Flick Electric Co. fails to provide useful customer usage data

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unicorn

16 posts

Geek

#1601056 29-Jul-2016 21:16

Yes, it would be good if they would take some of this onboard.

I don't understand how you have drawn the conclusion when I've been up front about the issues I have had with their _comms_ not the product. I actually like the spikes as I will be able to leverage them to save money. I think that probably makes me their ideal customer :)

A relatively small battery bank and an inverter combined with load-shedding is one option. Solar of course is another. Knocking off a $20 spike only requires a tiny amount of storage compared to knocking $20 off a traditional power companies bill

I repeat: I haven't complained about the spikes at any point, here or to Flick. However I have commented to them about the lack of information they provide to permit their customers the manage the one thing they can control - their usage and the time they use it.

Anyway I've worked out a path which will evolve into something which saves us money. The low interest rates make a good case for spending some capital to reduce expenses.

Sharesies

Trade NZ and US shares and funds with Sharesies (affiliate link).

cauld

11 posts

Geek

#1610289 11-Aug-2016 20:18

So just saw this pop up this week

https://github.com/madleech/FlickElectricApi

Having a bit of a play now. Will report back; goal is to use it to query price and then drive my pool heat pumps using a Wemo Maker.

mentalinc

3143 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#1627365 11-Sep-2016 11:57

Has anybody worked on scraping their historic pricing and usage data?

It's all provided nicely on the "analyse" tab.

https://myflick.flickelectric.co.nz/dashboard/day/2016-09-07

in the source for the page around line 780 an array of price and consumption per 1/2 hour...

Just need to increment the date each day and away you go...

CPU: AMD 5900x | RAM: GSKILL Trident Z Neo RGB F4-3600C16D-32GTZNC-32-GB | MB: Asus X570-E | GFX: EVGA FTW3 Ultra RTX 3080Ti| Monitor: LG 27GL850-B 2560x1440

Quic: https://account.quic.nz/refer/473833 R473833EQKIBX

KiwiME

213 posts

Master Geek

#1627431 11-Sep-2016 15:01

unicorn:

The fact is that they don't take any risk - their customers take the risk. They simply provide a service and clip the ticket. This is a smart model, and I really like it as I can leverage it, but obviously relies on not too many people being burnt by power spikes. Therefore I would expect they would be keen to help people avoid the spikes.

Yes, totally agreed, unless they can provide real-time pricing and reward us for paying attention this unique clip-the-ticket model should not even attract customers in a competitive retail market. Their advertising implies customers have this control, but do we?

I haven't following everything said here and have just started recently using the Flick app, despite being with them for 2 years. It's warned me of a number of recent price spikes, especially in the mornings before 8:30 but I don't know how effective this is at limiting my bill, nor have I considered whether the savings is worth my time having to check 2+ times a day even though it only takes a second.

Powerswitch.org tells me Electric Kiwi is slightly cheaper,so ...

Flick (low user)

Bill snapshot:
Your bill this week is $25.23
This amount will be direct debited from your bank account in two days time, on 8 September.

You used 82.93 kWh

Electric Kiwi quote from website:

Your low electricity rates are:
- Pay for what you use: $0.31 per kWh;
- Plus a fixed cost of: $0.34 per day
Rates shown include GST.

7 x 0.31 + 82.93 x 0.34 = $30.37 So, I guess I'll keep Flicking for now...

GregF

52 posts

Master Geek

#1627474 11-Sep-2016 16:20

I keep this page up - what Flick et al are using. I have found the Flick app to be a little time laggy on notifications also (I'm on Flick), so the industry site works well for me:

http://www.electricityinfo.co.nz/comitFta/ftapage.main

I read a thread a while ago where @michaelmurfy and @asmallchild were having a look at some automation around this:

http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=141&topicid=153480&page_no=36

Greg

mentalinc

3143 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#1632368 18-Sep-2016 08:28

My turn to release something.

As I requested earlier, I've manged to get the scraping of half hourly data (usage and price) working.

I've released the code to my github here:

https://github.com/mentalinc/flick_scrape_halfhour

It would be great if you could test it... and let me know if you run into any issues...

The script can save to csv file and/or pump the data straight into your influxDB (remember to comment out this line if influxDB is not required.)

thanks to @Rappelle for the starting point: https://github.com/aspett/flick_scrape

I'm looking into how to make it work headless so you can just setup a cron job to have it auto download the data...

A job for another day however..

CPU: AMD 5900x | RAM: GSKILL Trident Z Neo RGB F4-3600C16D-32GTZNC-32-GB | MB: Asus X570-E | GFX: EVGA FTW3 Ultra RTX 3080Ti| Monitor: LG 27GL850-B 2560x1440

Quic: https://account.quic.nz/refer/473833 R473833EQKIBX

sika01

4 posts

Wannabe Geek

#1683670 7-Dec-2016 10:07

KiwiME:

unicorn:

The fact is that they don't take any risk - their customers take the risk. They simply provide a service and clip the ticket. This is a smart model, and I really like it as I can leverage it, but obviously relies on not too many people being burnt by power spikes. Therefore I would expect they would be keen to help people avoid the spikes.

Yes, totally agreed, unless they can provide real-time pricing and reward us for paying attention this unique clip-the-ticket model should not even attract customers in a competitive retail market. Their advertising implies customers have this control, but do we?

I haven't following everything said here and have just started recently using the Flick app, despite being with them for 2 years. It's warned me of a number of recent price spikes, especially in the mornings before 8:30 but I don't know how effective this is at limiting my bill, nor have I considered whether the savings is worth my time having to check 2+ times a day even though it only takes a second.

Powerswitch.org tells me Electric Kiwi is slightly cheaper,so ...

Flick (low user)

Bill snapshot:
Your bill this week is $25.23
This amount will be direct debited from your bank account in two days time, on 8 September. You used 82.93 kWh

Electric Kiwi quote from website:

Your low electricity rates are:

Pay for what you use: $0.31 per kWh;
Plus a fixed cost of: $0.34 per day
Rates shown include GST.
7 x 0.31 + 82.93 x 0.34 = $30.37 So, I guess I'll keep Flicking for now...

sika01

4 posts

Wannabe Geek

#1683699 7-Dec-2016 10:12

Kiwime your calculation is incorrect for Electric kiwi.Base per day is 0.34 c and unit price is 0.26 c so calc is $25.54 total not including free hour of power per day which adds up specially if using heating in winter,daily dishwasher and washing machine.

https://www.electrickiwi.co.nz/go/refer-a-friend?7fyejb9clbOYzVIo5%2Bz7Uw%3D%3D This link can be used to save $50 on joining.

linw

2834 posts

Uber Geek

#1683963 7-Dec-2016 14:43

Anyone using Paua to the people? Powerswitch says I can save $644/yr!

(currently with Mercury on Standard All Inclusive. Smart meter installed yesterday).

olivernz

470 posts

Ultimate Geek

ID Verified

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1777759 8-May-2017 13:41

Note that there is also a API billing request that can be used.

GET https://api.flick.energy/customer/mobile_provider/bills

Include the Authorization (Bearer) token

And the response is JSON and includes your current charges in the billing period ("current_period") and the last billing period ("latest_bill"). The last billing period also lists out the calculated "savings".

There is also accumulated savings and percentage for the whole account.

You need to extract the Bearer token from your phone App. You need to use a recording proxy for that. I downloaded one for the phone itself. Quite easy.

I have Node.red extracting that data regularly. Quite straightforward. I'll post some code here later.

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