🐙Cut your energy bills nearly in half with Octopus Tracker

m3t4tr0n said:
I know I am playing catchup here on an established thread, but are you on tracker (as per thread) or agile ? I have never dared switch from IO but I do manage to do quite a bit of load shifting so has worked well for me so far.
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He's on agile

When trackers good agile is great
When tracker is bad agile is suicidal 😂

If you can load shift agile makes sense, if you have solar and/or battery it's a no brainer

Tracker the easy road
 
ThatFragranceGuy said:
He's on agile

When trackers good agile is great
When tracker is bad agile is suicidal 😂

If you can load shift agile makes sense, if you have solar and/or battery it's a no brainer

Tracker the easy road
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Yeah I don't have solar or batteries (yet) but I load shift all I can on IO for now
 
m3t4tr0n said:
I know I am playing catchup here on an established thread, but are you on tracker (as per thread) or agile ? I have never dared switch from IO but I do manage to do quite a bit of load shifting so has worked well for me so far.
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I'm on agile electric and tracker gas. Agile was better (for me) early summer, but then was a bit worse late summer (largely as my missus doesn't understand), but now it would be very hard to beat I think, if you load shift or have an EV. If I had a battery fitted to my solar then I wouldn't be paying anything for electric I reckon, or could get close to that.

The swings are wild now though, yesterday evening was like 50p about 1830, but 1330 today they're paying me 2p and 2030 is only 0.68p and around 0 till midnight (and probably overnight too when rates come out), I've never seen it that low that early on a night before. Hopefully it continues.
 
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ThatFragranceGuy said:
He's on agile

When trackers good agile is great
When tracker is bad agile is suicidal 😂

If you can load shift agile makes sense, if you have solar and/or battery it's a no brainer

Tracker the easy road
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Agree with all of this.

Agile's quite good if you're a bit of a nerd and have an EV, but the tracker would be much easier for most, and better if people don't have an ev or battery.

When I say one is "better" than the other, there's only usually about £5-10 in it per month, between the two, but they both have bills which are about half what fixed rates were.

I treat it a bit like a game, but it's more about getting an understanding of what and how I can load shift, as weighing up getting a battery which I think for most would even be more efficient than spending money on solar panels. Solar + battery + EV + agile is the aim combo though, even better with a bit of experience.
 
m3t4tr0n said:
Yeah I don't have solar or batteries (yet) but I load shift all I can on IO for now
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If you have iOS I think you can compare to
Agile via Octo aid to see what you'd have paid. Or just keep a few days diary and see.

Wouldn't work for us as I've got an absolute out of a gaming pc and a home theatre / music setup that drinks electricity and I'd say 5pm-8pm each day would murder me, but if I had solar or battery I'd be on it
 
Andy_W said:
I'm on agile electric and tracker gas. Agile was better early summer, but then was a bit worse late summer (largely as my missus doesn't understand), but now it would be very hard to beat I think, if you load shift or have an EV. If I had a battery fitted to my solar then I wouldn't be paying anything for electric I reckon, or could get close to that.

The swings are wild now though, yesterday evening was like 50p about 1830, but 1330 today they're paying me 2p and 2030 is only 0.68p, I've never seen it that low that early on a night before. Hopefully it continues.
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Yeah IO has been great recently too, every day I have plugged my car in, its gone straight to charge, so most evenings have been at 7.5p
 
m3t4tr0n said:
Yeah IO has been great recently too, every day I have plugged my car in, its gone straight to charge, so most evenings have been at 7.5p
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To be honest I think they should lower the IO overnight rate, and should lower the Agile off peak rates too (even if jacking peak rates, to a lesser degree or with more consistency). It's very difficult to "beat" the tracker, even if you're a bit of a nerd like me, and it shouldn't be like that. It's not possible to load shift everything (especially cooking), without a battery, and I'm doing the grid a big favour charging in off peak times, yet I don't save much over the tracker, for the effort.

At the minute I'm counting it as a favour to the grid, but if they really want to balance the grid, they need to incentivise off peak use more. They need to get more people learning how this all works, as it will really pay back when we're even more reliant on renewables.

