If you’re an Octopus Energy customer, then you should consider downloading Octo-Aid. It’s a smartphone app that links to your Octopus Energy account, and analyses the data from your meters to give you insights.
To use it, you need to:
- be an Octopus Energy customer
- have a working smart meter
I downloaded Octo-Aid ages ago, but as our electric smart meter stopped working last year, I’ve had to wait until it was fixed in January to give the app a proper review. Happily, this coincided with a re-design of the app, which now looks more like a standard iOS app. Before, it looked like a rather quick port from another platform – even though it’s iOS only. For Android users, there’s a different but unrelated app called OctoTracker.
Linking your Octopus account to Octo-Aid
To access your data, you’ll need your Octopus Energy API key. You can get this here; I’d suggest saving it somewhere as you may need it for other things. For example, I use mine with the SolaX app, and for the Octopus Energy Home Assistant integration. So, I have it saved in 1Password, alongside my Octopus Energy account information.
You can only have one API key per account, and once it’s generated, Octopus won’t show you the full key again. If you don’t have it saved somewhere, you’ll need to regenerate it and then re-link any services to your account.
Once you’ve copied and pasted your API key into Octo-Aid, it’ll start downloading your data. This may take a couple of minutes if you’re running Octo-Aid for the first time, as it’ll download a lot of historical data. In future, it should open more quickly. Whilst you wait, Octo-Aid will show you a little cephalopod-themed joke.
Data analytics
So what can Octo-Aid tell you about your energy usage? Well, it can compare your usage with previous days, weeks and months, and whether you’re using more or less. It can also give you a forecast of how much you may use for the rest of the month. There’s also an estimate of your home’s ‘base load’ – how much power your always-on devices need. These are things like your fridge and freezer, or devices that have a standby mode. Because Octo-Aid has access to your tariff information, it’ll also tell you how much this is costing you.
If you have some way of exporting electricity, such as solar panels, a battery or a wind turbine, then Octo-Aid will also display this data and include it in its cost calculations.
If you’re lucky enough to have an Octopus Home Mini, then this data will be in almost real-time for your electricity meter, and on a half hour delay for gas. We don’t have one yet (I’ve signed up for the waiting list but not heard anything) and so our data for the previous day normally appears around lunchtime.
Tariff comparisons
A really useful feature of Octo-Aid is to be able to compare Octopus Energy’s tariffs, based on your actual usage data. Octopus has a wider range of more advanced tariffs than its rivals, including its Tracker and Agile tariffs where electricity costs can vary daily or half-hourly respectively. It also offers specialist electric vehicle charging tariffs that can integrate with your home charger, if you drive a supported vehicle and have a supported charger installed. In our case, our car is supported, but our charger isn’t yet.
Octo-Aid was able to tell us that we’re on the best gas and export tariffs, but that Octopus Intelligent Go would be cheaper for us for electricity. Unfortunately, this is one that requires a compatible charger, and so I’m on a waiting list for that too. With energy prices likely to shoot up soon, and the withdrawal of many fixed tariffs last month, it’s worth using Octo-Aid to see if another tariff would be cheaper.
Budgets
There’s also a budgets tab in Octo-Aid, where you can set maximum monthly spends. You can set these yourself, or let Octo-Aid suggest values for you. You can then track how your energy usage compares to the budget. There’s some nice graphs, which overlay your current usage with the previous month. As we’re in spring, and it’s (mostly) getting warmer and sunnier, we’re obviously using a bit less.
Other tools in Octo-Aid
Octo-Aid includes an electric vehicle charge planner. You’ll need to tell it your car’s charge rate and maximum battery capacity, and then it’ll tell you when it will be cheapest to charge. You can even tell Octo-Aid to pop up a reminder notification when it’s time to start charging.
We’re on a fixed tariff, and so the cost doesn’t really vary for us unless it’s really sunny. But if you’re on one of Octopus Energy’s time of use or electric vehicle tariffs, then this is potentially quite useful.
Overall, it’s a handy little app, and it’s free to download and use. If you’re not already an Octopus Energy customer, here’s my referral link to join – we’ve been with them since 2023 and they’ve been better than any other provider that we’ve used. The referral link gives you £50 off once you’ve paid your first bill by direct debit, and I’ll get the same. That being said, Octopus has almost 25% market share in the UK now (not bad for a 10 year old company) so I’d be surprised if many of you reading this aren’t already customers.
