You can easily see whether your Smart Meter is reporting to Octopus. If you look at the usage screen in the app, it should show gas and electricity for the day before by about 3pm or earlier.
Iâve just had the summary for tracker prices for the previous week. This is for southern England.
Electricty - lowest price 13.49p , highest - 19.19p. Average price 16.620 which is 10.89p lower (40%) than the standard flexible tariff.
Gas - lowest price 4.65p, highest - 5.330. Average price 5.09p which is 1.910 lower (27%) than the standard flexible tariff.
Tracker is like a Tracker mortgage, you see the benefits quickly when rates drop but equally when prices rise Tracker will rise first.
It feels like thereâs currently a decent margin before we get close to the standard rate so Iâm sticking with Tracker.
Sounds like a great deal.
Is the deal different in Southern and Northern England?
I would jump on it immediately, except that I do not want to have to worry about whether wholesale rates will rise enough to push the tracker rate way above the capped retail rate.
Or is the tracker tariff capped as well?
âTracker features Price Cap Protect, which caps the maximum daily price at 100p / kWh for electricity and 30p / kWh for gas â keep in mind thatâs a lot higher than the Ofgem Energy Price Cap, so if you canât afford prices to increase further, youâre probably better off sticking with a protected tariff such as Flexible Octopus.â
We are currently on âflexibleâ, following 2 years on a fixed scheme from 2021. Iâm hesitant about changing, but our monthly payments are rising by about ÂŁ100 on âflexibleâ.
Thanks Robert.
Sounds like those capped Tracker rates are about 4 times the Govt. capped variable rates.
Thatâs a very nasty downside surprise if it happens.
I suppose it depends on the cost of early exit from the contract too.
(Also, before that point perhaps the Govt would intervene in the UK wholesale energy market too.)
Yes there are regional differences.
For example todayâs prices for Southern England are:
Electricity: 13.49p
Gas: 5.32p
For North East England
Electricity: 13.35p
Gas: 5.15p
The high cap amount could be of concern, especially if something happens in the markets to cause prices to spike. Hereâs a graph of the prices for southern England over the past year. This has been clipped from the excellent Energy Stats UK site https://energy-stats.uk/
Prices have been lower than the price cap for all of 2023 but there were some scary days in December last year!
Another option to consider is Octopus Agile. This gives a different price each half hour during the day. The swings in prices can be more dramatic. For example for today the lowest price is -0.24p at 14:30-15:00 - yes that is a minus figure! The highest is 36.15p at 18:00 to 18:30.
We moved from Agile to Tracker as my estimates showed that it would be slightly cheaper and we wouldnât have to micro manage our usage. Also with solar and no batteries we were often finding the cheapest periods were when we were producing the most solar so it was becoming difficult to take advantage of the cheaper periods.
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Hope itâs ok for me to add my news here :
on Monday, we finally got a smart meter after years of trying. I think they were concerned about the poor broadband, although, like us, it seems to simply connect via 4G.
Anyway, itâs here - and the very next day we signed up to Agile Octopus. Iâve been looking into that for a while.
Electricity prices can go as high as 100p. Most of the day though, theyâre well below the standard Octopus tariff rate of 28p, except between 1600 and 1900 when theyâre invariably higher. That could all change over the winter of course. Note that the standing charge is 6p per day cheaper.
You get told âtomorrowâsâ 1/2 hourly rates at 1600 âtodayâ. So you can plan when to do high electric usage activities like washing machine (lunchtime), dishwasher (overnight), immersion (still getting used to that - I would like to get a timer installed). We have no gas supply, so cooking tea at peak time with our electric Esse is a real budgeting challenge. Today I turned it up high at 1530 to warm up nicely for a slow cook from 1600 onwards. Yesterday, I cooked tea using only the microwave !
And, as above, they sometimes even pay you a little to use electricity. Or you get it for free : thereâs a 0p slot at 3 am this morning, for instance.
Iâm a bit geeky about it at the moment - thatâll settle down. You can leave at any time without penalty, so itâs a no-brainer really, to try it out.
Finally : we have no solar - this is simply to see if I can drop our bills using Agile Octopus, just by being a bitâŚagile.
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It is interesting and certainly worth some thought. 
Iâd rather not have to think so much about energy prices every day.
Also, with a variable tariff is it capped like the main national tariff, or is there no cap - in which case you get hammered if prices go way up.
