New to WonderWatt – Advice on Octopus Agile vs Intelligent Go?

rustypole

Hi everyone,

I’m new to WonderWatt and just getting started with exploring its automation capabilities.
I currently have a GivEnergy All-in-One 15kWh home battery, but no solar panels and no gateway installed.

My energy provider is Octopus, and I’m currently on the Intelligent Go tariff for import and Octopus Agile for Export.

I live solo and work from home, and I’ve noticed that I typically have plenty of energy stored in the battery well into the afternoon through normal usage.

I also have an EV that I charge once a week during 11:30pm to 05:30am

Given this setup, I’m considering switching to Octopus Agile, as it seems like a no-brainer with WonderWatt’s automation features potentially helping me optimise charging slots and exporting slots and usage based on dynamic pricing.

I’d really appreciate any advice or guidance from the community:

Has anyone made a similar switch?
Are there any key considerations or limitations I should be aware of?

Thanks in advance for your help!

KristianS

rustypole I did the exact opposite to your suggested route, and similar to @duplada
I only have one AIO, but I do have an Volkswagen ID.7 and so, for me, over this last year, IOG has been way better than Agile (but only since I got my Export MPAN). I won't bore you with why I had the system for the first year unable to Export.
Once again I used @MrMessy guide to construct what I wanted and there it has been, importing on the overnight or allocated day slots, then exporting when the grid needs a helping hand, all while Octopus have been paying me more than they charge me, including the ID.7.... genius

duplada

You are not going to get too many direct answers to your questions, as there too many user specific variables involved (if you think about it) WW is great system if you read all the different threads on here and do your testing you will find out by experience, what is the best option for you, and you will pick it up as go along. More specific user questions usually get answered quickly. Good Luck 😃

rustypole

duplada thanks.... to be honest I'm finding WonderWatt to be not that straight forward which is odd considering my technical background. Is there any setup guide or starter guide available?

johalareewi

You might want to use Outgoing Octopus for export rather than Agile. Outgoing currently pays a flat 15p/kWh whereas Agile Export rate changes every 30 mins and is usually under 15p. When I was on Agile Export I averaged 7p/kWh so switching to Outgoing doubled my export income. YMMV

Agile Import rates have been rather high lately and if you have a massive battery that can get you through the day, charging overnight on IOG is probably the way to go. Agile Import rates overnighr have been pants for ages. Just the occasional plunge. Agile Import afternoon rates have been cheapest but as solar drops, this might change.

Last winter Agile Import prices hit the magic 99.99p/kWh several times. 🙁
Could be more of the same this winter.

If you go to the Octopus site https://agile.octopushome.net/dashboard there is a "compare your consumption" option which you can use to see if Agile would have beaten the tariff you were on.

johalareewi

rustypole Is there any setup guide or starter guide available?

There is an FAQ which is a good place to start but it seems to be well hidden.
Link https://community.wonderwatt.com/d/5-wonder-watt-faq
How you set WW up depends if you are on Octopus Agile, Octopus IOG or something else.
The first two each have their own special setup, everyting else uses the main WW schedules.

duplada

Well to be honest with you Rusty I haven't used all the features of WW myself yet. I found that by experimenting, you soon learn. I was on Agile but switched to Octopus Go and then to IOG mainly because Agile has been rubbish this year compared to previous years and I now own an EV. I also have two AIO's so I can store a lot of power and run the full day come what may, solar or no solar. After giving things considerable thought I decided the best option for me was to run entirely on standard Schedules Export and Import. I export to the grid and use the Octopus Outgoing 15p Anytime tariff. As when I am exporting during the evening and the wee hours Agile Rates are lower. It works like this. Since I am only paying 7p per kWh in the IOG 23:30 - 05:30 discount period. IMHO it makes sense to be connected to the grid for as much as that time as possible. The period is six hours after all that's a quarter of the day running for 7p per kWh

My aim is to be fully charged at 05:30 when the IOG period ends the other 18 hours of the day I run on batteries so I never import from the grid outside of these hours. I can import at 12kWh and Export at 9.5kWh DNO limited.
I used @MrMessy cheat sheet to create a custom discharge schedule for my setup it starts just after 8pm and by 23:20 I have 6% in my batteries or there abouts. I then charge for just over 2 hours to around 80%, whilst I am charging I have my dishwasher automatically running and my Myenergi Eddi Immersion device filling the hot water tank. After the two hour charge I export it straight back to the grid down to about 22 % - 16.5kWh export. I then commence the final charge to the high near 100% for 05:30 Then the whole process starts over again the following evening. I import about 55kWh and Export anywhere from 25 to 60kWh per day if there is good solar about.

