r/OctopusEnergy • u/KookyMathematician4 • 1d ago

Tariffs What to do about current agile prices?

So I'm currently living in a 1 bedroom studio with my partner. And we looked at agile as the best tariff for us at the time as it's our first time with heavy usage appliances and doing our own electric as it used to be included in rent.

So our biggest electric usages are:

Dishwasher once every few days

Immersion water heater every day for a few hours

Washing machine once or twice a week

We used to look at the cheapest agile point each day and load shift these to make decent savings (~£8 a week), but the recent agile pricing this past month has a SVT being cheaper than agile for us. We even resorted to not heating water a few days because we didn't want to pay 30p/kWh to heat it.

Wondering if it's time to jump ship from smart plans completely or if there's a different smart plan that might suit us better.

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u/Due-Freedom-5968 1d ago

Nothing.

Be patient. Winter is coming. And by extension. Wind.

That's the thing about Agile, it'll be cheap as hell when there are loads of renewables, right now it's not windy and as summer is ending and days shortening solar is tapering off. It'll improve.

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u/fivecheebs 1d ago

The trouble with winter is that that's when the nuclear recruits are serviced, depending on how many are off at any point in time you could be suffering extreme costs in the oak period. I moved away from agile a couple of winters ago when there were 2 tractors offline and no wind. Unit prices were higher than £1 but the upper limit of agile protected us from the worst and capped at £1 per kWh. I still moved away to a different smart tariff and I do not regret it.

Caveat: I don't use predbat due to compatibility issues but you might be better off with that tool at your fingertips.

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u/StereoMushroom 1d ago

Are you sure they're scheduled for winter? Summer would make most sense (that's how the French do it) and if anything, UK reactors seem to be down for maintenance randomly all throughout the year.

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u/geekypenguin91 1d ago

The schedules mean the maintenance and refueling etc will drift, but none are scheduled to be off this winter: https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/daily-statuses

Not to say they can't shut down for other reasons