How to hack your home for cheaper, greener, energy with our open API

Save cash and carbon with a smarter home

We’re building the groundwork for an all renewable, all-electric future.

One way to reduce the need for dirty fossil fuels is to shift our collective consumption patterns and better distribute energy usage throughout the day - to times when energy is greenest (and cheapest). We’re doing that with our AgileOctopus Tariff. With dynamic pricing based on half-hourly wholesale energy prices, Agile empowers customers with super low (sometimes free, or even negative) prices to change when they use energy to off-peak times when the grid is under less strain – making energy far less carbon-intensive, and much cheaper. Customers receive massive benefits from changing energy consumption and automating appliances to run during the cheapest and greenest times.

Agile or not, you can get involved – if you’re on a fixed, flat rate tariff, using energy off peak is still ‘greener’ because the power coming down the wires will be less carbon intensive. However, if you want to really reap the benefits of changing your energy consumption, you can save hundreds with a smart tariff like AgileOctopus.

This smart tariff relies on a smart meter to track the variable cost of your energy, but Agile’s savings are truly unlocked with other smart home products and app integrations. Automating your appliances allows you to make the most of the cheapest, greenest energy without even having to think about it; when you’re sleeping, or out and about.

You can connect up smart hot water systems, electric heating, electric vehicle chargers and anything else that can be told when to use energy – from smart plugs to smart home helpers like Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa. As we’ll see in a moment, it’s super easy to automate your home so you can most of cheap, green energy without ever having to think about it.

Accessing our Agile API

Agile is all about the potential for innovation and empowerment that comes with taking your energy into your own hands. That’s why we made Agile’s API public. We let our customers access our pricing data so they can integrate and automate their smart home, their way.

Just over two years ago we held a Hackathon to launch the Agile tariff and invited over 100 engineers from more than 20 companies to see what innovation could come out of a tariff API. Since then, a buzzing community of entech enthusiasts have gathered around our Octopus Agile Forum and we’ve tracked more than 30 published uses. We've seen homebrew Home Energy Management Systems, apps that show agile rates on Apple watches, and a whole host of ingenious setups - using everything from Raspberry Pi's to Tado smart thermostats to automate energy consumption.

Our energy pioneers are living the future of energy, today. Here are just a few ways you can hack our API to make the most of cheaper, greener energy.

Tracking Agile Rates and Consumption Data

Once up and running, the first question customers generally ask us is to do with tracking their consumption data.

In May 2020 we updated the dashboard making the Agile tariff rates easier to view and explore.

The Octopus account dashboard also gives a beautifully designed dynamic graph of daily consumption - it’s quick, easy, and quite addictive to flick back, day by day, through your consumption patterns and watch the graph move up and down.

The Agile pricing as published on the Octopus account dashboard works for most, but our pioneers are constantly using our API to develop new ways to view their daily prices (and other information) that better suit their preferences.

Kim Bauters, for example, has used our API to build his OctopusWatch App, so you can even keep Agile rates on your wrist for easy access!

In a similar vein, there’s the popular Watchdog App from Max Sanna, and Kim also has competition from another Apple Watch App - Octopus Energy Agile Watcher, built by Robert Sammons.

Another great example - and probably the most popular - is Mick Wall’s EnergyStats UK, a website (and Twitter) that displays rates and provides a whole host of useful tools that allow you to analyse your Agile tariff and consumption pattern.

With that in mind, customers often ask us about downloading their data to create their own graphs, to compare against flat rate tariffs or simply check our homework to ensure their bill is correct. Again, our en-tech pioneers have used our API to come up with a number of ingenious solutions!

If you’re not quite ready to make the leap to Agile but you have a smart meter that we’re capturing half-hour data for, there’s a few online tools to help you compare what your bills would look like on our different tariffs, based on your energy usage - some are able to look at trends over the past 12 months.

Can you automate it? - Yes you can!

After asking how to track their consumption, the second question people ask us is usually to do with managing appliances so that they use energy at the best times of day.

You can use the Agile API to manage and automate devices around the home such as heating, hot water, home battery storage and electric vehicle charging. This way, you’ll be able to make the most of super cheap, super green off-peak energy.

These are just a few of the incredibly smart (pardon the pun) ways people are making the most of smart meters, smart appliances, and clever API’s.

I’ll do it myself (tech level 🌶🌶🌶)

Having covered some different API-based tracking tools and product integrations, the final step is to even get involved and have a go yourself!

For those getting started with the API, Guy Lipman has put together a handy guide that goes into a bit more detail than our own developer page - this is a great place to start and I know a lot of customers who have successfully used this as a jump-off point.

Our own Agile forum, where our smart home pioneers gather to share tips and tricks is also an especially rich rich source of material

The popular Home Assistant System is another especially useful reference point, chock full of smart home and IOT related integration - it’s great to see how quickly the Agile API and Agile Octopus Tariff have made their way into the smart home ecosystem.

In the home-brew category, users like GreeningMe have created their own Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS), using the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi to manage a large part of their energy consumption.

Together with Western Power Distribution, Passiv Systems have also created something similar to GreeningMe’s HEMS, which is currently being trialled and evaluated as another BEIS funded research project called MADE.

Talking of Raspberry Pi devices, probably one of our personal favourites is the InkyPHAT eInk display. Can you call tariff displays cute? We think so! As per usual, you can do this yourself - the code is open source and the devices are available to order on Pimoroni (and elsewhere).

If you’re up for it, Ryan Walmsley has hacked his EV charger (but please heed his warnings before messing with any electronics).

If lockdown has really got to you and you’ve started talking to inanimate objects, get onto Telegram and start chatting to Agile with Itinerant Ham’s Agile chatbot.

Finally, If you’re interested in finding out more about APIs more generally, the new Re.alto service is in beta and aims to become a kind of API marketplace. Their site is going to be worth watching - it’ll be exciting to see what other kinds of API are being published!

It’s awesome to see such a range of services, systems and devices connected to our API and we know there’s lots more being worked on. If you have something to share - we'd love to see it - reach out to me on Twitter (@agile_phil) or email us agile@octopus.energy.