Iâd be interested in the overall cost compared to the standard variable rate but I donât ( canât? ) do electricity planning.
Air impact guns and a 3HP compressor running at 3am may get frowned upon. 
Itâs an interesting topic. By locking in a unit price, youâre essentially adding volatility to the operating margins that the utility companies are supplying your energy. They can mitigate that by also locking in wholesale rates, and diversifying supply, and this applies all along the chain. But somewhere, someone will bear the risk, and theyâll want additional profits for that exposure. So by locking in rates youâre moving cashflow volatility to another party, and (on average) youâd expect this to cost you some premium. Whether thatâs worth it depends on how you value the variability in charges. A known/fixed spend rate (even if higher) might be valuable to you.
This gets more complex if you guarantee a minimum usage (take-or-pay). I donât know if thatâs a feature of your reatil markets, but Iâm guessing not. Itâs certainly a feature of many wholesale markets.
This fascinating. Energy traders using low cost information and analysis to directly affect consumer behaviour and drive down volatility of the market seems like a great idea. Theyâre basically using your ability and willingness to reason (rather than computer algorithms) to make real-time decisions to improve the system performance. I really like the idea.
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You have to take into account that at the moment the UK government has as far as I know mandated a price cap on the unit cost of energy for consumers.
That cap means there is a lid on how bad prices can get for consumers, which skews the calculation in terms of the tail risk of very high and sustained energy price inflation.
It does depend on the tariff you are on. The Ofgem-mandated price cap tariff has to be available to everyone but customers are free to choose a different tariff if they like, as @Argyle_Mikey has done. The cap there is a self-imposed one by Octopus - basically they have set it at a price that limits risk to their customers so as to make their flexible tariff attractive.
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Does the Octopus wholesale tracker rate tariff have a price cap on it?
If so, I would consider taking it out.
Yes it does but itâs very high, same as Agile I think.
ÂŁ1 per kwh for electricity, 30p for gas.
When you look at the graph in post #125 itâs never gone that high but there were some high days last December but this year has been quite moderate.
Today is brilliant, 15.11p for electricity and 3.77p for gas. With some sun out today even with our modest 3kw solar system our energy cost for today is likely to be well under ÂŁ1, including standing charges.
To coin a phrase weâre âmaking hay while the sun shinesâ and a few months of higher prices in winter hopefully wonât offset the advantages for the remaining 9 months of the year.
Weâll seeâŚ!
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As the higher price periods are basically the same every day, weâve already been concentrating on time shifting around our daily tasks to cheaper periods - as opposed to worrying about the minutiae of the 1/2 hourly price. Once youâve done that - changed your habits - youâll get, say, 80% of the benefit every day.
The cap is 100p per KWh. But as I say, you can leave at any time without penalty. You can even rejoin again, as long as itâs more than 30 days later.
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I have Solar and Battery. Iâm on Flux to get paid slightly less than the standard rate for exports between 4-7pm. In summer I donât charge at the cheap period (2-5am). Now I do and export close to my limit of 11kWh at peak rate. Roughly 1.65 factor when selling.
As soon as the heating (ASHP) is needed there will be less to export. However really cold weather is often sunny so the extra heating is not a problem then. The dense cloud means the grid is needed when the overnight charge runs out.
Cosy Octopus could help. Agile is much like Cosy when averaged, but I would give up the export price premium. Without knowing what the winter weather holds Agile could be risky. I certainly would have been paying close to the standard rate last winter, rather than the cheap GO rate which with 20kWh of battery storage was enough mostly. Unfortunately GO lock you in to a poor export rate for 12Mđ.
Life can get too complicated!
Phil
Iâve gone with Octopusâs 1 year fixed tariff.
It offers a cheaper rate than this time last year. Our electricity use is relatively stable whereas our gas usage rockets when the central heating is used.
Back of a fag packet calculation suggests that, assuming our winter gas use is the same as last year, it will cost us less in gas than last year including the ÂŁÂŁ from the government. Hopefully our new, condensing, boiler will be more economical than the mid-90s job it replaced.
Maybe not the best deal, but it gives us certainty over prices, if not consumption. We are heavily in credit anyway, so have no worries about putting the heating on.
Iâve just changed from Octopus Flexible to the Tracker.
If anyone in future notices that because of a change (e.g. in Govt legislation, market dynamics, or the Octopus formula) that the wholesale tracker tariff has become a bad deal (considered over long term), please let me know.
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