Author: admin

So, to try and make things easier, I discovered an article on the Octopus web site https://octopus.energy/blog/agile-smart-home-diy/ which showed how to configure a Raspberry Pi Zero to become a smart display. It links to the Octopus Energy API and automatically downloads the upcoming rates every evening and changes the display every half an hour to show the current electricity rate and a graph showing when it is going up and down.

This was a real game-changer for us and once stuck in a case and mounted in the kitchen, it meant we could choose when to set the washer or dishwasher going to minimise the costs.

All the details on where to get the bits and how to set it up are here: https://github.com/pufferfish-tech/octopus-agile-pi-prices/blob/master/README.md

We already had Smart Meters so the move to Agile was pretty painless and once done, we could then track the pricing and make some educated decisions about our usage.
Generally speaking, the pricing would fluctuate for most of the day depending upon external influences like how windy it was. More wind equals more windpower generated and cheaper costs. However, the sting is between 4pm and 7pm each evening which is always the peak time as people get home from School and Work, make a brew, cook tea, watch TV etc. This peak pricing can go much higher that the other hours in the day and is capped at a maximum of £1 per kWh which is huge and it has reached that several times whilst I have been with Agile.

The rates can be viewed via the App but Octopus have created various ways to allow others to develop solutions to ingegrate with other things and that’s what this Blog is all about; much more on this later on.

However, in the early days, I tried to think about the “Mrs” effect i.e. how much she engaged with the idea of saving energy costs compared to the effort required to enable us to do this. The App was a good start and she started to check the hourly rates to use energy at the best times so we were already on to a good thing, I just wanted to make things a bit easier for us all.

I also had in the back of my mind the energy costs prior to the energy crisis and if I could manipulate our usage to match those figures (£188 per month and 19p per kWh) then in my mind I was winning. If I could beat those prices, I was REALLY winning.

With massive energy cost increases looming, I had to do something drastic and that is when I discovered “Octopus Agile”. I had been with Octopus for several years now and been very happy with the way they operated as a Company and the prices I had paid previously. Octopus Agile was and still is an “Agile” Tarrif that changes price every 30 minutes and is aligned with the wholesale energy prices. That means that when Octopus are paying low prices for electricity, so am I and it encourages me to load-shift my heavier energy usage to times when the prices are lower.

Previously, I would just put the dishwasher on or the washing machine at times that were most convenient to me and I suspect were also convenient to the rest of the UK and hence we’d all be using appliances at the same time, demand would shoot up and so would the wholesale energy costs because they’d then have to fire up additional generating plants or buy-in electricity from some of the global interconnectors. Changing my habits could reduce my costs and actually help out the National Grid by (In a very small way) balancing it a little more than it would have ben by using appliances at peak times.
It also meant that I would be using greener energy sources which is a bonus.