or not. We use both - the IHD is more useful in most cases, as it’s always on in the kitchen and will give live pricing information too.
Moving on from what Octopus themselves supply, there’s also some great third party options which utilise their API.
Octopus Compare App
I’d recommend the Octopus Compare app (Apple/Google) to do the number crunching required to see which tariff suits you better. It takes your actual usage from the smart meter API and gives you the figures each day for each tariff to determine which is cheaper. Ours switched from being cheaper for Agile, to cheaper for Intelligent Octopus during the winter months.
During the summer the equation is different, with more solar power available and less demand on the grid. It also depends a lot on wind speeds which dramatically affect the wholesale prices and consequently Agile’s half-hourly pricing.
Octopus Watch App
The Octopus Watch app is a popular way to find the upcoming prices on Agile, and makes it easier to plan your electricity usage. It currently costs £1.99 on both Google Play and iOS App Store. It’s well worth the money.
Unfortunately it doesn’t fully support the Intelligent Octopus tariff. The main reason for this is that Intelligent Octopus prices your EV charging at the low rate whenever it happens (for a single supported EV). Usually this will be between the hours of 11:30pm and 5:30am, but not always.
Octopus don’t surface this information in the API yet though, so the app is only able to calculate the pricing using the time based tariff instead. For our case however, they are almost the same.
For Agile and Octopus Go tariffs, it works correctly, and will allow you to compare the two tariffs to see which would have been cheaper for your real usage. If you are using Agile, this will make it a lot easier to see whether it’s working out as the best choice for you.