Octoplus new Octopus rewards scheme

Launched on the 19th October, includes wheel of fortune, free electricity periods (in addition to the Power up events), demand saving sessions for using less electricity

https://octopus.energy/octoplus/

Already signed up just not sure how it will work in practice. How saving sessions work when the use is already virtually zero because of the battery I’m not sure.

SimonClarke How saving sessions work when the use is already virtually zero because of the battery I’m not sure.

I think they're using net consumption, ie import minus export. So even if your import is zero, if you export more than usual, you'll get paid for the extra export.

Sounds right just not exporting much as it keeps raining! Actually ran out of battery last night about 10 minutes before going to bed. First time since April. My fault as I only charged the battery to 75%. At least Octopus seem to be trying

DD I signed up as well. It does say in the faq that they pay for export.
My aim with the battery is to minimise grid import anyway so not sure how much I'll gain, but there isn't any downside

You won't get paid anything during the "saving sessions" if you already load shift. A friend has "been there, got the T-shirt" when they were beta testing (official pre-launch beta as opposed to Octopus' never-ending betas 🙂 )

In addition what he found during the "free electricity" times was that Agile import was nearly always negative during the same period so that's of limited use. NB - like me he's in the East Mids where Octopus have no renewables so YMMV if you live near one of the windfarms they own.

Vestas might be able to make some money if you have a battery and don't usually export to the grid (at the same time as the saving session).

Not sure when the savings sessions will be, but if anything like last year, mostly tea time I guess. 😀

For surprise sessions it seems you must have social media, Why it cant be a push notification on the app escapes me but it states ,
"a Saving Session could pop up at really short notice. We may only find out a couple of hours before it’s due to start. You’ll be able to opt in for these as normal, but we won’t always be able to notify you the usual way
Follow our WhatsApp Channel to get live notifications
Follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram"

I would rather miss out than sign up to any of them.

TX200 I seriously doubt exporting will generate the same "rewards" as cutting import - not if you're on a tariff which pays more during 4-7pm for export anyway. The way Octopus put it to a friend was "you can't have your cake and eat it" 🙂

I don't think the scheme is actually intended for anyone who has a battery - we certainly wouldn't make anything at all out of it....

Vestas I think it is for people with battery as in the part of the scheme this year where they will offer free electric periods - so we can fill up the battery in those time slots.

I do agree though on the evening savings being of little consequence as last year even without a full battery I made hardly anything, above signing on bonuses, due to us already running lean as such and pushing heavy use to cheap rate.

DreadorUK
Agree - ive just set up the Octopus R&D config to import whenever <15p and export when >30p, hopefully this should react to whenever the prices are at the extremities. Hopefully i can sit back and leave it in the background.
If it picks up Octopoints along the way even better.

positor1

"How to to turn on Octopus app notifications in a few taps:
This year, you'll get all Saving Sessions notifications via app rather than email, so it's super important you turn on app notifications to avoid missing out on Sessions."

Vestas In addition what he found during the "free electricity" times was that Agile import was nearly always negative during the same period so that's of limited use.

We get Octopus Power Up events as we live in one of the target East Anglia postcodes. So far when they have run it’s been when it’s been quite windy and I’ve looked at the agile rates and they weren’t particularly cheap at the time. They’ve all been 2-4pm so normal afternoon cheapness but not exceptionally so or negative.

Maybe the saving sessions being national they will coincide more with network wide low prices in agile as well

geoffreycoan I just got notified of the first 11am-2pm one for tomorrow! Was it something you said??

Hook
yes but not surprise sessions , they are as I detailed if worded correctly.

PianSom

Is this UK wide or a specific area as I'm in Berkshire and haven't had any notification?

I just looked on my account, but when I clicked on the savings sessions it says that I'm not eligible. All the FAQs don't apply since we're already on Flux export so they can see our meter and the 1/2 hour readings, etc. Not that bothered about the saving sessions since I doubt we'll save anything since we're always running off battery and/or solar except during cheap rate when I charge it up. I would like to use the free sessions though, even if only to top up the battery.

