This page was last updated on 30/4/2020
The purpose of this page is to help you resolve common issues you may experience.
Octopus Energy Watchdog will only display full days. That is, days with 48 data points, one for each half hour of the day. It also keeps into account when we change the clock, so days between 46 and 50 data points are allowed. Unfortunately sometimes when there are glitches in the Octopus backend, some days may be incomplete. The app will NOT display them until they are complete sets. This helps you quickly spot missing data, and to raise it with Octopus.
This also means that if the API sends several lines of consumption for today (usually the early hours of the day), you will see them in the dashboard, but the app won't display them until tomorrow, when the full 48 datapoints will have been released. This is done in the interest of keeping data tidy and comparable, rather than publishing incomplete days.
The Octopus Energy API doesn't provide a way to correlate a user with its own meters, the products and local tariffs used by said meter. For electricity it's fairly easy to find out by scraping the dev page, but for gas it isn't. You won't find the correct product names as displayed in the API on the bill, or anywhere. Because of how obscure and difficult these details are to obtain, the feature was left out for now. I'm planning to add a 'DIY gas tariff' feature in the next release, where you can enter your normal gas rate to get calculated costs rather than fetching them from the API.
Sometimes this happens to certain accounts. Unfortunately the app is only showing what the API is sending. The only caveat is that the app waits until there are 48 datapoints for a single day before displaying it (i.e. 48 half-hourly segments to make up 24 hours). The issue is almost always in the Octopus systems stopping automatic updates - it is a fairly common occurrence and it usually gets fixed in a timely fashion. The only solution is to email [email protected], as they can look into it and fix it for you.
A fix was deployed in version 2.5 to cater for new gas meter serial numbers which use a different string format. This didn't exist until a while ago, so the app wouldn't recognise it and throw an error. Logging into the app with the automatic process from 2.5 onwards should work. If it STILL doesn't work, log out and use the 'manual login' process. This means that the app wasn't able to correctly scrape your gas meter details from the dev page.
Use the manual login process and enter manually the details of the meter(s) you want to see within the app.
The app won't be very useful in this instance unfortunately.
This feature is on the roadmap, probably for the next release.
Your credentials are not stored anywhere. Not even on your device. If you use the automatic login process, your phone will launch a headless browser, literally navigating to the Octopus account and dev page, and then scraping the required details (MPAN, Serial Number, Product, Tariff for electricity and gas). Once those details have been gathered, they get stored locally on your phone, while your username and password are discarded. Alternatively, please use the manual login process and paste your details by hand.
To make the app fast, every time it starts it requests the API for all data between the last available datapoint and now. Sometimes, if Octopus gets stuck, they stop sending data (for example, on 10/1/2020). Then the issue gets fixed on 13/1/2020 and you start getting data again from that date. The missing days haven't been backfilled yet, but eventually they will come through. When this happens, the app only looks forward and will never go back to request the missing days. The fix is easy though. Go to More -> Force Full Refresh. This will request the entire dataset for the past 60 days. Please use sparingly as it performs a lot of requests to the Octopus API. I'm planning to improve the code in future with a routine to go and backfill missing days whenever it happens.
It was recently brought to my attention that SMETS1 meters send consumption in kWh, while SMETS2 meters send it in cubic metres. The API just pushes numbers without specifying what you're getting. To provide some mitigation to this, if you know what are you getting back from the API, you can set a custom gas multiplier in the More section. For example, if you're sure you have a SMETS2 meter and you're getting consumption in cubic meters, you can convert it to kWh by entering a multiplier in the settings. This value tends to hover between 11.18 and 11.22, depending on where you live, the type of gas and many other parameters. You may be able to find this coefficient by tinkering with your meter interface, or by checking the Octopus bill.
You're right! Many customers requested to be able to store 60 days worth of data in the app, to help when performing comparisons with the bill. You will notice this if you use the Export CSV function. That said, to avoid cluttering up the interface it still displays only the last 30 days. In normal usage scenarios, the app will only request the delta between the last time it was opened and the current date, so it won't be any slower than normal once the login has been performed.