Guides

The cheapest time to run a washing machine on Octopus Agile

Last updated: 10 August 2026

On a typical Agile day, the same wash cycle can cost three or four times as much at 5:30pm as it would at 3am. The washing machine is the ideal appliance to shift: nobody needs a wash to happen at a particular hour, most machines have a delay timer, and a household runs enough loads a year for the pence to add up.

The short answer

Most days, the cheapest time to run a washing machine on Agile is in the small hours — roughly midnight to 6am — with a second, shallower dip often appearing in the early afternoon. The one window to avoid is about 4pm to 7pm, when prices peak. But "most days" is doing a lot of work in that sentence: the exact cheapest half hours move with the weather, and they differ between the fourteen regions. The right answer tonight is a lookup, not a rule of thumb.

What a wash actually costs

A modern machine washing at 30–40°C typically uses somewhere around 0.5–1 kWh per load — most of it heating the water, which is why hotter cycles cost more. As an illustration, take a 0.8 kWh load on a day where the evening peak is 35p/kWh and the overnight trough is 10p/kWh:

• Peak wash: 0.8 × 35p = 28p
• Overnight wash: 0.8 × 10p = 8p

That's 20p saved per load — over 70% off — for pressing a button before bed. At five loads a week it's roughly £50 a year from the washing machine alone, and more in a household that washes hotter or more often. The full savings guide works through the whole kitchen.

The timer trap: "7:00" probably isn't a start time

Many washing machines use a finish-anchored delay: the display shows when the cycle will be done, not when it starts. Set "7:00" on a machine with a 2½-hour cycle and it sits idle for 4½ hours, starts on its own, and finishes at the seven-hour mark. To aim the actual running time at a cheap window you have to add the cycle length to the window you want, then round to the steps the dial offers — arithmetic that's easy to get backwards at 10pm. Our delay-timer guide covers the conventions; Cheap Hours does the sums and just tells you what to make the display say.

Finish-anchored timers have a genuinely nice property for laundry, though: you can aim the finish at your alarm clock. A wash that ends at 6:30am ran through the cheap hours and comes out of the drum fresh — damp clothes left sitting all night are how you end up washing the same load twice.

Practical habits that make it work

• Load the machine in the evening, set the delay before bed. Tomorrow's prices are published around 4pm, so by evening the whole night is visible and scoreable.
• Aim the finish at wake-up time on finish-anchored machines, if the cheap window allows it, so the load never sits wet.
• Think about noise. A machine against a bedroom wall may make 3am spin cycles a bad trade at any price. Cheap Hours lets you set the earliest hour you're happy for a timer to fire, and scores only the settings you'd actually accept.
• Wash cooler when you can. Timing changes what a kWh costs; a cooler cycle also means fewer kWh. The two savings multiply.
• Check the machine's own safety guidance about running unattended. Manufacturers differ on what they're comfortable with; if you'd rather be awake while it runs, the early-afternoon dip is often the next-best window.

Keep reading

• Appliance delay timers explained — the "starts in" vs "finishes in" arithmetic in full
• The cheapest time to run a tumble dryer — the natural second half of laundry day
• Plunge pricing — the days a wash pays you