This schedule keeps my AIO batteries SOC in sync and I am positive in August, September and so far in October so it is working for me. Everyone has different situations as I said in my reply yesterday, so I don't expect what I do will be of interest to many other users, though it may give others inspiration to do something different. I wanted a solution that I could run hands off. Using WW makes this very easy to do, you have to fine tune it, but then you just let it run. I will just add that when I charge the EV which only happens once a month or so, I slow charge the house batteries all the way from 4% to 100% to calibrate them.

Try doing all that with the Givenergy portal or app.

You are correct I couldn't find any documentation either, but I guess this may be addressed in the future, things are changing so quickly with the software week to week it would be soon out of date. But I agree it would help new users get a better understanding of the features.

Here is what my WW day looks like

duplada

Maybe @WindyMiller will post one of his portal graphs for you. I think Windy uses WW and Agile and I saw one of his daily graphs on the GE thread the other day and it was quite something to behold.

WindyMiller

duplada
This schedule was produced by WonderWatt...

This is a picture of the settings (not exactly the same as I made some edits during the day after I took a screenshot of the schedule unfortunately)...

The Blue outline boxes charge at 100%, the Red outline boxes discharge at 100% which results in exporting what's left after meeting the house load.

At around 4.30pm each day (so not set and forget) I look at the next days slot pricing on WonderWatt and, if it's a plunge day with many slots below 13p, I select charge and discharge slots to maximise my exports whilst minimising the import slot costs. I receive 16.5p per kWh from Eon Next for export so, factoring in around 20% losses through the battery, slots below 13p are worth importing then exporting.

My system is GE AC3.0 inverter, 2x 5.2kWh batteries (+ 6kW Solaredge inverter and 17 panels) installed in May 2023.

Notice the massive house load between 12.30 and 2pm. This was the free Octopus session where I managed to import 14kWh by turning on the aircons to heat, heat the water, clean the oven, run the dishwasher and washing machine and charge the batteries.

Overall I made £4.30 on exports that day at a cost in imports of 30p - net £4 not counting what I might get from the free session.

Note however with Agile that you only get 2 or 3 days a month like this when the wind blows strong. The rest of the time Agile hovers around 16p as its minimum price. During the summer with Solar I can charge in the day and last the night. But from now to February I have to use imports so I seek out the cheapest 6 or 7 slots each night to charge the batteries and a few more in the day if necessary. All under WonderWatt control.

These are my pre-defined charge schedules I switch on and off and make minor adjustments...

Here's my yearly pattern of usage...

And here's my tariff compare table adjusted for my usage pattern and battery size (which is too small to last 18 hours between charges)...

I don't have an EV so can't get GO and I don't have a Heat Pump so can't get Cosy. Flux is never the best tariff. Hence I'll stick with Agile for the time being.

This shows the potential of WonderWatt controlling the battery inverter with the Agile tariff but it has taken the best part of a year to fine tune it (which of course is to be expected as things change with the seasons). I hope you can follow it all.

And good luck with your choice.

duplada

WindyMiller That's something else Windy, I am going to study your efforts in detail later when I have some time. Really well done, I can see all the effort you have put in. It doesn't matter if you are using simple schedules like mine are the more complex features of WW like you on Agile, you have to fine tune it, to get the most out of it.

@admin that's an advertisement of what can be achieved with WW for you. Under the heading "Can you do this With the Portal?"

WindyMiller I don't have an EV so can't get GO

I had been on Agile (without a battery system) since 2022 when the electricity prices soared. What a pain that was, when it came to the 4pm to 7pm expensive period. Let's just say it wasn't the easiest system to schedule your home life around, and it wasn't / I wasn't too popular in the household to say the least. Despite not having a battery and significantly re-scheduling how we did things, I managed to reduced our Electric bill by 25% and had around a 20p per kWh average, which was quite good at that time. This year I had the battery system installed, which has been a game changer. Though if I didn't have the battery capacity to get me through the 16/17 hour Go/IOG standard rate periods, I would probably still be on Agile. The rates On Agile have not been as good this year during the summer months as previously.

