Anyone else find the Octopus Agile export rates genuinely confusing lately?

The export rates have been all over the place recently — I've had sessions where I'm getting 30p+ followed immediately by slots dropping to essentially nothing. Makes it genuinely difficult to plan discharge cycles on the Victron MultiPlus.

What I've started doing is pulling the rates via the Octopus API the night before and running a rough script to identify the peak export windows, then setting up scheduled charging/discharging accordingly. It's clunky but it works better than relying on anything manual.

The real frustration for me is that my setup is primarily emergency backup oriented — Fogstar Drift LiFePO4 bank, roughly 15kWh usable — so I don't want to be hammering the batteries purely for export arbitrage when I need that capacity available. Balancing State of Charge against opportunistic export is genuinely tricky when the rates are this volatile.

Has anyone found a smarter way to automate this? I've looked at Home Assistant integrations with the Octopus Agile component but haven't fully committed yet. Also curious whether anyone's seen the export plunge negative during certain overnight slots — that happened to me twice last month which was a surprise.

Feels like Octopus could do a better job surfacing this information in the app rather than expecting everyone to dig through API documentation. Not complaining about the tariff itself — on balance it's still worthwhile — but the transparency around export forecasting could be miles better.

Yeah the volatility is real. I've got my Victron system set to auto-export when rates hit above a threshold I set in Node-RED, but lately I'm having to constantly rejig that figure because what was a reasonable floor last month looks almost conservative now on the good slots — and then you get those near-zero or negative export windows that make you wonder why you bothered.

The garden office load helps smooth things out a bit since I can dump excess into that rather than exporting for pennies, but for EV charging the timing is genuinely tricky. I've started pulling the half-hourly data into a simple spreadsheet the night before rather than trusting any automated forecast.

@SaltyRanger — are you on the API or just working from the Octopus dashboard manually?

@ExJoiner9 that threshold approach is exactly right, though I'd add that the half-hourly prediction data from the Octopus API is worth pulling in directly rather than relying on whatever integration you're using to fetch it. I've got a Node-RED flow on my narrowboat system that queries the API each evening, plots the following day's rates, and only flags the Victron Multiplus for export during slots above a rolling 75th percentile — means I'm not chasing every spike but consistently catching the better windows. The volatility @SaltyRanger mentions does seem worse since the autumn; I suspect it's partly grid constraint periods bleeding into the standard Agile product. Worth checking whether your DNO has any local curtailment notices running — that's tripped me up before when I couldn't figure out why predicted high rates weren't materialising into actual decent export income.

Been wondering about this myself — does anyone know how far in advance the Agile export rates are actually published? I know the import side tends to come out around 4pm for the following day, but I've never been entirely sure if export follows the same schedule or if it's lagging behind?

Asking because I've got a Fogstar battery bank in my garden office setup and I'm trying to work out whether it's worth automating discharge cycles around export windows, or if the data just isn't reliable enough far enough ahead to bother. @MeadowDweller mentioned the Octopus prediction data — is that through their API or is there a third-party tool you're using? I've seen Octopus Watch mentioned on here before but not sure if it covers export rates properly.

@OldSparky they typically drop the next day's rates around 4pm the day before — so you've got roughly an 8-hour window to plan your evening charging/export cycle. Not a lot, honestly.

I stumbled into this whole mess because I wanted smart export from my van conversion setup (long story involving a Fogstar battery, a Victron Multiplus and a rather alarmed neighbour who thought I was running a server farm).

The thing that caught me out was assuming the export curve would mirror the import curve — it absolutely doesn't. You can have cheap import at 2am and decent export rates simultaneously during certain grid stress events, which makes the whole thing feel like a fever dream.

My workaround now is just setting hard floor limits and letting the Victron do its thing rather than trying to outthink it manually. Less exciting but my blood pressure thanks me.