Spencers
See https://octopus.energy/power-ups/

There’s a link to a list of postcodes on there.

Maybe I misunderstood as I thought by joining Octoplus I'd be eligible for the free sessions. The link you kindly put up doesn't include my postcode, so I can't join them (yet). I did go through the process to register an interest in my area, so I should get an email if our area gets added at some point.

Otherwise the Octoplus scheme doesn't seem to of much use/interest to us this year. We did manage to get about £15 of credit last year by cutting down during the sessions, but won't be able to save anything this year since we're not using anything from the grid at the typical saving session times.

positor1 it might be push messages to android and iOS are rate limited? Maybe they can only send so many per hour.

Might have similar issues with email notifications.

If they do it via the twitter account (X even) again that wasn't too bad. I set their savings session account to alert me when it tweets.

Spencers there are two different Octopus free energy schemes.

The first which started in August is called Octopus Power Up and was done in conjunction with the Eastern area DNO UK Power Networks. This is only available to specific postcodes in East Anglia when there is excess grid capacity. There have been about a dozen or so of these events so far and every one has been from 2-4pm, except as @PianSom says, we got notification of one tomorrow for 3 hours from 11-2pm. Had to hastily make changes to my power up automation scripts to cope with this new timing!
And per the earlier conversation tomorrow’s agile rates for that period are circa 25p, so it’s quite a saving.

And now separately as part of the Octo points thing there will be similar free electricity sessions and sessions where you get rewarded for reducing your grid import, but these will be uk network wide.
I think I saw that the first of these won’t be until at least the first week in November.

I have tried to 'follow' Octoplus on WhatsApp as instructed in order to get notification of special sessions as instructed.

After going through the steps I end up with Web Page not available.

Has anybody managed to do the follow?

geoffreycoan

Thanks, yes I've conflated the two schemes; hopefully the Octoplus/points scheme will give me the free sessions I'd hoped for. I think they currently have a few glitches so maybe the WhatsApp set up will get sorted out before they start. I've made sure I have notifications enabled in my Octopus App (it was anyway), so little more I can do at this point.

I will have to wait for the start of November to see how it works. I'm retired, so it's easy enough for me to manually change my battery charge setting if short notice. Just turning on appliances alone* isn't really going to help though during the free sessions I guess since all that will do is draw from my battery unless a charge is in progress?

*I had an idea that I might use an electric panel heater during free sessions to warm up our living room before the main heating comes on since we're mainly in there when home. Obviously depends on timing and weather too.

Rtidey yes I managed it ok. I had to click the link on my phone to get it to work in WhatsApp and maybe it took two goes but I’m on the WhatsApp ok. 2000 other people also on

Spencers Just turning on appliances alone* isn't really going to help though during the free sessions I guess since all that will do is draw from my battery unless a charge is in progress?

If you set the battery discharge rate to zero when you put the appliances on, it’ll draw from the grid not your batteries. Just remember to set it back to the maximum afterwards

We run our batteries down before the session and do a force charge to capture all the free juice.

We’re in a session now, pulling in 10kW, charging both batteries and all the high load appliances on!

PianSom

I had one of these three hour sessions today, and have another one tomorrow.. MANY loads of washing / tumble drying have been scheduled..

Atkinstagram Yup, same here. Had the immersion going too 🙂

Now I'm wondering if I need to top up tonight, or will I have enough juice to keep me going to 11am. Problems, problems

I'd consider it but my AIO is offline yet again....can't access schemes like this if the system is offline every other week 🙁

PianSom

I had my immersion going as well, along with a slow cooker (a chicken and white wine casserole if you want to know), I think at one point I was pulling 12kWh in from the grid.

I’ve reduced my overnight charge to 65%, as we tend to use a fair few kWh first thing, but come 11am, it’s alllll going on.

Interesting, we had notification of the scheme today but haven’t had an email about one tomorrow. Don’t think I’ve had any weekend power ups.

Whereabouts are you guys that have had notification from Octopus? We’re SG19 which on the signup postcodes list is Great Barford power station (near St Neots).

