Humble Beginnings

30 Dec 2023 by Wouter

After working hard on the site over the Christmas break things are starting to come alive. I've created the main landing page, a basic menu and processing to download the latest rates from the Octopus Energy API.

Live electricity rates are now available for the following products:

Regions

One thorny issue that I had to tackle was dealing with energy supply regions. The country is divided into 14 different supply regions, which are operated by different distribution network operators, each with different pricing structures. This means that your energy rates will vary depending on your region.

A simple solution would be to create one page per tariff, per region, but this leads to a complicated navigation menu and I didn't want the number of pages to proliferate. Instead I decided to calculate an average rate across the whole country - a simple mean of the rates for each region. This is the rate that is shown by default. A dropdown in the menu bar allows you to choose your actual region, so you can see the most accurate prices.

I've also created a region finder tool to help look up your region.

Products

I realised that there is a distinction between a Tariff and the actual Product you are on. For instance, for Octopus Agile they have the following products which were available historically. The one labelled in bold is the product available now for new joiners.

Date Product Code Description
01/01/2017 AGILE-18-02-21 Agile Octopus February 2018
22/07/2022 AGILE-22-07-22 Agile Octopus July 2022 v1
31/08/2023 AGILE-22-08-31 Agile Octopus August 2022 v1
19/10/2023 AGILE-VAR-22-10-19 Agile Octopus October 2022 v1
25/11/2023 AGILE-FLEX-22-11-25 Agile Octopus November 2022 v1
06/12/2023 AGILE-23-12-06 Agile Octopus December 2023 v1

The Octopus Energy API has pricing information for each of these products, and many other websites will force you to choose your exact product to ensure accurate pricing. I've instead chosen the pragmatic option of only showing the latest available rate. There are two reasons for this:

  • Octopus will eventually move customers to the latest product, so being on an old product is temporary
  • The actual unit rates are usually the same across all the products

I'm hopeful that this is a simplification that makes the information easier to understand and use.