I have been a happy customer of Octopus Energy for almost two years now. As they have an extensive list of tariffs I have been on a few of them. Originally started of on a standard Electricity / Gas tariff, moved onto Economy 7 after installing solar and a battery and now on the Agile tariff.
The standard smart meter display from Octopus works very well for standard tariffs, but cannot keep up with the smart tariffs. It can only display one charge rate for either gas or electricity so if you are on a Smart tariff or TOU (Time of Use) tariff it does not give you the correct infomation as it does not know all the details.
Recently have been playing about with Home Assistant to bring all smart home systems into one place. Rather than going to many different webpages to get all the info I have currently available.
An excellent integration from BottleCapDave is the Unofficial Home Assistant integration for interacting with Octopus Energy . I was using it to record gas and electricity consumption and costs. Which it can do really well but it is a day behind due to how the data from a smart meter is uploaded.
But lucky for me I got sent a Octopus Mini, which can talk directly to the smart meter and you can get near realtime electricity and gas usage evey 30 minutes (due to gas meter being on a battery). BottleCapDaves integration fully supports the Octopus Mini so once setup will give you realtime costs for your electricity what ever tariff you are on.
As this information was now available in Home Assistant, I used a program called ESPhome which is software that enables easier programming of ESP32 and similar devices to become a sensor or display for Home Assistant.
Using ESPhome to program an ESP32 and with a Waveshare 2.9inch Epaper display connected to it. Means I can now have a smart display that shows me the correct prices in near realtime. So I can keep track without having to be glued to a computer or phone.
Using the same display I have also added the SOC (State of Charge) for my battery, so that is another bit of information I can now see in realtime, in a more convenient manner.
Display currently updates every 60 seconds and shows
Victron System Battery SOC
Current Local Time
Electricity kWh used Today
Gas kWh Used Today
Electricity Total Cost in GBP including Standing Charge Today
Gas Total Cost in GBP including Standing Charge Today
More information and the ESPHome yaml code is available at
https://github.com/anothermort/Octopus_mini_HA_Epaper_display
Parts Used
Waveshare 2.9 Inch E-Paper Display Panel
** Above are Amazon Affiliate links **
Still To Do
Add a startup splash screen
Dynamically change fonts sizes so larger costs or energy usages can be displayed.
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