Comparison Rate - Compare Agile to other Tariffs
It can be tricky to compare a tariff like Agile Octopus with other rates - after all the price changes every half hour! Most other tariffs, including highly variable tariffs like Octopus Tracker update once a day at most - often prices are stable for months at a time. To compare Octopus Agile with other tariffs we need to calculate an equivalent daily rate.
Calculating an equivalent "average" daily rate is straightforward, we simply take an average of all the prices during the day. However, this is flawed oversimplification - it assumes that energy is consumed at the exact same rate throughout the day. This is rarely true. In actual fact, typical usage throughout the day follows a predictable pattern, with lower usage at night, and peaks during the day, lunchtime and particularly in the early evening.
On AgileBuddy I use a weighted average of this typical usage pattern, which I call the "Comparison Rate". The latest agile prices shows today's comparison rate at the bottom of the page. This rate is also used when showing historic rates. It is important to note that this represents a "typical" usage pattern - your actual effective can be quite different - for instance if you actively shift demand away from expensive periods or if your usage pattern doesn't follow this curve.
The numbers are somewhat similar to the Octopus Tracker rate, presumably because Octopus uses a similar methodology to calculate what the day's tracker rate should be. Any differences are probably explained by suble differences in the expected average half-hourly usage.
