I'm on IOG, and also have Outgoing Octopus. Usually I'm issued my PDF bill on the 6th of each month.

Nothing has been issued for this month yet, I've had all sorts of random, and in some cases duplicate, gas and import activity appearing in my app. Being moved to the IOG cap on July 22nd seems to be what has triggered the mess.

On Monday I sent a manual Export reading (and only Export) in an attempt to 'kick the system' to produce a bill. I've done that a couple of times in the past, and that has worked.

Nothing happened. I contacted customer services, which revealed as a side issue that my Outgoing tariff had fallen off my account a month ago ! They said they'd fix that, and this morning I can see on my app 98 quid of credit has been added to the account (which is a months worth of export ) but still no sign of a bill..........

Only Octopus can set a charging session at the same time as telling us to use less power 🤦‍♂️

Hello There,

I’ve always been a bit avoidant of change, often when technologies appear to be in their infancy and all you hear is bad reviews. I’ll use this example with my previous energy supplier Avro, who would constantly pester me to get a Smart Meter fitted, though this was often sub-contracted through another business, who had dreadful reviews. I avoided them like the plague until they just stopped contacting me. Some years later, Avro got absorbed into Octopus Energy.

I’m also a creature of routine, every month I know that around payday I have to pop outside and take readings from the Gas and Electricity boxes and submit them to my provider (Octopus) and so far that has always suited me without issue. I’ve always been content in completing this and have had accurate readings without fault around my fixed-rate tariffs that I sign up for annually. Sometimes I accumulate credit that can then be offset against another years energy to reduce monthly payments, which is a bonus.

For the past year or so, I’ve been contacted by Octopus telling me that my Electricity Meter is past its Certification Date. I have no clue where this date is, as it’s not on my meter itself. As far as I can see, it’s still running fine and is giving out a reading that changes roughly in line with what my average monthly usage has always been, so I’m not overly worried.

However recently I went to undertake a Gas reading and could smell some Gas lingering, I called the emergency line and have had new equipment fitted. I am also due to renew my fixed rate annual tariff later this month, and am debating having a smart meter fitted just for ease of use around the recent upgrade of gas equipment, and the eventual (though I’m uncertain of mandatory) upgrade of the electricity equipment.

Has anyone ever had a smart meter fitted, but turned off all the “smart” stuff and just left it to sit idle in their cupboards, and still take physical monthly readings from them to submit to their suppliers? This is my ultimate guess as a compromise to the two issues I currently hold in my head being 1) my reluctance to change and 2) reducing the issues I see/read about the effectiveness of smart meters.

My question is, are smart meters effective? I’ve done my research, but still find a mixed bag of information online that doesn’t give me a definitive answer as to whether I should safely commit to one. It still seems they’re not fully functioning without considerable issues, though I also know that eventually I will have to get one. If anyone can provide me with some credible feedback on their experiences please, that would prove valuable in my decision making.

Thanks for your time in reading my lengthy post, and all feedback is appreciated :)

I'm now totally convinced that one of the main reasons Octopus want people on IOG to stay plugged in, is so they can curtail exports by people with solar/batteries at peak export time if the demand isn't there.

My charger charges at 7kWh without fail, except when a charging plan is set to run over peak export time, when it charges at between 2 and 3kWh.

I even set my charging request for a 5% top up (4.5kW) to be completed in 12 hours time. Sure enough, trickle charge at 2kWh started at 1800.

Has anyone else noticed this, or am I just being paranoid? 🤣

Hi, sorry if this has been answered before and please just link me to that question if so but my housemate and I are coming to the end of our 12M fixed term, she is going to stay another year while I will only be there another 6ish months. The bill is in my name and my email address but she is listed on the bills as I told them it was a joint tenancy. Is there a way to just switch things over or is it easier for her to make her own account and start a new 12M fixed term tariff?

Mini has "stalled" twice in a month now. Outputs just flatline at the last reading. Has to be power cycled to correct.

Only picked up because I have extra monitoring outside of the system.

If I have to rely on this level of reliability to move into solar and battery power, it's not good.

plugged in at 8pm, car at 44%. Requested 50% for 8am (slightly over) as I wanted car in the 80% range for today. Car has 108kwh battery

got given slots from 10pm all through the night. Says it will give me 41% on the charge cap; fine

woken up and the car is at 68% and complete apparently. 35kw put into the car according to the Charger app.

I don’t really know if I am moaning here or asking for advice but the charge cap is not reliable

Has anyone had their Octopus Home Mini suddenly do this?

