OVO Power Move, can you tell me more?

Thank you  @BPLightlog

Hi @Vivienne33 ,

Yup, that’s right. OVO is doing this as part of the OVO Power Move trial, but it’s only available to invited members who’ve all received the email and have already been selected. If you weren’t invited, I’m afraid you won’t qualify.

Thanks for your replies, really helpful. Maybe because we’re low users anyway theres not much saving to be made here I’m afraid! Thanks again. 

Interesting conversations, I joined this forum as OVO supplied only basic information about Power Move when I contacted OVO via Twitter.   Has OVO stated when the trial will be completed and, assuming the trial is successful, at what date will OVO roll out Power Move to all their Smart Meter customers?

I’m disappointed to have missed out on this trial, excluding individuals with solar/solar and battery seems nonsensical to me. Surely a kWh saved from usage is a kWh saved, which ever household it comes from. 

We have battery which sits almost idle all winter as there’s no solar to charge it. These sorts of time-of-use incentives would be perfect for using the battery to its maximum. 

For anyone who was interested in joining the trial but hasn’t been able to, I can recommend signing up to loop.homes, they offer a free service to monitor your energy usage and have also announced a service like Power Move where you get paid £3 per kWh saved (split 80/20 between user/service provider) during the trial periods. 

@Tim_OVO mentioned an extension of the PowerMove trial in December - keen to hear more about this and how we can sign up. Tim, is there a request list we can join for this? 

Thanks!

Yes @f0rtune we've also signed up to the Loop trial - it being part of the National Grid test. 
I tend to agree that it would have been useful for battery storage to add into the whole experiment but at least with Loop, there’s another option. 
 

Well it is proving a challenge. Three full time workers in the house wanting to cook before 7pm using electric fan oven and/or grill. Part of the issue is that we use little energy at other times. We do have an EV but that gets charged during daylight hours when solar PV can contribute to the usage. The dishwasher and washing machine run during the day and not at the same time, for similar reasons. All lighting is LED.

So far this month we’re running between 15% and 18% at the peak hours, above the 12.5% target.

We’re also in a Demand Side Response trial via our EV charger provider. That can reduce the power going to the car when grid load is high. There’s no income for that trial (mind you we probably won’t get any for the Power Move trial either)!

Sorry for the slow reply @BPLightlog but I looked at this in the past and found that the labelling of bars in Ovo’s plot of half-hour usage was out by 30 min. I can no longer check this, as I switched to another supplier a year ago, but I recall that the one labelled 00:00 to 00:30 was really electrical energy consumed between 23:30 and 24:00 the previous evening. I complained about this a few times on this forum in the past, so perhaps Ovo have fixed this by now.

The unambiguous proof, for me, was to carry out a carefully timed creep test, with the electricity supply switched off (next to the meter), for a period that (only just) includes one complete half-hour interval (make a note of your on/off times!) The next day you can look at Ovo’s plot and see where is the bar that shows zero usage.

(If you don’t like having the power completely off for that long a period, you can try boiling the kettle a few times in the middle of one of those half-hour intervals, and then look to see which bar has the appropriate “excess” usage.

Cheers

Simon

Hi @pmarsh42 @f0rtune,

I’ve spoken to the team who are looking after the two trials this winter to incentivise off peak power usage, one of them being Power Move. They follow the same eligibility criteria, and initially the second trial that’s launching in December is recruiting participants in the same way as Power Move: by an email invite to those eligible. This trial is expected to be much bigger and the way people can join will change later this winter. For the moment those that follow this criteria may get an email inviting them to join.

Criteria for eligibility:

• Billed on OVO’s in house billing platform (majority of OVO customers are)
• No upcoming switch away from OVO
• Pay monthly customer 
• Opted in to marketing communication 
• Email address available
• Smart meter
• For half hourly (HH) smart meter reading schedules: No missing consumption data in last 21 days
• For daily smart meter reading schedules: No readings missing in last 21 days

A sample of 10k HH and 10k Daily are going to be chosen for the first trial batch

Hello Ovo Friends. I have not received any details of the scheme for those with Smart Meters which involves reducing power use for a period of time at peak times. Can anyone tell me if Ovo have such a scheme and if so, how I join it? RobA.

Thank you BPLighlog. Very helpful.

Here’s some more info on one of those other schemes