Why Octopus Agile — Aveum Tariff Guide

Tariff guide

How Aveum runs your home at the lowest cost.

Aveum reads your electricity prices and schedules your devices around the cheapest windows - automatically, every 30 minutes.

Electricity price chart showing cheap and peak windows

How Aveum works

Reads your electricity price

Aveum pulls your live or day-ahead tariff prices - flat, timed, or half-hourly. It always knows what electricity costs right now and later today.

Schedules devices around the cheapest windows

EV charging, battery charging, heat pump pre-heating - anything Aveum controls gets moved to the cheapest slots automatically.

Makes a new decision every 30 minutes

Aveum runs continuously throughout the day and night. Each half-hour slot is evaluated against your constraints and the latest prices.

Reports what it did and why

Every morning you get a plain-English summary of the decisions made, the cost of each action, and the estimated saving.

The optimisation principle

Price variability is the engine of savings.

The bigger the gap between cheap and expensive electricity, the more Aveum can save by shifting your load. On a flat tariff that gap is small. On a half-hourly variable tariff it can exceed 30p/kWh within the same day. Aveum makes 48 scheduling decisions every day - automating those shifts reliably for every device adds up to material savings over the year.

How different tariffs affect optimisation potential

Aveum works on any tariff. The more your price varies across the day, the more there is to optimise. These are illustrative ranges based on a typical UK home - actual results depend on your setup and usage.

Tariff type	Price structure	What Aveum can do	Typical range
Flat-rate tariff	Same price all day	Shift load to off-peak windows where available	~£50–£200/yr
Fixed overnight window	Cheaper rate during set hours (e.g. 00:30–05:30)	Automatically schedule EV, battery, and appliances into the cheap window	~£200–£450/yr
Half-hourly variable	Price changes every 30 minutes, set the day before	Full optimisation — Aveum picks the cheapest slots across the entire day	~£400–£1,000/yr

Ranges are illustrative, not guarantees. Actual savings depend on your devices, consumption pattern, tariff rates, and how much load can be shifted.

Aveum is not a tariff tool. It's a continuous scheduling system that works across any price structure. Switching to a more variable tariff gives Aveum more to work with - but the automation is valuable regardless.

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