The grid would have a very easy time if they could balance load better, so it was equal throughout the day/ night, especially in winter when there's not much solar.

If they put something like a 50p premium on 1700-2000 and a 25p discount on 1000-1600 and 2200-0500, and then floated the agile rates on top of that it would give people more certainty and let them plan their lives a bit better.

It's not easy just getting rates at 4pm, for 11pm that night, so they could have one where it should be like a rolling update, 24 hours ahead at least. They know enough about the weather to do that.
 
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Andy_W said:
To be honest I think they should lower the IO overnight rate, and should lower the Agile off peak rates too (even if jacking peak rates, to a lesser degree or with more consistency). It's very difficult to "beat" the tracker, even if you're a bit of a nerd like me, and it shouldn't be like that. It's not possible to load shift everything (especially cooking), without a battery, and I'm doing the grid a big favour charging in off peak times, yet I don't save much over the tracker, for the effort.

At the minute I'm counting it as a favour to the grid, but if they really want to balance the grid, they need to incentivise off peak use more. They need to get more people learning how this all works, as it will really pay back when we're even more reliant on renewables.

The grid would have a very easy time if they could balance load better, so it was equal throughout the day/ night, especially in winter when there's not much solar.

If they put something like a 50p premium on 1700-2000 and a 25p discount on 1000-1600 and 2200-0500, and then floated the agile rates on top of that it would give people more certainty and let them plan their lives a bit better.

It's not easy just getting rates at 4pm, for 11pm that night, so they could have one where it should be like a rolling update, 24 hours ahead at least. They know enough about the weather to do that.
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Oh I share the nerd, everything is pumped through my home assistant, I grab data from their API etc, I just haven't really had the time to really start thinking about agile but I think it would probably be better if I had solar. You are of course right about cooking but you'd be surprised the number of times we do actually shift a bit as soon as we plug in the car and know the schedule.
 
m3t4tr0n said:
Oh I share the nerd, everything is pumped through my home assistant, I grab data from their API etc, I just haven't really had the time to really start thinking about agile but I think it would probably be better if I had solar. You are of course right about cooking but you'd be surprised the number of times we do actually shift a bit as soon as we plug in the car and know the schedule.
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:LOL: yeah, if you're involving API's and home assistants then you're deffo in the nerd category 👍

I've only got 4 panels, which came with the house, but it's not so much solar that makes agile better, as solar kicks out most energy from like 10am to like 4pm, but those are times when agile rates are cheap anyway. The solar doesn't save you 25p a kWh, it saves you more like 10p a kWh etc.

A battery would be far better for agile and solar would be far better for the tracker I think.

I think we're getting close to the point where it's going to be profitable to trade electric with the grid, be interesting to see how this pans out, especially as dogger bank comes on line and more wind from Scotland being linked with the SEGL cables to England etc.
 
Andy_W said:
:LOL: yeah, if you're involving API's and home assistants then you're deffo in the nerd category 👍

I've only got 4 panels, which came with the house, but it's not so much solar that makes agile better, as solar kicks out most energy from like 10am to like 4pm, but those are times when agile rates are cheap anyway. The solar doesn't save you 25p a kWh, it saves you more like 10p a kWh etc.

A battery would be far better for agile and solar would be far better for the tracker I think.

I think we're getting close to the point where it's going to be profitable to trade electric with the grid, be interesting to see how this pans out, especially as dogger bank comes on line and more wind from Scotland being linked with the SEGL cables to England etc.
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To my mind (although I have some concern about battery deg) my ideal would be about 20kWh of battery (about my normal daily usage) charged overnight and run the house during the day
 
Boro999 said:
Home assistant 👀 link me up.
How do I start with this?
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Just Google it, I'll warn you that it's both the best thing ever for tech minded people and also the bane of your life depending which avenues you go down, but essentially you can use it unify a whole host of ecosystems and data sources and set triggers for automations off of different sources eg in my home office/gaming room I've got lights from hue; Nanoleaf and Govee and can automate everything without messing around with individual apps
 
HA is like a platform with various integrations so you might have hue, Alexa etc and those things continue on their own but also integrate with home assistant

You generally want it running on something with 24/7 uptime like a nas or a pi device
 
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