Octopus tracker - fix now? Price cap rise etc

[paintedwallpaper]

Hello! I am on Octopus Tracker (the contract is coming to an end very soon) and I think it's saved me quite a lot over the last year.

I am wondering if anyone is on it and what they are doing about the energy price rises coming in soon?

I heard the advice is to fix for 18+ months - not sure how that works with Octopus Tracker - should I go on a new tracker or do people think it is better to fix?

I understand gas could be fairly volatile for the next year or so - is that right?

Would welcome thoughts from others. Thanks!

We are on the tracker. We did think about switching to a fixed rate but have decided to stay on the tracker. It is a bit of a gamble.

thank you wingingit! I'm so confused!

I just posted about the tracker-how does it work day to day? So do you check the price and the regional formula, then plan your day's use around that cost? And does the day's rate change through the day, or is it always available at a set time (?morning) I can see how it would work with appliances, but not so sure how to manage it with central heating in cold weather. Do you make real savings, or do they tend to be cancelled out by usage over the winter? I need to decide before 1 April, so any words of wisdom v. welcome! 🤓And do you need a smartphone App?

@Heratnumber9 Tracker is daily rate, set the day before. If you subscribe to a tracker Telegram channel, you get the next day's price the evening before (usually about 6pm) so you can plan if you want to leave doing energy intensive stuff until the next day, or wait a bit longer. Alternately you can get an email the day before, or Octopus tell you the daily rate on an app i think on the same day hence the telegram is better. With gas the price tends to be more stable than electric, so I don't pay too much attention to gas. But with electric it is good. You could subscribe to just gas or electric - you don't need to do both. Depending on when you sign up it will depend on the savings you make (what deal is on at that time). Generally the cost of electric is below the price cap, but sometimes it's more (there were a couple of occasions when it was way more, but only a couple of days, so we didn't do washes on those days). I think most people tend to make savings vs fixed or variable, but you do have to be a bit savvy about not using on certain days.

There are other tarrifs like Agile where it changes on an hourly basis and much more volatile but depending on whether you have electric car and so on can save some people lots of money.

I'm not sure at the moment whether Tracker is worth it

https://www.reddit.com/r/octopusenergy/

This is a great source of energy about all the different tarrifs.

I found tracker a bit baffling at first but you quickly get used to it. And there are apps where you can compare and choose the best tarriff for you based on your region and usage.

@paintedwallpaper thank you for the information, its really interesting. I'm with octopus but on a fixed rate. Still in credit after the winter which is unusual for me 😂😂

I’m on tracker and plan to stick with it. You can’t go back for 9 months if you leave and traditionally in the summer you’ll almost always be better off on tracker than fixed.

If you input your details into this website it takes your meter reading history and tells you the best tariff based on your actual usage

https://www.octopriceuk.app/

For the past 30 days my electric bill on tracker was £88 and the fixed tariff would have cost me £95.