Hi @Baker ,

This comment is the personal views of a Forum Volunteer, rather than official advice from OVO.

Based on what you’ve said, I would probably recommend that you withdraw from Power Move and just focus on Power Move Plus.

It’s not worth ruining your health over it - the idea is not to deprive yourself but to shift heavy usage. If you’re not comfortable with that, no-one will hold it against you if you choose step down.

Likewise, if attempting a Power Move and/or Power Move Plus challenge is proving detrimental to your health and/or wellbeing, please discontinue participation immediately. OVO has a duty of care to its customers and they do not want things like PM/PMP to affect your health and wellbeing - that comes first, always.

Thank you for your honest reply, I did wonder if when they designed this if they had taken everything into account in households.

I had thought it probably wasn't for me, yes I will drop out.

Have a wonderful 2024

Yes it is not aimed at people who use little electricity. It is aimed at high users to encourage them to MOVE their demand to off peak, clue is in the name. As a low energy user you'll never reach the target. 

I’m a low user myself with my average usage being less than 5kWh a day, but I’m able to pull off Power Move targets without too much trouble because I’m able to be flexible.

I’m also able to pull off 0.2kWh Power Move Plus targets by being smart with my usage - and this still allows me to run all my Ubiquiti UniFi kit, watch YouTube and do other stuff, just in a slightly different way. I just do my dinner slightly later in the day.

Have you tried the following?

1. Run your laptop on its battery for the event.
2. Turning down your fridge temperature for a couple of hours before the event, then back to normal during the event; to turn down a fridge, you need to turn the thermostat dial to a HIGHER number!!!!
3. Similarly, turning your heating thermostat up by a couple of degrees before the event, then back to normal for the event (or even down one degree for the event, then back to normal afterwards, if you can bear it).

The last 2 work very well for me for 1 hour events, less well for longer events, but I suspect that my insulation could be better.  Of course, you need to check that you aren’t using significantly more energy to pre-heat the house, but I haven’t noticed significantly more (total) gas usage.  I also have a gas fire, then I can use during the event, if I do feel cold.   

    Rgds,

           Steve

Hi Baker

You are in a similar situation to me but I have got my electric usage down to about 60p a day, I use one electric light at a time and during the power move period I use rechargeable Ledeak camping lights £14.99 for a 2 pack  from Amazon, I have sight issues but they are really good and bright and the battery on  my laptop and ipad. I am lucky that I cook on gas but I do reach my £15 target each month. Try not to use the kettle during the PM period, some others have said they fill a flask with hot water at 3.45. Keep trying

Hello @Baker, well done on winning the PowerPlus incentives.

The difference with the monthly Power Move incentive (confusingly, they sound very similar incentives!) is that it compares your peak hours (i.e. 4-7PM) with your overall weekday usage (bank holidays and weekends don’t count), one is a proportion of the other, which changes every few months: sometimes it’s 13.5%, from January to March it’s  between 11.5 and 14.5%.  But the key thing to remember is, that the incentive is based around the idea of your peak hours total consumption as a percentage of your weekday total consumption.  
 

As you've so rightly said, cutting down on, say, cooking and eating, during that 4-7 slot is difficult. If it’s possible to prepare food in advance and just quickly reheat to eat during 4-7, that’s one way around it, but as you say that’s not always to everyone’s tastes, or indeed possible for some.
 

But because Power Move is based on percentage of use in the weekday 4-7 period as compared with overall usage during the weekday, there are possibilities for you I think.  your average is fairly low at around 5kWh per day, so well done on that…but remember the Power Move incentive doesn’t care whether you’re a low user or a high user, it only cares about that crucial percentage figure. So although we might strive to reduce our overall consumption, Power Move won’t reward us for that, not at all. What it will reward us for is reducing the key 4-7 weekday slot when compared to the overall weekday consumption.  
 

I’m so sorry to labour that point, but it’s easy to assume with Power Move that it rewards us for lowering consumption overall, it doesn’t.  So, that said, move as much consumption as you can away from weekends (and bank holidays) into weekdays (NOT into the 4-7 slot, of course!), and very crucially, as you’ve intimated with reference to cooking etc., out of the weekday 4-7 slot and into any other weekday period. You work from home, so that’s an advantage in a way, shift as much of your 35 kWh average weekly electrical consumption as you can into the weekday non-4-7 slots, if I can put it as clumsily as that! Any weekday (except bank holidays).  
 