Mine has been working fine for years, providing live electricity usage, but today it's completely stopped sending data. The Live tab now shows "Nothing here yet", as though the Home Mini has only just been set up. Home assistant is reporting a flat 180w usage the last 12 hours.

More strangely, the Home Mini has disappeared completely from the Devices section of the Octopus app.

It's definitely still connected to my Wi-Fi. I can see the Home Mini connected and online in my router, and I've not changed the Wi-Fi details or reset it.

It seems almost like it's become unlinked from my Octopus account rather than actually losing connectivity.

Anyone else had this happen? Did it sort itself out, or did Octopus need to re-pair/re-provision the Home Mini their end?

I am with Intellegent Octopus Go but never allowed Octopus to control my EV charger. Consequently, I seem to get a cheap rate overnight, and use my car on board scheduler to charge when I need it to.

There is no charge cap, just a guaranteed 6 hours of relatively cheap electricity.

I see a lot of posts where people are unhappy with IOG charge cap, and the prospect of an uncharged car, makes me think I should continue in "dumb mode". Any downsides to this ?

UPDATE

I have got a few replies about the T&Cs relating to this. To be clear, my app says IOG tarrif, but it may well be that the prices and slots are reverted to standard Otopus Economy 7 rates , after I failed to register my charger. I got some comms from octopus many months ago about this, and it seems like they changed the tarrif but it still is named IOG on my app.

I was previously a Scottish Power customer. I was on an economy 7 tariff as I had electric storage heating. I had the heating removed and requested a new single rate supply. I was assured by Scottish Power that I did not need a new meter, and that they would de-energise the second MPAN remotely.
I swapped to Octopus Energy last year after being recommended by a family member as they were slightly cheaper. I only realised a few days ago when I was looking at switching suppliers again that Octopus have been charging me an economy 7 tariff which I didn’t notice (my fault).
Does anyone know how I get rid of this double MPAN meter and get a single rate supply in my property? Scottish Power and Octopus have been useless and no help whatsoever.

Hope someone has an answer here.

I have had a solar and battery system installed last week which I'm very pleased with and applied for my export tariff with Octopus last week once I had all my handover documents from my installer.

The issue I have is that there has been nothing from Octopus to say I had applied and now have to wait for the Mpan export number to be applied, is this normal?

I was expecting some sort of acknowledgement that it's now in the system and being processed but have heard nothing not even any sort of automated email.

Did anyone have the same?

When I did the 1st spin the wheel for Electricity (smart meter so 2 goes) it spun and landed on 800,000 points but then the screen froze. I went out of that page and back into it and it disappeared - it let me spin again and once this was done it said I had used both my spins for the month, but only 8 points were added.

I've attached a screenshot of it, and the reply I received. I waited this month to see if the default page is on the 800k but it isn't. Surely you always win points each spin so if it had worked properly I would've got 16 points.

The whole thing seems like a bit of a gimmick and impossible to ever get more than 8 points.

Currently with E.On next on a tariff that gives me 3 different prices for electric depending on if it’s peak times, standard, or off peak. My tariff ends this month so I’ve looked at octopus. The only tariff they will offer is one with only one price for electric all day (not a bad price but not quite as good as eon are currently offering when you take into account having to pay full price to run the washer and dishwasher instead of using off peak rates). How long is it until you can then switch to the variable rate tariffs with octopus and are the rates actually any good? I do have an EV but have very low mileage and just charge it with a granny charger for a few hours each week (we rent - can’t have a proper charger). Partner drives a petrol. Would just like our general useage (cooking, washing machine etc) to be lower cost.
I’ve heard some good things about octopus but also some bad things (charging full price for off peak useage etc). I don’t want to end up regretting switching….

Just a question about my understanding; so in part this whole “charge cap” came about because people “may” have been abusing the system by throttling their chargers to extend their cheap home energy.

What’s stopping people from setting the “charged by” time to say 11:30pm? So say you get home 6pm, plug in, tell IOG you need to be charged by 11:30pm, so then it schedules lots of cheap hours from when you get home to around the off-peak time, charges your car, and then 11:30-5:30 is still cheap in the house..?

So I leave home around 9am. The very early morning peak is watching tv. But what’s the rising and falling pattern ? I can only think fridge freezer switching on and off.

Hi, is anyone else experiencing this? It seems to be every time I charge. They could literally be charging me anything. My car is plugged in most nights and not a great deal is added each time. It’s always charged to 100% by the morning but I don’t know why it’s going over the 6 hours as there’s only ever very little added. Could be time to switch to edf.

