Lately we’ve been using the Octopus Agile electricity tariff* to cut our energy bills. As we both work (mostly) from home, using electricity during non-peak periods – AKA procrastinating by doing the laundry – is easy, so it’s been saving us money.
There are loads of ways to keep track of the tariff rates – apps, websites, forward-looking predictors – and some people take optimising their usage incredibly seriously.
I don’t.
I realised that all I really want to know about any given day’s costs are:
- Is there a period when electricity is really cheap, like under 10p, so I should stick the washing / dishwasher on?
- Is there a period where it costs loads, say over 35p, so I should maybe not stick the washing on?
So I built a thing to tell me that, every day. Squids In sends me an email, and a push notification to my watch via Pushover. It runs on Heroku via the scheduler.
If that sounds useful to you, the code is all here – note all the config variables you need to set in lines 7-14.
* An electricity tariff where the cost per kWh changes every 30 minutes depending on supply and demand, with prices for any given day announced the evening before. Details here.