u/cameronchalmers

Hey folks, I’m hoping someone has an answer for me on how to get this solved

Last year, octopus provided a home mini for in-app usage. I switched gas provider to another company last year and it continued working fine. I then switched away from octopus completely and turned it off.

Last month, I switched my energy back to Octopus and noticed the home mini wasn’t working. I contacted Octopus and they gave me some basic troubleshooting steps including a factory reset and then some pairing advice like making sure it’s not too far from the meter or the router. I live in a 1 bed flat and the OHM is about 3m from both the router and the meter so it’s not an issue, and is in the same place as where it was when working before.

I’ve had an update since as Octopus CS escalated to the home mini team, and I’ve basically been told that because my gas is with another supplier the home mini won’t authorise as it usually connects via the gas meter first. They also said that usually when this happens, they can send a manually authorisation to pair with the electricity meter automatically.

In my case, they’ve said they can’t see the device online so can’t send that manual authorisation. I’ve explained that it’s connected to my routers, but once it’s connected it doesn’t seem to be connecting to Octopus servers.

Their solution to this has been for me to just continually attempt to set it up again, in the hopes it’ll hopefully connect at some point. I pointed out that surely I can’t be the only customer who’s got gas with another supplier, but they don’t seem to be able to offer up a solution.

They've also been unclear in their messaging, saying they can see logs and then can't see logs etc.

Does anyone have any experience with this, or ideas on how to get it sorted? I feel like I’m going crazy as I think octopus need to replace it as there’s something wrong with it, but they’re convinced it’s working fine.

The chat with them about this has been going on since 15th March, and I'm no closer to getting this sorted. It doesn't really seem acceptable if they offer something that fundamentally has issues like this.

Edit: just to preempt some questions, some troubleshooting steps I've tried from my side are: create a

• separate 2.4ghz only SSID
• try a different router
• try setting up in the octopus app with an ipad and android phone, instead of my iphone
• checked firewall and network settings, including ports
• did a TCP dump to check for any outgoing connections (there aren't any)
• tried a hotspot so it's a totally different network

Edit 2:

Their latest response is this:

"Thanks for your replies here and I've heard back from my colleague in the home mini dev team, I appreciate this won't be the news you're wanting to hear, however at the minute there isn't anything we're able to do here to get the device paired and equally I don't have a timeframe on when that's likely to change - replacing the device also won't be a resolution to this issue, so I'm afraid there's nothing I can do here at all at this stage. Should this change, my colleague will let me know and advise next steps but in the meantime there's nothing further I can do to help you get this connected."