When I decided to swap to Octopus GO 8.5p in my area, (My GE EV charger was not supported on Octopus and neither was my Car). I went into the Octopus App and selected change tariff, It asked me car make / model, then charger make / model, it then replied we can't offer you IOG but your are good to GO (I made a Joke 😆) with Octopus Go, Do you want to Switch? I clicked yes to Accept. I was then immediately put on the GO tariff none fixed variable, No Checks, No Car Registration, end of story. I was expecting to have to jump through various hoops but I didn't have to. I have now replaced my GE EV charger with a Zappi to qualify for IOG, that's a different story, you have to "onboard" your charger and they do a test to see if they can control it, and It also asked for the registration number of the car as prerequisite to onboarding.

I have seen posts elsewhere of users who have "a virtual charger" for visitors. Move along nothing to see here.

duplada

WindyMiller Notice the massive house load between 12.30 and 2pm. This was the free Octopus session where I managed to import 14kWh by turning on the aircons to heat, heat the water, clean the oven, run the dishwasher and washing machine and charge the batteries.

Yes you certainly get some exercise during the Octo Free Sessions careering around the house activating and deactivating appliances and devices.

I managed 31.1kWh import on the Saturday session it would have been more if the EV charger had started when programmed to. Though I am not complaining, In total for the day 85.4kWh in and 51.3kWh exported, all automated with WW, with a little help from me and my wife transferring washing, setting air con, and the like, very much like yourself. I am not sure of the financial gain, as of yet I have been too busy writing posts on here to crunch the numbers. My graph is below. Incidentally there is going to be a three hour slot at some point in not too distant future according to Octopus. Best start planning for that one straight away, Over & Out.

WindyMiller

duplada Thanks @duplada

I've been using WW for 18 months now and the capabilities of the software have grown enormously in that time. In addition the resilience has improved no-end. All thanks to @admin and his team and the wonderful support.

In the early days I couldn't have controlled my system so finely and had possibly 1 in 5 commands fail. The addition of 3 retries at 4, 10 and 10 seconds sorted out the reliability and I now get more like 1 in 50 commands fail (still occasionally have the Inverter Offline message which seems to happen for 10 minutes or so occasionally and is not network related).

The ability to set individual charge AND discharge slots was a game changer for me. Previously I cajoled the system to discharge using Schedules between pre-selected Agile charge windows and often made mistakes. Now it's a case of going through to select the higher priced slots to export and set the remainder to import.

I use a counting system to set which slots to charge/discharge. Starting at 0 with a discharged battery, add 1 for each charge slot, subtract 1 for each discharge slot, add 0 for each hold slot then try to keep the accumulated number between 1 and 5 although eventually reaching 6 (or 7) at the end to leave the battery at 100%. This means I avoid hitting 0% on the discharges and 90% on the charges (where the charge current starts to drop) maximising the export. In one day the best I can fit in is 24 charge slots and 18 discharge slots then dumping the charge during the 6 evening peak slots. That is pretty much what happened on 4th October in the example above which was my best day ever for exports from the battery.

I then set my HW timer to heat the hot water in the very cheapest charge slots each slot adding 1kWh of heat to a 6kWh cylinder so 6 slots (that controller has 4 time periods daily).

WindyMiller

duplada Yes you certainly get some exercise during the Octo Free Sessions careering around the house activating and deactivating appliances and devices.

Feeling a little bit guilty here. My wife put on the washing machine and cleaned the oven. I sat there and put on the hot water, batteries and 2x aircon units (all smart). But I did load the dishwasher that morning and set the timer to come on in the free session.

duplada I managed 31.1kWh import

That's pretty good. I have to watch that I don't overload our grid connection. I have an 80A fuse which should, in theory, allow me to import 36.8kWh in 2 hours. I also have a new distribution board. But recently there was a warning on BBC News regarding people overloading their grid connections during free sessions.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgrqlnlp4w2o

duplada

WindyMiller I have to watch that I don't overload our grid connection

Yes, be careful, Earlier in the year I managed to overload my GE Gateway (85amps max), with my EV charger and Battery charging at the same time. It wasn't a saving session. Me being a rookie operator to my newly installed system, it was the only way I could find to stop the EV charger discharging the house batteries. It turned into a nightmare getting it going again. I wrote about it on here just yesterday. My Gateway is now limited to 80amps, and constantly adjusts the AIO's house battery charging activity, which allows other devices to get what they need. See below the saw tooth pattern is the Tumble Dryer thermostat on and off.

