Hello World

19 Dec 2023 by Wouter

Welcome to Agile Buddy. This is the first blog post for the site.

My background

My name is Wouter, and I'm a technology tinkerer by night, .NET developer by day, coding in both C# and F# in my role at a financial services company. I live in leafy Surrey, and am fortunate to be able to work remotely full-time. I have a keen interest in smart home technology, subjecting my wife and young family to various home automations.

My energy saving story

One of my recent projects has been an effort to reduce the energy footprint of my aging Victorian home, spurred on my the recent events in Ukraine and the ensuing spike in energy costs. Beside the obvious (and often expensive) changes like draught proofing, cavity wall insulation, purchase of more efficient home appliances, I started investigating use of technology to reduce my energy bills.

I started with smart thermostats, which allow me to control the temperature in individual rooms. This allowed me to create schedules where bedrooms are only heated at night, living space during the day and evening, and my office space is only heated during office hours. I added automations to turn off the heating completely when the house is empty, and added presence detection sensors to boost the heating automatically when rooms are occupied outside normal schedules.

My next step was to investigate reducing my electricity costs. I added smart switches that turn off sockets at night or when not in use, to prevent usage from so-called vampire devices (where idle appliances are still consuming power). I added smart lighting that automatically switches on only when rooms are occupied. Though these changes made a difference, savings were small, and offset somewhat by the vampire draw of the smart home devices.

Further research led me to discover Octopus Energy and their innovative tariffs. I looked at the data and quickly realised that their Tracker tariff offered significant savings, with a different electricity price every day following wholesale prices. These rate have been lower than fixed rates pretty much every day over the past 12 months! I also discovered their Agile tariff, which has pricing that changes every 30 mins, again depending on wholesale pricing. It also offers plunge pricing, where prices can go negative and you can be paid to use electricity!

Octopus markets the tariff at people who can easily "shift demand" (e.g. by use of home battery storage). I do not have home battery storage, but realised that further savings over the Tracker tariff could still be had with Agile.

It should be said that much of the energy use of my household is fixed and inflexible - think things like the fridge or wifi router that are on 24/7, or cooking dinner which has to happen early evening. But not all of my use is like that - I don't mind if the dishwasher runs overnight for instance, and the same applies to the washing machine or tumble dryer. Since I work from home I can make sure these appliances run at the very cheapest time of day, especially relevant if the cheapest time of day has plunge pricing where I'm actually paid to use electricity!

What prompted me to start building this website?

Shifting demand is easy, but it does mean you need access to up-to-date pricing information. Prices change every 30 minutes, so it should be possible to get a very simple at-a-glance view of upcoming prices. The Octopus Energy Account page shows a rudimentary summary, but the visualisation is vaic and quite unclear and the rate for right now is not actually shown anywhere!

Octopus does offer a rich API to query this data, and there is no shortage of developers that have created websites to visualise this data. Some examples include:

I thought it would be an interesting project to attempt my own visualisation of this data, adding the data and visualiations that I think are most useful. I've also tried to cut down on some of the jargon around regions and tariffs, to make this information easier to consume. In due course I hope to add further value by adding some useful tools and interesting visualisation. I have no shortage of ideas, so watch this space!