Agile rates are cheap tomorrow during the day and in fact go slightly negative at 10pm, but free electricity is even better. According to Home Assistant I consumed 11.9kW 😀

Be nice to be offered anything in nr29….

geoffreycoan
Strange. I had not realised that not all Power-ups were for all current areas.

I'm not that far from you - CB24, just north of Cambridge. Got the email for tomorrow 11-2 at around 2.30pm today.

PS I saw a nice HA piece of code earlier, where someone has added in an IMAP ability, then passes Subjects through a regex filter to identify Power-ups and set up a start/end time sensor. I finally got my Octopus Home Mini today, so am planning on getting down to some HA geekdom in the next few weeks

PianSom me neither, I’d assumed that they covered all areas. I’ve checked my server copy of my mail and nothing from octopus since the email of the 27th power up and the results of the last 3.

So I clicked the link of the 27th power up and changed the URL to the 28th which I accepted. Not going to go mad in the period as I’m not 100% confident , but if it might be free I’ll try !

Good to hear that octopus mini’s are still being sent. I applied for one but wasn’t sure

The imap sensors for power ups sound good. At the moment I have my own helpers but have also been manually editing the apps.yaml for predbat to put the zero rate period in to encourage it not to over charge the battery. I then disable predbat for the morning and charge period so I can manage the battery myself. Didn’t quite get it right today as the 9.5 battery had too much charge in it, couldn’t export enough before the period started. Will have to add this to the automation

geoffreycoan
I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I got bored of waiting for Octopus to ship the Home Mini, so decided to pick one up on eBay. I am now waiting on Octopus support to help me with pairing.

I thought about getting the Bright hardware (and may even still get one - I had a really positive interaction with their support person) but (a) it was more expensive and (b) it seems that neither product can cope with export tariffs on my meter properly. So I went for the cheaper option, as I am too impatient to wait an unknown time for the free option!

PianSom let me know if you are able to get the octopus mini paired ok and I might go down the eBay route myself. TBH I’m using the export sensor on one of my inverters connected to a utility meter in home assistant and it gives the same daily totals that octopus says on my account so I’m happy with that.
Tried the DCC meter API but the data feed is too lagged too be of any use

Re power ups. Just looked on their website and there’s no api or dashboard to show power up events as they are “starting small”.

Also in the terms and conditions:

9. The number of Power-ups received will vary by location, there is no guarantee as to number of Power-ups and no upper or lower limit. Customers will be able to decide which events they participate in. Prior to each Power-up, we will send you a notification of the Power-up window, if you ‘opt-in’ to the Power-up you will receive a credit on your bill equal to the cost of any electricity used during the Power-up (the “Incentive”).

geoffreycoan To be honest, I'm a little disappointed by Octopus Mini - the only thing it does is push live readings up to the server. I'd got the impression it would be available to query from home automation systems to implement local control, but I guess you'd have to write your own system to get the usage back from the cloud in order to implement anything, and that means quite a delay before you can act on the "live" data.

It does mean you can see today's usage data on the Octopus app, which is nice, but not really game changing. Almost makes IHD redundant since you can use phone to see the live usage, but it doesn't show gas, and so it's not all quite there.

They've announced they're now starting tests on the next gen of mini, which may have local access.

I got a Mini to replace a missing IHD. No problem pairing it at all.

DD
Though I moved house a few months ago so haven’t fully set up yet, I’ve been a Home Assistant user for 6 or 7 years now. The HA Octopus integration “knows” about the Home Mini, so I’m expecting to be able to use it to monitor and manage my power usage. (BTW, it’s supposed to provide gas readings every 30 mins - no?)

geoffreycoan
Yup, will let you know. Hopefully next week.

DD there's an integration for mini in home assistant

https://github.com/BottlecapDave/HomeAssistant-OctopusEnergy

Not sure if you could reverse engineer it for your own use.

But home assistant is defo the way to go. 😉😀

geoffreycoan
I tried multiple time to follow WhatsApp for the special sessions notifications and I finally succeeded (without changing anything). So I think there are some glitches causing errors somewhere in the process, but multiple attempts does seem to eventually work.

