Octopus Energy

I am a customer of Octopus Energy, who are an innovative electricity supplier in the UK. I find them a great company, not least because of:

I have written an unofficial guide to Octopus Energy, aimed at customers with smart meters who are trying to make sense of the different products and data.

If you are interested in moving to Octopus, I'd highly recommend them, and if you sign up with this link then we both get £50 credited to our account.

This page contains a number of tools I've built on the Octopus API, some blog posts I've written about Octopus, and some links to other Octopus related sites.

Octopus tools

I have built a number of webpages to do things that I find useful.

The big ones are written in python/postgresql, and the code is visible in github. One is a Smart Meter Data Viewer, which you can read about here.

Next is a tool for forecasting the next week of Octopus Agile price. You can read about it here.

The rest of the tools are all written in html/javascript, and generally run in chrome. They all prioritise content over beauty. All the source code is visible, and you are welcome to copy/modify any of this.

Many of these pages load your data from Octopus - as a result, you need to include your security key, mpan and meter numbers as url parameters. You can find these details on your Octopus account. The javascript takes these parameters and uses them for calling the Octopus API - they aren't ever passed to my server. It is recommended that you don't share your security key and meter details, so be careful sharing any urls that contain these.

The first tool I built gives you historical half-hourly Agile prices for a region, between two dates. This tool doesn't require your security key. The url is: https://www.guylipman.com/octopus/prices.html?region=C&startdate=2020-03-28&enddate=2020-03-29 . If you aren't sure which region you are, there is a listing on wikipedia. Note that this page can be a bit slow if you're trying to retrieve more than a month of data at a time.

The next tool gives your historical electricity consumption. The url is https://www.guylipman.com/octopus/consumption.html?startdate=2020-03-01&enddate=2020-12-31&key=AAA&mpan=BBB&meter=CCC where you replace AAA, BBB and CCC with your account details (see above). This page will identify any gaps in your data. It also works for gas consumption if you replace mpan=AAA with mprn=AAA.

The next tool provides some analysis of your consumption data for a single month, telling you how much money and emissions you saved by consuming at the cheapest times. The url is https://guylipman.com/octopus/consumption_analysis.html?month=2020-04&key=AAA&mpan=BBB&meter=CCC. There are optional parameters mode=perkwh or mode=perday, and you can also specify the fixed price to compare to using, for example, fixedprice=15 (otherwise it uses Octopus's standard variable tariff for your region). Note that this webpage requires you to have consumption data for the whole month in order to work.

The next tool compares what you paid (or would have paid) on Agile for a single month, with a range of other Octopus tariffs, both for your consumption profile as well as if your consumption was shaped according to the standard profile. The url is https://guylipman.com/octopus/price_comparison.html?month=2020-04&key=AAA&mpan=BBB&meter=CCC. Note that this webpage requires you to have consumption data for the whole month in order to work.

The next tool calculates your Agile bill between two dates, in the same way that Octopus does when billing. The url is https://www.guylipman.com/octopus/bill_agile.html?startdate=2020-03-23&enddate=2020-03-31&key=XXX&mpan=YYY&meter=ZZZ. If you have a smart meter on Octopus but are not on the Agile tariff, it will tell you what your bill would have been. There is also a version for calculating your export income: https://www.guylipman.com/octopus/income_agile_export.html?startdate=2020-03-23&enddate=2020-03-31&key=XXX&mpan=YYY&meter=ZZZ.

Next is a generic API tool which provides a way to make requests to the Octopus API. You can enter a URL, your security key (if required), and there's an option to display the output as raw json, pretty json, or a table.

Next is a tool that checks all your meters for missing consumption data - the url is https://www.guylipman.com/octopus/missing_data_check.html?account=A-XXXXXXXX&key=XXXX.

Blog Posts

I have a full list of energy-related blog posts on my main energy page, but the following posts may be particularly relevent to Octopus customers:

25 July 2021High Power Prices
2 February 2021Octopus Agile - A Winter's Tale
10 January 2021Designing Creative Electricity Tariffs
17 August 2020iPhone apps for Octopus Energy Customers
15 August 2020Accessing your Octopus smart meter data
26 July 2020A website for viewing your smart meter data
14 July 2020Forecasting electricity prices
2 July 2020Getting the data to forecast electricity prices
25 June 2020Letting people access their electricity data
25 June 2020Letting people access their electricity data
31 May 2020Measuring electricity demand flexing
1 September 2019Analysis of Octopus Agile electricity prices
21 August 2019Optimising a Mixergy boiler
2 Apr 2019Power price vs Carbon Intensity
28 Feb 2019Analysing UK electricity prices (part 2)
20 Feb 2019Analysing UK electricity prices (part 1)
04 Feb 2019Exploring time of use tariffs

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