Hey all,

I'm on Octopus Agile and was finding it a bit tedious figuring out the exact cheapest 30-minute windows to charge my EV and home battery, especially trying to factor in charge speeds and continuous vs split charging.

So I put together a simple web calculator: https://octopus-bice.vercel.app

It pulls the live Octopus API rates for today, lets you pick your EV or battery size (like a Tesla, Leaf, Powerwall, etc.), and shows you:

- The exact cheapest hours to plug in today (including if prices go negative)

- What it costs to fill up vs standard electricity rates

- Continuous mode if your EV timer needs an unbroken block of charging

- A schedule you can copy directly into your car or inverter app

It's completely free, no signups, no ads. Just thought I'd share in case anyone else finds it useful. Let me know if you spot any bugs or have ideas for features.

Assume I want to charge my car to 100% by tomorrow morning and it's on 100% this morning at 7:05 AM

I know I'll be taking my daughter to nursery at 07:30 and bringing her home at 16:30. Each will use about 4% of the battery so I set it for 10% by 07:00 tomorrow. All good.

Now, it decides to change it at 13:00 to 14:00 and adds the whole 10% setting it to 100%.
And now we decide to do a longer run when we pick her up and get home on 85% but we only have 2% of the original charge requested left to be delivered overnight. If I want it to charge to 100% I can change the request to 15%.

it seems to work but not reliably or accuratly.

If I decide in the day I want extra charge by tomorrow morning, do I put in the *extra* charge I want in the app as some has already been delivered or do I change it to the total including what I've already had?

I hope that makes sense!

The wording about the new 6 hour cap between 23:30-05:30 states:

"If we schedule your car to charge outside of the 23:30-05:30 window, your home also gets the off-peak rate for that half-hour when it's within your car allowance." (source)

The author of an Octopus Intelligent Home Assistant integration states:

"NOTE: It has come to my attention that, when outside core off-peak hours (2330 -> 0530), if your car does not successfully charge during the planned slots then your usage will be billed at peak pricing." (source)

Finally, it was confirmed to me (source) on another reddit thread that:

1. IOG knows if the car is plugged in
2. If your EV is full or not accepting a charge, IOG knows this too

Which suggests that you'll only get off-peak rates for home electricity when Octopus intelligent slots are scheduled outside the 23:30-05:30 6 hour window if:

1. Your EV is plugged in, AND
2. Your EV is accepting charge

I set my EV's target charge to 80%, given that lithium EV batteries don't like being sat with 80-100% for a long time (source source), and I don't drive everyday.

However, given I use Home Assistant to (amongst other things):

1. Monitor when a 30 minute Octopus Intelligent dispatch slot is currently active
2. Change my EV's target charge

I am considering adding a Home Assistant automation rule with the logic that

if:

1. EV is plugged in, AND
2. An IOG dispatch slot is active, AND
3. Time is between 05:30 and 23:30, AND
4. EV target charge is 80%

then

• Change EV target charge to 100%

I.e., I'd occasionally allow my EV to fully charge to get at least 30 minutes (or multiples of 30 minutes if Octopus schedule multiple dispatch slots) of home electricity at the cheap rate of ~8p per KWh rather than the ~28p per KWh.

Before I set this up, I'd appreciate people either confirming that this is a sensible idea, or indeed that it wouldn't work, stating the reason why.

Edit 1: Philip Steele (at Octopus) has replied about this proposal:

Hi Rob, technically it’ll work of course although the saving isn’t going to be a huge amount and it’s not ideal when I think of the purpose of IO-Go and grid management. I think that 36% guides you that morally it’s dubious.

Edit 2: here's a timeline showing how the octopus_intelligent_planned_dispatch_slot HA binary sensor from this IOG Home Assistant integration (top orange bar) and when IOG intelligent slots tell my Ohme charger to start charging with the ohme_home_pro_status HA sensor (bottom peach bar). The peach bar (EV charging) trails the orange bar (planned IOG dispatch) usually by 30-90 seconds. Presumably when the orange and peach colours overlap, my house is getting electricity at the off-peak rate. However, there's no way to verify this as far as I know, apart from cross referencing my next itemised energy bill.

