More Information

Troubleshooting

This website and underlying infrastructure has been put together by me over a few weeks, and is hosted on a virtual server. I am working on improving it, but it is likely to have a few glitches for now. Also, I am reliant on data that ultimately comes from smart meters, and these have had many many teething issues.

If you do have issues, please do get in touch. At some point I'll set up a web form for you to contact me, but in the meantime, please email guy dot j dot lipman at gmail dot com (replace dot with . and at with @), and let me know the url where you had the problem.

Getting my data

At the moment if you want to get your data, you will need a smart meter. If you have an account with Octopus Energy, your access key will be the concatenation of your account number (should be something like A-ABCD1234, and appears in the url of the main dashboard when you log in) and your API key (which is a 32 character string and can be found on their developer dashboard). If you aren't with Octopus (or even if you are), you can register for a free consumer account with n3rgy by going to their main website and clicking on the "I'm a Consumer button in the top right corner. In order to authenticate that you have the right to access your account information, you will need to provide n3rgy with your electricity MPAN (which can be found on your latest bill), the MAC code of your in-house display (a 16 character string - leave out the hyphens), and roughly when you moved into your home. Once you are registered with n3rgy, you will be able to access your data using your MAC code.

Suggestions

This website is a work in progress, so I would be very open to suggestions of things that would make it a lot more useful. In particular, if there are particular views of your data that you'd find useful, please let me know. And if you know of ways other than Octopus and n3rgy that customers can access their smart meter data, please let me know. The best way to get in touch is by email, on guy dot j dot lipman at gmail dot com (replace dot with . and at with @).

The background to this project

As a long term energy geek, I was excited to get a smart meter in early 2018. Finally I would be able to know how much electricity I was using, and when.

Unfortunately I was quickly disappointed. There was an in-house display, but it didn't show much information, and didn't provide any way to get that data onto my computer. It did save me from manually submitting meter readings, but I didn't entirely trust my supplier, and worried that if anything went wrong I wouldn't have anything to point to.

Then at the end of 2018, I switched to Octopus Energy, and one of their big selling points for me was their API that lets customers access their consumption data. They also have a tariff, Agile, which varies every half hour based on market prices. This offers a huge scope for saving, but also a need to be able to track all the consumption data and prices.

Over the past 18 months I have been doing quite a bit of coding, in both python and javascript, trying to make the best use of the Octopus API. I have been part of a group of like-minded and clever people who are trying to do their bit to make it easier for customers to save money and the planet.

Obviously only a minority of smart meter customers are on Octopus, so I have also been thinking a lot about how to let other smart meter customers make the most of the data they are collecting. Sure, many people don't want to worry about things like this, but if they can't see their data on demand, we can't be surprised when they don't trust the system.

Over the past six months I had many conversations, with Octopus, with the Smart Energy Research Lab, Hildebrand Technology, n3rgy, Octopus, Carbon Coop as well as with many smart meter users. I wrote a blog post on the topic, and even presented on my ideas as part of a job interview.

I finally found myself with a bit of time so I decided to give it a go.

I'm not entirely sure where this project will go. At the moment I am volunteering my time to this, and it is just hosted on a virtual server for which I'm paying £10/month. But I am still convinced that there are a lot of smart meter customers that would like to know that they could get ready access to their data if they wanted.