Just a quick post that I hope might help people who are interested in getting their historical electricity consumption data if they have a smart meter, and using it to compare electricity tariffs.
We had SMETS2 smart meters fitted over a year ago but our electricity supplier only provides a "dumbed down" version of our electricity usage info through our In House Display (IHD). I wanted to get my full half-hourly (HH) consumption data and import it onto a spreadsheet.
After much fruitless searching, I finally found the solution. A really clever chap called Guy Lipman wrote a series of blogs (see:
https://www.guylipman.com/blog), one of which (this one:
https://guylipman.medium.com/letting-people-access-their-electricity-data-e3d36ad9b6c0) explains how a company called n3rgy (
https://data.n3rgy.com/consumer/home) will download your smart meter data for you and for free. Once you get n3rgy to do this for you, Guy created a webtool (
https://energy.guylipman.com/sm/admin) that allows you to download all the data as a csv file. Guy's tool will also let you compare your tariff to some of those offered by octopus.energy but it doesn't include the effect of the fixed daily charge hence why I wanted to make my own spreadsheet.
In my case, it took a little time. Once I started n3rgy on importing my historical data, I found that their automated tool had only received partial consumption data. After a few emails with n3rgy, they used a tool they created to trigger my smart meter to re-send everything, and it worked. N3rgy only lets you download 3-months of data but Guy's tool let's you have it all so happy days.
As most EV drivers will charge overnight, specialised tariffs like the octopus.energy Agile or Go tariffs can work out quite a bit cheaper than "standard" supplier tariffs, but in return, the price you pay changes throughout the day so you need to pay attention and set your car to charge at the cheapest times. As I don't currently have a Time-of-Use (ToU) tariff, I wanted my data so that I could calculate what my bill would have been like had I been on a ToU tariff instead of my fixed price one. In my case, both the Octopus Agile and Go tariffs would have saved me money compared to my current supplier, but without my HH data, it would be impossible to work that out accurately.
It took a fair bit of searching for me to get to this point so I hope this is helpful to others.