You don’t want to increase overall consumption, that would be counter-intuitive, just move stuff around as much as possible to make that weekday 4-7 slot LOOK GOOD when compared to the rest of your weekday usage. The constant “always on” stuff like ‘fridges, freezers, laptops, routers, some LED lighting, etc. etc. don’t impact that much on Power Move (unlike other initiatives like PowerPlus) as they don’t militate against that crucial percentage figure. There’s been lots of discussion on here about heating costs, as that is one cost that is likely to be higher 4-7 than during the hours when we’re asleep! Again, working from home is a slight advantage for you, from a percentage viewpoint, but nobody is advising you to sit in the cold and dark during 4-7, least of all OVO, and definitely none of us consumers on here advocate it! 
 

So, don’t lose heart, at 5 kWh average per day, admirably low as that is, you have lots of wiggle room to reduce the 3-hour weekday peak hours slot to the required 600 Watt hours or so: 200 Wh for each of the three 4-7 hours allows scope for lighting, heating, TV etc etc., maybe including some judicious microwaving if you really monitor things carefully.  There’s lots of really good really specific advice from consumers here on how they’re hitting (or sometimes not quite reaching) the Power Move challenge.  
 

Very good luck to you, let us know how you get on over the next few days, remember to monitor scrupulously your half-hourly usage figures in your online OVO Account every day or so.

@Baker and others, I’m such a slow typist, there’ve been so many replies while I was labouring over a hot keyboard! 
 

Power Move is for low users as well, as @Blastoise186 says, it just requires cunning and flexibility! I’m in the low use category myself, even lower than you, and I hit the target OK, but my wife and I are retired so there is a lot of flexibility there. It would be a shame if you pulled out of Power Move, 15 quid a month pays the iniquitous standing charge for electricity for the entire month, or, put another way, pays for about 10 days’ worth of electricity for your household, at 5kWh a day? And @Sally123, what a phenomenally low usage that is at 60p a day…

But it most definitely is NOT worth losing sleep over or making ourselves anxious over, life is to be enjoyed after all without giving ourselves even more headaches than are out there already!  Have a wonderful 2024 yourself, all the very best…

Anyone who can’t meet the target without sitting in the dark and not eating properly, should follow Blatoise’s original advice and forget about Power Move.  In your case the amount of electricity involved isn’t going to make much difference to the grid in any case.

I seem to manage the hour slots. But not when it’s for the month they say l could reach it .Their is two of us. l try cutting down by doing washing at different times so it’s not on after four. out of peak times. cooking is later as we are used to eating later.l work to six at moment.

One of my other tricks overall has been to have a relatively stable and consistent load throughout most of the day, which only really peaks when I put my dinner on. Given that I’m also a fire service volunteer, the random nature of my duties - such as when they take place - also works to my advantage for Power Move Plus as I’m often out when they take place… Or in one case, I slept through an entire PMP event using smashing my target by just 0.13 kWh after doing an exercise the previous day that meant I slept for the next two days straight.

Admittedly, not everyone can pull off the same tricks as I can, but I felt that sharing this may potentially help someone, even if they never come back to say anything here.

The difference between Power Move (an OVO promotion) and Power Move Plus (the OVO name for the National Grid Demand Flexibility Scheme) has been explained many times on these forums.

In particular the first has a percentage target whilst the second has a kWh target, that alone should tell you the difference.

I'm sorry if you cannot understand those differences.

However-

If you think that either (or both) of the two different promotions/schemes is “a con” then you have a simple solution - ignore them and don't take part.

Nobody is forcing you to take part in either scheme.

Hi @pauly113, quite a few on here seem to be there or thereabouts with the Power Move target.  
 

Why do you say “practically no-one” will achieve it, as a matter of interest? Are you basing this on any kind of survey or is it just a gut feeling?

And if you estimate a reasonable weekday target to be more in the region of 20%, can I ask does this mean you feel most people are currently compressing well over a fifth of their weekday usage into the three hours of 4 -  7? Maybe 30 or 40% or something? 50%?

If you feel the present target is unachievable, and I agree it may well be for a number of consumers, why do you say the National Grid still manage to “achieve their objective”?

I don’t think either of the schemes are a con (especially as somebody on this forum has now assured us that OVO are passing on all they get from the National Grid for the Power Move Plus scheme).

But, there are two major problems with the Power Move Scheme, namely the amount we can get is not proportional to our usage, which is unfair for heavy users, and it is also severely stepped, which makes it very difficult for people with limited moveable workload to achieve anything at all.

Why does OVO use this scheme (Power Move Scheme) instead of something like the variable price unit system used by Octopus???  Their scheme doesn’t have either of the two problems detailed above, and everybody can save a bit proportional to both their usual usage and their efforts.

   Rgds,

            Steve

This has nothing to do with Power Move. This is the result of a successful Power Move Plus event where the customer has been rewarded for using 0.1 kWh less than the target. 

