‘Octopus Energy saga has spoiled my money-saving plan’

“I switched my electricity tariff to Octopus Energy in September to take advantage of two of their energy deals.

“I have solar panels and a heat pump at my home in south London. I’ve read that it’s possible to earn around £130 a year by using a special Octopus tariff thanks to the electricity generated by the solar panels.

“We also have an electric car and Octopus has a separate tariff that should let me charge it during off-peak hours and pay a third of the price that I am paying now.

“The problem is that to sign up to either of these deals, we need to have a smart meter installed and we can’t seem to get one.

“We have called and checked Octopus’s website hundreds of times since October but there is no availability. In the meantime, we are stuck on their variable tariff. We could be saving hundreds of pounds each month with this deal but we’re unable to use it.

“Having raised a complaint to Octopus in December we’ve now been given an appointment for March, six months after we switched from our previous provider.

“We feel totally misled by Octopus and would have been so much better off staying with our old provider.”

James, south London

Troubleshooter says:

As well as being greener, one of the big perks of having solar panels installed in your home is that you get paid for the electricity they generate.

Octopus Energy has a deal which guarantees that it will pay you 15p for every kilowatt-hour (kWh) if energy you export to the grid. You will need to be an existing Octopus Energy customer or switch to them from your current supplier to benefit from this rate, plus have a smart meter in your home.

This is because Octopus need to be able to remotely monitor the flow of energy in and out of your home to work out how exactly much energy your solar panels are generating, plus how much you’re using.

You also mentioned another Octopus deal that lets you charge your electric car during off-peak hours for less than the normal day rates. So between 12.30am and 4.30am, you would pay just 12p per kWh of electricity during these hours. That’s almost a third of the cost of the government’s energy price guarantee.

Octopus is currently the only energy supplier offering a cheap tariff for charging electric cars. To benefit from this deal, the company has to supply the rest of your electricity too, which is why you switched over.

But again, you also need to have a smart meter because a reading needs to be taken every 30 minutes.

So why were you having such issues getting a smart meter installed?

You had registered for a smart meter in September and had been added to a waiting list. Once you have signed up it can take weeks to organise an installation date because of higher levels of demand.

Smart meters automatically send details of how much gas and electricity you’ve used directly to your supplier, making your bills much more accurate and eliminating the need to submit manual readings.

Due to a government initiative to replace old and outdated energy meters, all energy suppliers must aim to install a smart meter in every home where possible. Whether or not you’re eligible will depend on your location but bear in mind that it might not always be worth it.

Once I intervened Octopus Energy brought the installation of your smart meter forward by a month. A spokesperson said: “Given it has taken longer than we would have liked to arrange this installation, we’ve decided to backdate the customer’s tariff since he moved to us.”

In order to calculate the compensate it should pay you, Octopus will monitor how much energy you export with your solar panels throughout February. It will then use this data to extrapolate how much you would have exported between September when you switched and now.

This will hopefully be particularly helpful to ease the burden of soaring energy bills.

Unfortunately, Octopus doesn’t allow customers to benefit from both the export deal and electric car tariff simultaneously. For the time being you have chosen the second option so that you could save money on charging your car.

Find out how you can save money and benefit from grants by making your home more energy-efficient.