Almost everyone that has had a SMART Meter installed has been underwhelmed by the result.

The generation 1 smart meters were anything but smart. Bizarrely, the meters could only be read by the energy company that had installed it.

This is a particularly perverse outcome. A whole industry was created around customers switching utility suppliers, a situation that the energy regulator had created in an effort to boost competition. So millions of smart meters were installed, which very quickly became “non-smart”.

Along comes the roll out of generation 2 smart meters, which fixes some of these compatibility problems.

But there remain huge challenges. The wait times for installations are measured in months. Once an installation occurs, very frequently they are ineffectively commissioned. It remains a lottery whether your SMART gas meter will function as intended or remain dumb.

But for us, the real kicker is the data. The new SMETS2 meters are unable to provide data to the consumer in the detail or format that customers expect.

SMETS2 smart meters still come with an in-home display, which is yesterday’s technology. The only function that the in-home display can do well is to tell customers how much electricity is being used at a particular moment in time.

But it doesn’t know what tariff you are on. So if you charge up your car overnight on cheap electricity, the in-home display simply assumes you are using electricity at peak rates – and so serves the customer information which is completely inaccurate.

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So along come Octopus with the Octopus MINI.

This is a tiny little device which connects to both your home Wi-Fi and the SMART Meter, and sends live data back to Octopus servers.

When you open up your Octopus App you’ll now see an additional tab showing “live” consumption data.

If you have invested in a Home Storage Battery System, such as the GivEnergy All in One, your live consumption data will look something like this:

In the situation depicted above, the home isn’t consuming any electricity from the grid (live use is zero watts), since all the home’s requirements are coming from the battery.

A typical day will look like this:

Here the home is drawing power during the overnight period, during which time electricity is heavily discounted due to a time of use tariff. Three things are drawing power – the Electric Car, the Home Storage Battery and the Hot Water Tank immersion heater. You’ll notice that no measurable power is being drawn during the peak hours.

Energy Use Data provides Empowerment

Octopus have a different kind of relationship with their customers, since they are driven by different values. They believe that if they empower folk with accurate data that is easy to access and easy to interpret, a significant proportion of customers will change their behaviour.

Having accurate data is what customers with Solar and Home Storage Batteries have enjoyed for years.

Here is the GivEnergy App showing the solar production and battery discharge into a home. Again, you can see that the import at this time is zero, which is exactly what you’d expect to see. The GivEnergy system monitors consumption within the home and constantly responds to demand in order to keep import to as close to zero as practical.

Not everyone will be interested in getting an Octopus Mini. But for those that do want to see accurate live data of their energy consumption, this solution is a massive leap forward.

Well done Octopus.

Let Brimstone Energy help you achieve Energy Abundance and navigate the Green Energy Transition.