Hi mate, yes you have to migrate to the Agile tarrif and to do so you will need a smart meter smet2 so the Octopus can read your meter at regular intervals. Agile Octopus is a beta smart tariff, helping bring cheap greener power, but is directly impacted by wholesale market volatility. Agile prices can spike up to 100 p/kWh any time
so best suited to customers who can shift large amounts of their energy use to avoid these expensive peaks.
You can access the half hour rates I listed above the day before, so you can plan energy consumption well in advance. As you can see most of today was operating on plunge pricing so that Octopus were effectively paying us for consumption. As evening approaches our prices increased and at the moment from 18:00 to 19:00 they will be just shy of 30p a kwh reducing back down after that.
We migrated over from the Tracker tarrif that also follows wholesale energy prices but on a daily basis rather than half hourly. This tariff is also designed for customers who can shift energy usage out of expensive peak periods providing transparent pricing. You don't get plunge pricing on tracker and the price is viewable the day before for the whole 24 hours of your consumption. It has over the last year been much cheaper than a flexible or fixed rate.
For example I had a shower this afternoon and stayed in for half an hour with a gin and tonic and some prefab sprout music. It's a 9kw shower meaning it consumes 9kw in an hour of use. The price at the time was around minus three pence a kwh so it consumed 4.5kw of energy at - minus threpence which equates to minus 13.5 pence which octopus credit off our bill.
This morning after her shower, the wife just left it running for 4 hours with the window open whilst I boiled kettles and did the washing and drying. Maybe today was just lucky as I did not know they operated plunge pricing for so long during the day and an electric car would have really really come in handy.
You can swop over to tracker or their Agile and if it doesn't suit they have a guarantee for you to leave without penalty, so effectively a no risk trial.
The gas price on Agile will be the gas price applied to the tracker rate.
Re the free energy periods you mentioned. That is related to the non smart tarrifs were if you sign up they will give you a small period of free power when the grids full. The free energy they give you will be the energy you use above and beyond what your normal usage is for that period.