Like most businesses and homes we wanted a way to save money on energy bills, so we decided to give this problem some TPS attention.
It actually started as a very casual conversation with a friend, who brought an Octopus Energy tariff to our attention called Agile Octopus. In a nutshell, this is a ground breaking new tariff that offers electricity prices based on the fluctuating wholesale rate. The price for the coming 24 hours is published in 30 minute intervals every evening.
The electricity price is dictated by the demand, which naturally changes based on the time of day, and also the supply, which depends on the energy mix being generated. Green energy being much cheaper than burning gas for instance.

Sometimes there is so much green energy available that the price drops below zero, and you can actually be paid to take electricity, because it is cheaper to do this than curtail wind farms and pay gas power stations to deal with any spikes. So we wanted to create a way to help shift our usage to cheaper times, but also use/store it, especially if being paid to do so.
Battery systems were far too expensive to test this concept, but we realised that we could use a hot water tank as an energy store. A hot water tank acts a bit like a battery, but stores hot water to be used when it is needed as oppose to electricity. The other plus side is that it is already installed and ready to go. We just needed a way to control the immersion heater to convert the cheap electricity into hot water.
So we built our own Smart Switch and coupled it with a simple web app to tell it when to turn on and off, and also give clear insights to show when it was best to use appliances day and night.
The results? We were blown away! Month 1 we didn’t expect to see much as knew we would need make tweaks and fine tune the solution, but it showed a saving of over £100 per month compared to the same period for the previous 2 years!
These results continued and we knew we had to test with others to make sure it wasn’t a fluke. So we built some more units and spoke to some friendlies about testing. It wasn’t a fluke, so we set about turning it into a product.
Ecomise, as it became known, is now a proper product. A world away from the clunky box of bits that we came up with, it is small, compact and DIY installable with just 4 connections.
We are immensely proud of it as not only does it save people money within weeks, but it tackles a huge problem around using and storing green energy which often goes to waste because we cannot use it.