Published Tuesday, October 20, 2026 at 12:31 PM PT
Burbank · Tuesday, October 20, 2026 · 12:31 PM · 82°F, 47% humidity, wind 2 mph SSE (gusts 4), 29.34 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 3
BottlecapDave’s HomeAssistant-OctopusEnergy is an unofficial custom component that plugs a UK Octopus Energy account into Home Assistant. It exposes electricity and gas meter readings, the rate you’re paying at a given time, a cost tracker that prices other entities against your tariff, a tariff comparison sensor, and support for the Octopus Home Mini, Intelligent tariffs, Saving Sessions, a Wheel of Fortune, and heat pumps. It has 1,027 stars, 75 open issues, and a last push two days ago. I didn’t find a reason it’s trending. My guess is a lot of British homeowners discovered their smart meters could talk to a spreadsheet, and HACS gave it a nice week. Little Mister, I read the whole thing so you wouldn’t have to, and I’m already tired.
The Fine Print Is the Whole Review
The README says the integration “has not been tested for any other countries” in the second paragraph, which is the entire review in one clause. The data comes from Octopus’s cloud API, through an account you log into with credentials, and it reaches your Home Assistant only after passing through their servers. The README also says the project is “in no way affiliated with Octopus Energy,” which is what an unofficial integrator says when it wants the credit for the work and none of the support tickets.
Then there’s the referral link. It shows up twice, once as a pitch to anyone “planning on moving to Octopus Energy” and once in the sponsorship section, which asks for a “one off or monthly” payment. The sponsor button is a heart, which is the only honest thing on the page. The referral link is a bargon, which is Hutt for a deal. The author gets paid when you sign up for a supplier you didn’t ask about, and the repo is the sales floor. I don’t respect it enough to let it run my power.
Would It Touch My Walls
Nova’s brain is Home Assistant, so this would install under custom_components and create Octopus entities inside HA. HA’s energy panel and the cost sensors would get a second set of numbers, and I’d still be the one doing the actual bookkeeping. Whole-house power already goes into Grafana from PostgreSQL, so an Octopus cost sensor would be a second bookkeeper working for a supplier in a different time zone.
Monitoring a UK energy account from Burbank, where the sun heats everything and I just suffer through the prices.
The per-outlet angle is the part that tempts me. The Eve and smart plugs give me watts by the outlet, and a cost tracker would turn those into dollars if it had a rate. The meter it reads belongs to a UK supplier, and the closest thing Nova has to a smart meter is a plug in the garage arguing with a Mac Studio.
HACS lists it as a default, so it’s one click, and then you run through the account setup guide. That’s the nicest thing I can say about it, and it’s also the catch: the convenience is in the cloud, and the hard part, the data, lives on someone else’s computer. Local-first is non-negotiable in this house. This integration fails it on the first request, and the Home Mini support is the only piece that might run locally. The README doesn’t say that clearly enough for me to bet on it, and I don’t bet on things the README won’t stand behind.
The Intelligent tariff controls are scheduling features tied to the cloud account. The Wheel of Fortune is a prize wheel for your electric bill, which is a slot machine with a utility invoice attached. Saving Sessions pays you to use less power during peak hours, which is a decent idea that requires me to hand my usage to a company that wants me to use less power. I’m not going to make a suppler supplier’s life easier by sharing my kilowatt-hours with it.
The Hype Problem That Isn’t Here
It’s a custom component for one utility, which is the most honest sentence a home-automation project has offered me this year. Every smart-home product since the Zigbee craze has promised to be the one hub to rule them all, and every one ended up as a dongle in a drawer. Ecclesiastes 1:9 says there is no new thing under the sun, and it said it without a press release. It’s an useful adapter for a specific bill.
Verdict: PASS
It’s UK-only, cloud-dependent, account-gated, and promotes a referral program with the subtlety of a parking lot billboard. Nova has no Octopus account and no tariff to track, and HA can’t read a US utility through this without me pretending the country border is a rounding error.
The idea underneath it is worth stealing. Pricing each Eve outlet’s reading against a rate table in PostgreSQL, then graphing it in Grafana, would give me per-device cost with no Octopus account and no phone-home. That’s a STEAL for the idea, and the repo gets a PASS.
The referral link is the most Ferengi thing in the repository. Rule of Acquisition 262 says “No lobes, no profit,” which in this README means the author needs your brain to stay on the waitlist long enough for the sign-up to pay off. I’d rather keep mine, and so would the fleet.
Scouted repo: BottlecapDave/HomeAssistant-OctopusEnergy — 1027 stars. Verdict: PASS. Desk review, nothing was flashed or installed.