WindyMiller But I did load the dishwasher that morning and set the timer to come on in the free session.

That's not sufficient is it? and you well know it, it's time to change your ways WindyMiller 😅, being the Grand Master of WW functionality, and Octopus Tariff spreadsheet analysis is no excuse, now, hit the deck you slacker and give me twenty 😆

WindyMiller

This high pressure weather we are having shows the down-side of the Agile tariff. With peak Agile slots at 60+p, day slots at 20p and overnight slots at 16p these are the WW charge schedules I am using to get the best from a bad lot.

I fill the batteries overnight as that contains the cheapest slots of the day. Then as Solar is providing virtually nothing I charge the batteries again in the day just enough to get through the evening peak.

With these I can avoid the 60+p slots (and indeed anything above 20p) completely.

PS That heavy overnight load was charging my son's EV with a Granny Charger whilst he visits.

duplada

WindyMiller That heavy overnight load was charging my son's EV with a Granny Charger whilst he visits.

At one time kids just used to visit their parents to get a good Sunday Dinner inside of them 😋 , nowadays they visit to not only recharge their own batteries, but their EV batteries too. 😂

Anyhow, Windy you now qualify for the Octopus Go Tariff by "granny charging". Ditch that Agile bitch, and come across to the "Dark Side" why don't you, your spreadsheet knows it makes sense.

johalareewi

Likewise. Been checking IOG but Agile still wins for me at the moment.
The IOG daytime rate is a killer for me. I don't have a big enough battery to get enough 7p electricity to get through most of the daytime rate, and solar is heading for 1 or 2 units a day.

KevinD

duplada i love this comment, it mirrors my situation where our visiting daughter is using our electricity to granny charge her car, so I switched to Go from Agile. Not sure how it will hold up as we've recently fired up our new heat pump for its first heating season.

WindyMiller

It's only the third time this year they have visited and charged their car. A total of 200kWh for 3 journeys back to Devon from Bedfordshire in a Kia EV6 - each one costing about £13 for 220 miles. Costs me £26 to do that journey in my Prius.

Can't really claim to have an EV with so little use though.

KevinD

WindyMiller
I think iirc, that they changed their T&C'd to specify a car and not an Electric Vehicle. I had queried why my electric folding bicycle which is by definition an electric vehicle did not qualify for the Go tariff.

duplada

WindyMiller Kia EV6

I nearly purchased one when they were launched. I went to the dealer event, but decided against purchasing, because getting into the rear was rather difficult with limited headroom. They weren't cheap either at £62k for the GT model. So in the end I purchased an MG4 Xpower for my wife instead. We had a test drive and got back to the dealership before we had left. The car is just EPIC, I have always purchased "sensible" cars previously, it puts a smile on my face every time I drive it (and everyone in it), and at my age that is something to behold. I don't exceed the speed limits but I do get up to them very quickly. Traffic light boy racers are now always in the rear view. I never realised that executing launch control, and then checking your G meter after a trip was a thing, but it is. There was a million reasons (as they say) not to buy it (I know before you start) I would buy another tomorrow, as for me it makes driving fun again, and keeps me feeling young. oh and it only cost £24k (I am a good haggler).

WindyMiller

duplada My son bought his new through the scheme at work. I think he paid £36,000 or £38,000. He got an interest free loan from work for that to be paid back over 4 years then the car is his. Insurance, servicing, MOT all included. At 4 years he gets the option to buy another so, guess what, I'm paying off some of the 4 year loan to him so that the car is mine after 4 years! He gets a new car on a new loan, I get a 4 year old EV at a very good price (as long as he doesn't wreck it) and I sell my (what will be) 12 year old Prius to someone who wants a pretty good hybrid.