Post B0Mbg8dyrWdfTlnp2m by gsuberland@chaos.social
(DIR) More posts by gsuberland@chaos.social
(DIR) Post #B0Mbg8dyrWdfTlnp2m by gsuberland@chaos.social
2025-11-18T07:27:50Z
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TIL that Octopus Energy's billing estimation system - the one that decides how much you should pay per month to even out your costs throughout the year - is hilariously simple. it assumes a standard curve of high energy usage in winter (because heating) and low energy usage in summer, takes your summer bill, and multiplies it to find your winter estimate.I have electric air conditioners, which breaks this assumption and causes some truly wacky estimates.
(DIR) Post #B0Mbg9ZPQ0ZmLsfgYa by gsuberland@chaos.social
2025-11-18T07:29:35Z
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I store their API data and have a Grafana dashboard for it, so I can see that in the entire time I've lived here we've never exceeded £300/mo in energy costs.in the last few months my energy usage has been more like £250/mo.their system is currently estimating that I'm going to use £470/mo in energy for the next 4 months, because my summer-time energy usage is the same as my winter-time energy usage and it can't figure that out.
(DIR) Post #B0MbgAkR2UzS0Mq0Nk by gsuberland@chaos.social
2025-11-18T07:32:32Z
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I had to go adjust my monthly down a bunch based on my own usage data, and the website is like "OMG YOU'RE GONNA BE IN SO MUCH DEBT IF YOU PAY THAT LITTLE" with this crazy graph of account balance going off the bottom of the scale.I then look back at my own graph (from their own data) and it's like "yeah you're actually still overpaying by a bit".
(DIR) Post #B0MbgBfVcIdyrNXaLI by shironeko@fedi.tesaguri.club
2025-11-18T07:58:49.554408Z
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@gsuberland around here you can pay for what you used that month or opt-in to equal payment plan and the consensus around is that epp sucks.
(DIR) Post #B0MbgJCNcU64DLyR3A by gsuberland@chaos.social
2025-11-18T07:38:23Z
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keep in mind that this is all smart metered. they have hourly data from my meter to measure how much I've used, with historical data going back years. but because they based the model on typical usage it completely breaks when faced with near-constant energy consumption throughout the year, thus doing the opposite of what the model was supposed to do.
(DIR) Post #B0MqA4YE2hMapbHKHg by jaseg@chaos.social
2025-11-18T09:10:24Z
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@gsuberland We had a similar problem a while ago, but with a conventional meter. We had to tidy up some billing fuckup caused by mis-labeled meters. The energy provider ended up fixing the billing issue by booking ~6 months of use all on one month in their internal bookkeeping. After that, for the next two years they would try to triple our payment every time they read the meter because apparently they did some very dumb average or something.
(DIR) Post #B0MqA5iXhpD6Rt750K by jaseg@chaos.social
2025-11-18T09:12:33Z
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@gsuberland I ended up having to revoke their permission to directly credit my bank account and set up an automatic recurring SEPA transaction instead because they randomly cleared out the account one time after changing something in their computer infrastructure.
(DIR) Post #B0MqA6TKtqdmn10RwO by gsuberland@chaos.social
2025-11-18T09:28:30Z
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@jaseg they screwed up the gas meter enrollment for us and didn't charge us for a year, then landed us with a multi-thousand-pound bill all in one go and tried to take it out of my account. was a massive saga, had to get the ombudsman involved, they wrote off a bunch of the bill but it cost us £700/mo for a year on top of other bill fuckery from the local council meaning we had to pay a lot more than expected. and then I lost my job. was not a fun year.
(DIR) Post #B0MqGScVT25HDYKKw4 by jaseg@chaos.social
2025-11-18T09:29:16Z
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@gsuberland fuck, what a mess
(DIR) Post #B0MqGTfjYWGATqqQbY by gsuberland@chaos.social
2025-11-18T09:32:56Z
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@jaseg yeah it wasn't great. their customer support was _fine_ when I actually got to speak to someone useful, but they were very resistant to communicating in writing.at least better than the local council, which has a policy of sending phony county court appearance letters and whose staff was comprised of one sympathetic lady and three dudes who acted like aggressive debt collectors. with the latter I think I've only gotten that mad at a person on the phone once before and it was the DWP.