Like others I've had a problem trying to access the WhatsApp channel. Tried many times using Firefox Focus with no success then this morning tried using Chrome and it worked first time. I went back and tried with Firefox Focus and again couldn't get the connection so maybe it's a browser problem.

geoffreycoan

let me know if you are able to get the octopus mini paired ok and I might go down the eBay route myself.

Well, it arrived, and wouldn't pair. I contacted Octopus (who were uncharacteristically slow and useless - even asked for a photo, so they could see what it looked like!) and they have now decided that my meter (Aclara SGM1411-B) is not compatible with the OHM. Seems very unlikely to me, but there we are.

So I just ordered a SMETS2 monitor from Hildebrand. Means I need to sell the OHM - interested?

PianSom The OHM is useless for anyone else. The MAC address/EUID is paired to your HAN (The smart meter zigbee network) and as far as I know, there is no easy way of getting this changed.

ProximusAl
Interesting.

That is not what I was told by Octopus. Nor by Hildebrand support who (very helpfully) suggested that it could be changed by Octopus, by them sending an Open/Join HAN instruction.

What is your source for this, please?

PS If anyone is interested in smart meter capabilities then this is a very good site

All very good but after 4 years my smart meters are still dumb.
Octo coming again tomorrow for another meter fitting. This must be 8 or 9th.
This is the 3rd in 6 weeks.

PianSom Hmmm, now that is interesting.

If that is the case, I would happily buy your OHM from you, and then ask Octopus to try it, as long as there were clear instructions on how to do it.

I have been on the OHM waiting list since it first came out....so many many months, maybe even a year, but every time I called about it, I got "Your meter isn't compatible yet"

I have a SMETS1 which is happily pumping juice to the DCC, and I also use the Hildebrand CAD which is on my HAN.

It was Octopus themselves that told me the OHM was unique to "The smart meter", because I asked what happened if "I sourced one from somewhere else"

I get the feeling that if you emailed "hello@octopus.energy" and asked for a HAN Open/Join instruction, I'm pretty sure I know what kind of response I'd get.......and it wouldn't be of any use whatsoever.

They are not preconfigured: I guess it's best described from the person that made it:

I’ve got a Secure Smets 1 and the OHM works fine. Just put the sensor near the meter and plug in the other end and wait. No mention of it being specific to my meter.

Of course, saying that it is not pre-configured to a meter isn't the same as saying that once paired it is then irrevocably tied. But - as I said - that is not what I think is the case. So I think I can sell with a clear conscience.

Can I ask ProximusAI, if yo have a Hildebrand CAD why do you want to change to a OHM? Is it because you want to track export? (Incidentally, this is not something I care about, since I have an Aclara meter, and the OHM's FAQs are clear that it doesn't support these meters for export. here #4)

PianSom I wouldn't change "per-se". I use the hildebrand CAD to feed HA, so the OHM would be in addition to this.

I have this weird issue where the DCC seems to miss one half hour read every month or so...sporadic....and the data is unrecoverable, ending up in me paying the full day at flexible rate.

I was hoping with the OHM, it would read the meter directly and upload to Kraken, therefore it's not "missing". The hildebrand cad has the reads the DCC have missed.

ProximusAl @geoffreycoan

OK, well if either of you wants it then I'd be happy to sell it on at the price I paid on eBay. I think I paid a "fair" price, since I only won the auction by outbidding the next bidder by 55p.

I've set up a temporary email address for a few days - get in touch if you want it It. It's
09_taupe_doliies [at] icloud [dot] com

PianSom
09_taupe_doliies@icloud.com (09_taupe_doliies@icloud.com)
The address you sent your message to wasn't found at the destination domain

09_taupe_doliies@icloud.com: user does not exist
🙁

well he did say temporary lol

ProximusAl
Sorry - iCloud/user fail.

Try caiman.lockers0v@icloud.com - I've tested it this time!

CFPygall It's lazy devs, far too many think chromium is the only browser and don't bother testing or coding for anything else.

Far to many sites are broken in firefox because of this kind of lazy coding, it's the same with Brave