Earth Notes: Octopus Innovation Centre Visit (2026)

From Octopus' email:

Octopus Energy have recently invested over £10m into a state of the art training facility and innovation centre in Slough. This groundbreaking centre trains over 1,000 engineers a year and also provides a test bed for new products such as the Octopus Cosy 6 Air Source Heat Pump. There are also two homes to assist in retrofit training for solar and heat pump installations and an advanced manufacturing facility to enable high precision metalwork fabrication.

Tours normally take approximately 2 hours, Emma, our Low Carbon Housing Director, gives a very interesting and informative talk about everything "Octopus” (Octo-Verse as we call it) about what we do and what we can provide etc. Followed by a tour of our facilities which includes our training centre, innovation and testing area and our distribution centre. And then there's time at the end for any Q & A's.

Inside were quiet (anechoic) and hot/cold chambers, two houses like at Salford Energy House 2, labs with benches to tinker at, and some very nice precision low-volume quick-turnaround manufacturing gear.

We discussed various schemes such as the Zero Bills tariff, available for some retrofit properties now (typically 2013-or-newer building regulations), the "Intelligent" Octopus tariffs that manage PV/battery/etc, and support for in-roof as well as on-roof PV.

There was a Sunamp heat battery spotted in the wild!

The whole visit and discussion of a couple of hours was very candid.

There were a few bits that we were not allowed to photograph such as discontinued experiments/products.