You opted out of Power Move on 20 November, so you won’t be earning £15 towards your energy bill for December. Thousands of other OVO customers will, many of them light users like me. You can still opt in for this month. 

Or use 87% of your weekday kWh before 1600 or after 1900 hours.

Can I ask what exactly you turned off previously, during the 4-7 slot? You see, I don’t think turning off the “always on” stuff makes any appreciable difference in the Power Move initiative.  As it’s all about percentages, the always on stuff doesn’t really impact at all. The only possible exception so far as “always on” stuff goes might be heating, which is likely to be on more during 4-7 than at other times.  But heating during the 3 hours 4-7 can be compensated for by using heavy stuff (i.e. the stuff that’s not always on) outside the 4-7 slot, to make the weekday 4-7 slot “look good” in comparison with the overall weekday usage. 
 

It’s a commonly-occurring misconception, this business of “switching everything off” during 4-7.   For most consumers that won’t make the slightest difference towards achieving the Power Move target, because what you’re switching off is not what’s at stake, except for those very few folk who are abnormally low users, averaging under say 2 kWh a day.  For those few, then yes, some slick thinking is required.  But for most people moving stuff from the weekday 4-7 slot and from the weekend/bank holiday slots into any weekday slot except 4-7 of course, that’s what does it.

The challenge is not for everybody, but by repeatedly asserting “it’s a con” doesn’t make it a con, I’m afraid.  It pays for nigh-on 50 kWh of electricity per month for those who do manage it. 
 

Give it a go this month…I think I remember your saying you’d come close at 13.6% previously? Apologies, I may be confusing in my memory posts from two entirely different people!  But if it was you @pauly113 then that’s about as close as you can possibly get, and is actually under the upper limit of the Jan-Feb Power Move.  Nobody’s forcing anyone to take part, any effort at reducing emissions during peak hours is good for all of us ultimately, and if it doesn’t work for some, then it doesn’t work for some consumers, it’s no biggy…but it’s not a con either!

Hi.

im not sure its a con or not.

I signed up only for my electricity meter to stop sending info halfway through the first month.

miraculously started again just before engineer visit midway December  … so I’m still trying it.

Anyway, just here to say I love your analogy (and it would stand opp YCFC!)

I signed up for this last year, without understanding what it was. Despite that I got £8.x in September, and £15 in November. I was at 7.4% mid December, so guessing I made it then. Missed out in October because I was away for much of the month, so my usage was low and flat.

How I managed it without trying? Because I am on economy 10, so with offpeak rates from 1-4pm, and 8-10pm, I have developed habits of not using power between 4-8pm anyway. 

So it’s not impossible for everyone.

Hi All

Can anyone tell me why I never get a chance to join power move plus?

Hi @Sally123 I’ve never participated in the Plus initiative, as it would be impossible for me to lower my consumption at the likely Plus times, but if it helps: my understanding is that you have to apply, then there has to be either a “real” Plus event or a Plus exercise, for which you have to be selected by email a few hours’ in advance of the event, should there be an event.p in the offing.
 

Is it that actual selection part you’re querying? There are others on the forum more knowledgeable than I am on that, but I guess it would depend on several factors based around geography and whether one’s usage profile fits the bill.  
 

You could search for more information using the term

Demand Flexibility Service

I know the EnergySavingTrust.org website has something on it, and there’s been quite a bit on the forum I think, too.

Good luck! 

The Hugo and (I think) Loop apps do the same thing. Hugo calls it Winter Cashback. You don’t need to be invited, you just install the hugo app and link it to your account, and you will get notifications on your phone for each event to tell you to opt in. You can opt in on Hugo or Ovo but not both!

I don’t know, but it may be that the quota is full. It was clearly stated when this year’s scheme was announced that the limited number of seats would be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis. 

Hey @Sally123,

This topic may be helpful:

How can I get involved?

We’ll invite eligible customers this winter to sign up to Power Move Plus - keep an eye on your emails. 

To be eligible, you’ll need to have a smart meter, be a pay monthly or on demand customer and, opt in to half hourly meter reads and email marketing consent. You can update your meter read or marketing preference via your online account. Terms apply to Power Move Plus- see here for details. Please note that our Power Move Plus events are available to limited numbers of customers at the moment and are available on a first come, first served basis but we’re working to open the events up to more customers.

Do I need to opt in to each event?

You can choose which events to opt in to. Sometimes it might not be possible to shift your usage to meet your target. If that’s the case then you don’t need to take part in that event. If you do want to take part, then you’ll need to opt in to each individual event.

If you don’t opt in you won’t receive a reward for that event even if you hit your personal target.