Improve daily usage chart

[HomeGeek]

When I view my power usage and I'm on a daily chart, under the chart it shows me night, morning, afternoon, and evening.

it would be much more useful to tell me peak, off-peak, and shoulder times. If I'm on the EV night saver plan, then it should be displayed at the appropriate times.

Or use different colours during the different rates, but I know that finding a colour scheme that works for all different types of colour bindness can be difficult.

Anyway, the point is that the daily usage chart should make it clear to me which rate that usage is being billed at.

[Lester]

..

I think that one has come up before, but hasn't had any progress.

The main website account page usage clicking through to daily usages shows 4 time blocks broken down to 4 lots of 4 hours, which helps with seeing EV Night Saver 0000-0600 usage, but none of those follow the normal TOU hours.

I feel this is likely going to be something that can't be done feasibly, due to the fact that states are all over the place with time blocks and charging.

Here in SA it is :

Off peak 2330 - 0630 @ 33.781c (or EV Night Saver 0000 - 0600 @ 8c) 

Peak 0600 - 1000 @ 48.499c

Shoulder 1000 - 1500 (cheapest of the various tariffs) @ 29.15c

Peak (again) 1500 - 0000 48.499c

For interest, supply charge is 108.031c a day, all pricing about includes gst.

Yes, SA has the dearest power in Australia.

I know some states have much more generous shoulder soak hours and rates, and other different tariff blocks of TOU times.

Metering also sees each individual property need to be assessed for rates and times for those with older analogue meters and peak / off peak single tariff.

It could be one day it will become more consistent, but until then it would be a bit of a job to do some sort of grayscale shading of the app TOU tariffs on the app.

[HomeGeek]

The billing system knows what state I'm in and what rate applies at what time of the day. They have the information.

Also, when I'm logged into my account, on the overview tab, looking at the electricity account, there's a "View plan details" link, and at the bottom of the page it tells me exactly what times of the day the peak, shoulder, off peak, and night saver EV times apply.

So, all the information is already available when I'm logged into my account.  AGL's developers "just" need to link it up.

I'm a software developer, and I know that old, complex legacy systems can not only have technical difficulties to modify, but also process barriers because everyone (especially management) are afraid of introducing bugs. And I imagine bugs in the billing system are the scariest types of software bugs, so there will be a lot of risk aversion.

But I dispute that it's not feasible. No matter how many different start/end times for different rates across the country, and no matter how many times these change throughout the year, the billing system must have this information. Well, this can be pulled out into a microservice, and then both the billing system, and usage systems can use the single data source. And as stated previously, it already tells me the time of day for each rate on the "view plan details" page.

Also, I find it interesting that the phone app is (in my opinion) significantly worse than the website on my computer. The phone app shows usage by 30 minute blocks, and lists them vertically, so I can't see more than 6 hours at a time.  While it's more precise, it's much harder to have an overview of the whole day since I can't see more than 1/4 of the day, unlike the website which clearly shows me the full day. Finally, while the phone app can tell me what my rates are, unlike the website, the phone app doesn't say what time of the day these rate apply.

[Lester]

Geek, you're right about the mobile app and the website login account info, it does take a mindset shift when going from one to the other,

And I know what you're saying overall about all the info being there, but the word you used in your reply . . . "just".

I know a lot of business / people in general shudder when someone comes to them and ask can you "just" do this, or that.

Perhaps you might be better off with a spreadsheet to work all that out on your downloadable data ?

AGL is good in this way as the AGL data download via the website usage page has everything you want, all it requires is dropping that data into a customised spreadsheet.

This would give you a lot of scope to display whatever you wanted . . . an overall bill to date, break down power use in kwh / $ to a day / week / month, right down to specific 30min intervals if desired, compare days / weeks / billing periods, seasons, even the weather if you wanted to track that in with the data.

It is probably very useful to track solar performance, as I would think you probably have solar along with your EV plan ?

I've got a spreadsheet half done, just want to tweak a few things in the meter box first, then I can have half the data I do now to process.

It'd be nice if AGL could provide a lot more specific info in the app, or even just the website login account charts, but knowing how many ask for this or that, it seems like unless it's something very easy to implement, the likelihood of such changes is very low.

[Deepesh_AGL]

Hi Homegeek, Thank you for your valuable suggestion. I will pass this on to our digital team who looks after our AGL Applications. Cheers, Deepesh