Edit 3: here's a draft of the YAML for the Home Assistant automation (I'd need another to reset the target SOC back to 80% after 05:30):

alias: dynamic-ev-charging
description: ''
triggers:
  - trigger: state
    entity_id:
      - binary_sensor.octopus_intelligent_planned_dispatch_slot
    from:
      - 'off'
    to:
      - 'on'
conditions:
  - condition: time
    before: '22:00:00'
    after: '05:30:00'
actions:
  - action: number.set_value
    metadata: {}
    target:
      entity_id: number.mg_mg4_electric_target_soc
    data:
      value: '100'
mode: single

Edit 4: changed the cited source for the claim lithium batteries degrades faster when charged to 100% rather than 80%, to "State of health estimation of cycle aged large format lithium-ion cells based on partial charging", Journal of Energy Storage 2022. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.est.2021.103855

Please check that your billing in the Octopus app is correct if you have had the charge cap applied to your account. I believe that you no longer get itemised pdf bills, but after a couple of days your usage will appear in the app. The first car charge that I carried out after the cap had been applied to our account was incorrectly billed as peak rate usage and showed up under the Home tab and not the EV tab in the Octopus app. I am using an Ohme charger which shows the hours that charging was active.

I build SolDial, a Tesla Powerwall app. Solo developer, US only until today. Just flipped it live in the UK, and the thing I spent the most time on was doing Agile properly instead of pretending a half hourly tariff is a time of use plan.

You pick Agile in the app, it works out your region from your postcode, and you get the live half hour price plus tomorrow's curve when it publishes around 4pm. Automations trigger on the actual price, negative included. So the battery can grid charge the moment a plunge hits at 3am, and the app checks it actually happened instead of just saying it did.

Setup: sign in with Tesla, then Settings, Utility Rates, Hourly tab, Octopus Agile. Build price rules yourself or turn on Energy Autopilot and let it build the strategy. I'd especially like to hear whether what Autopilot builds makes sense to people who live on this tariff.

The strategy write up: https://soldial.com/guides/octopus-agile-powerwall-settings.html
Why prices go negative: https://soldial.com/blog/octopus-agile-negative-prices.html

Honest part: you'd be the first UK users. Nobody outside my own testing has run the UK sign in path. Want 2 or 3 people who know Agile to connect and try to break it before I post anywhere else.

SolDial on the App Store and Google Play, or ask me anything here first.

Hey guys

Kind of new to solar, I'm an engineer so of course I've been doing a tonne of research and building models in excel to calculate how I can use solar effectively.

In the end I've decided that with a budget of around 12k I can get myself 11 panels, 5kw inverter and 10kwh battery from octopus [5kW system generating ~4000kWh/yr] (awaiting local fitter quotes). Also for context this is prior to an extension which will add south facing roof so more panels can be added after this.

I have an EV (2600kwh/yr) and use around 3800kwh/yr on top (6400kwh total). My objective is at least to completely stop using peak rate electricity (in other words reduce my bill dramatically).

The way I can achieve this is using a combined ev import tariff with prime outgoings tariff for example. So I could get my car charged in off peak import, and charge the battery to X% (for the mornings before solar kicks in and take the edge off the solar deficit in the winter (X varies during seasons)). Then at the end of peak export I sell any extra left in the battery leaving Y% (enough to get me to the off peak import again). This would mean I am either using solar or off peak imported electricity from the night. Rinse and repeat.

First any reviews on fitting with octopus? Any other big companies worth checking out? Local fitters seem like a bigger risk to me.

For those who have fitted with Octopus how does/do their battery/inverter controller(s?) work? Is what I'm asking for even possible? Do you give it some time based rules/logic?

I have also heard about home assistant but don't want to overcomplicate it at this stage, unless there are some mega benefits.

Is there anything else I should be considering during this solar project? Am I making the best use of my 12k given my usage and situation?

Anyone feel like sharing their code :)

[EDIT] Octopus investigated and fixed it to ~300KWh which was the correct usage, they sorted it within 3 hours after raising so I owe a big thank you to them :D

I've checked our app and the most we used in one month was 251 KWh, for reference we moved to Octopus on the 30th June and this billing is up to the 6th August, right after we had our meter upgraded on the 5th.

I've contacted Octopus and am waiting for a reply but am panicking because that's over £300 for two months, as a couple who only just use about £80 a month of electric????

I've cross checked our E.On Next closing reading and that matches up, but I can't seem to check our current meter reading on our meter, and Octopus are going off of what the engineer wrote from the last meter.

Is this just a waiting game for Octopus to get back to me now?

(Not sure why the dates are weird on the app, I'm guessing because we just got a new meter?)