Cheap Hours
A free tool that turns live Octopus Agile electricity prices into one setting on your washing machine.
Overview
Cheap Hours helps households on Octopus Agile set the correct delay on each appliance in order to get the cheapest rate, taking into account cycle length and available delay options.
Visit cheaphours.uk to see the product in action.
The problem
On Agile, the price of electricity changes every thirty minutes and differs across the fourteen Great Britain regions. The evening peak is routinely several times the price of the cheapest overnight and midday windows, and on windy days prices can go negative, paying people to use electricity.
When planned carefully, the savings can be significant. But acting on it can be hard - combine this with the different cycle lengths and delay options for each machine and working out the delays to set on each soon turns into a sizable chunk of mental arithmetic.
Why a list of prices isn’t enough
Knowing which half hour is cheapest still doesn’t tell you what to press. Working that out by hand runs into:
- Washing machines that count backwards from the finish, not forwards from now
- Dishwashers that count forwards, in whole hours, and stop at twenty-four
- Tumble dryers offering three fixed buttons and nothing in between
- Cheap windows the timer simply cannot reach from right now
The result is a tariff that rewards good timing, and no practical, easy way to act on it at ten o’clock at night.
The solution
Cheap Hours scores every delay setting an appliance can physically be put into against live Agile prices, then gives a single instruction in that appliance’s own language — press the delay button until the display shows 21:00, or set the delay to 6h — alongside the real start and finish times and the saving against running it now.
When the cheapest window is out of the timer’s reach, it says when to come back and what to set then. A live price chart shows the day at a glance, negative price windows are called out, and a whole household setup can be shared by link or QR code. There is no account to create, no app to install and no Octopus API key needed.
As one of our own products, it was built to the same standards as our bespoke client systems: the optimisation engine was proved by test before any interface existed, and an automated test suite gates every deployment.
Key features & capabilities
- Handles finish timers, delay-start timers and fixed delay buttons
- Gives the exact value to dial in, not just a time to aim for
- Shows real start and finish times and the saving against starting now
- Says so plainly when skipping the delay and starting now is cheaper
- Suggests when to come back if the cheapest window is out of reach
- All fourteen Great Britain electricity regions
- Tomorrow’s prices picked up within minutes of publication
- Negative price windows highlighted, where you are paid to use electricity
- A price chart comparing Agile against the standard variable tariff
- No account, no app and no Octopus API key required
- Full postcodes never leave the device
- Appliances saved in the browser rather than on a server
- Whole setups shared by link or QR code, with nothing stored
- Works on any modern browser, and installs to a phone home screen
Next steps
If you’re on Octopus Agile, Cheap Hours is free and takes about a minute to set up — or if you have an idea of your own that deserves to be a working product rather than a document, we’d love to talk.
- Try Cheap Hours: cheaphours.uk
- Contact us