Hi

I have solar panels and a battery, installed towards the end of October, so this is the first full month of them,

I did come in at 13% so achieved the target by the skin of my teeth! However, with a battery I don’t think I can actively do anything towards this target - I use a residual amount just to keep everything connected with a little burst every so often if I exceed what the battery can deliver, eg kettle plus toaster plus … , and only this weekend is the first time I have drained the battery and had to use off the grid for a significant amount (cloudy days / entertaining / lots of cooking). 

So as with comments above, I can only treat this as a bonus, although it did make me think about delaying cooking till after 7pm on Friday as I knew my battery was running low!

There is no Power Move in the summer so using SPs in the summer (with or without batteries) will not disadvantage you.

For about five months in the winter (approximately centred on December 21st) you only produce about 10% of the total power for the year so again, SPs won’t particularly disadvantage you but it will make it slightly harder to meet the target by removing your non-peak usage from the grid. If you have batteries though you can use what little power you do generate to use in the Peak which will tip it in your favour.

To be honest the only reason why I can meet the Power Move challenge is because I have an EV and I only charge up outside of the Peak during a weekday. For November I achieved 9.0% even using an oven about half the time in the peak. I don’t have SPs.

Peter

 Say 100% of my days usage is 

Washing machine

Dishwasher

1 cooked meal

Heating 16 hrs 7am til 11

Lighting 7 hrs 4 til 11

TV 7 hrs 4 til 11

And the top three are close to being free

and the other 2 reduced between about 8 & about 4

Surely I can't use less than 25% in those 3 hrs

Hi @Katymac, I can see how frustrating it must feel!

@solarrolar and others above have largely said what I can only repeat, I’m afraid.  However, you’re doing very well to have your washing machine, dishwasher and 1 cooked meal close to being free!! I envy you that, I must say! My solar panels produce, if I’m lucky, no more than a daily total of 1kWh, maybe 1.5kWh if I’m very lucky, during the darkest months Nov to Feb. That’s up here in Sunderland…maybe you live somewhere with more winter brightness, South Coast perhaps? Plus of course my PV array, being split, the NW is virtually 50% in total darkness during the winter months, and it’s not a very large array in any case. 
 

I would say, though, if you are using 25% of your total weekday consumption (and it’s important to stress weekday here, weekends and bank holidays do not count for Power Move purposes) during the 4-7 slot, then it sounds as though there is indeed scope to move some of this to weekday slots other than the key 4-7 slot. After all, 4-7 slot is only 12.5% of the total 24 hour weekday in terms of hours  Would you regard it as a cheek on my part if I asked roughly how many kWh this 25% weekday average consists of? The only reason I ask is that if your average weekday 4-7 consumption is under, say, 350Wh (0.35 kWh), then this means that your total weekday consumption is around 2kWh on average (phenomenal in winter), and with those sorts of winter figures without storage batteries you are doing absolutely famously, it’s going to be hard to improve on. I hit the target only because I have a (small) storage battery for nighttime use (especially Power Move 4-7 slot) and I recharge it every day regardless of whether or not the solar panels contribute much. They usually don’t in winter. The day before yesterday, for example, they generated only 0.4kWh.

And remember, the weekday usage is aggregated up at the end of the month, it doesn’t matter if the odd weekday percentage here and there is exceeded as long as other weekdays smooth things out. 

Do not be tempted to cut back on your 4-7 usage of stuff like LED lighting, led TV (small aside, is your TV consuming a lot, if it’s an older one like my Sony, with all sorts of surround sound and various boxes hanging off it? We only use our small LED one during 4-7), CH pump, all the background stuff like router etc. Honestly, you are most unlikely to make headway in achieving the target in cutting back on those relatively economical items, same goes for ‘fridges and freezer, not worth messing with.  No point in causing ourselves undue distress or stress, possibly even hazards and risk.
 

I would say you deserve great praise for your low winter usage, keep it up! I just hope that you will look again at the Power Move incentive peak hours percentage requirement, and perhaps move one (or two, or three?!) weekend heavier tasks to a weekday (not 4-7, obviously!) to make your weekday 4-7 slot “look good” so to speak.  Have another careful look at your OVO account half hourly usage pages for, say, the last week of November (including both weekends as well as the Power Move weekdays) and work out if there’s anything you can move around in order to hit that 13.5% target. And we’ve got those two bank holidays later this month (and the January First one, too) as well as the usual weekends, all available to jiggle tasks out of where possible. 

ah, I’ve just noticed your “and the other 2 reduced between about 8 & about 4”…that’s a bit puzzling: did you mean reduced between about 4 and 8?

All the very best, let us know what you think? I would guess that the experience you’ve related is of great interest to most of us consumers on here…good luck

Heating and lighting (less so) will be helped by solar panels in the day

TV only has the roku attached & a switch occasionally

I think the average is pretty low I may have worked out a Hiccup we had the boiler replace in Nov, which involved power tools and heating on for more than normal which skewed

I reckon my average is bigger, maybe between 3 & 4 

But with only lights, telly and fridge etc I'm stuck with it

I'm east anglia with a southwest facing roof and 12 (I think it's too cold to go and check) panels

Cheers @Katymac, given those helpful details and with your daily weekday average (bought, not self-generated by your PV panels) of 3 to 4 kWh and 25% of that consumed in the 4-7 slot weekday peak slot, then you’ve got a very good chance indeed of hitting the Power Move incentive for December. In other words, although your usage is admirably low, with the 4-7 slot consuming 800 Wh or more, this definitely seems to me  to give you good scope to reduce the 4-7 usage? It may only be TV, LED lights, and the usual background stuff like ‘fridge etc., but if you were able to reduce things to, say, 500Wh in the weekday 4-7 by moving 300 or more Wh into the rest of each weekday on average, then by that action alone you would have reduced your percentage to around 16%, down from 25%. 
 

Only you know your precise usage and what’s available to reduce in 4-7, or, just as effective in terms of percentage, what to move from the weekend into the weekday (not into the weekday 4-7 slot, though!) to massage your 4-7 percentage.

The 15 quid is not a huge amount, but it covers the monthly elec standing charge, for example, or is equivalent to 50-odd kWh of electricity per month, plus its main impact for me has been sharpening my awareness of the importance of that weekday 4-7 peak slot. Previously, I’d chiefly considered my usage only in terms of daylight versus dark hours! And for low users like yourself, and I include myself here, £15 represents a respectable chunk off the monthly electricity bill.

I quite agree: inspecting an East Anglian winter roof is not to be undertaken lightly! Do have another close look at your precise half-hour usages (using your account usage pages) and see if you can match those usage figures (especially the 4-7 weekday slots) to your actual equipment/appliances etc. That’s the really interesting bit, what the bought electricity kWh represent in your daily patterns. I mean, you’re not going to remember every cup of tea or even precisely every time you use the iron or cooker or washing machine etc. (although definitely avoid any of those 4-7!) but it’s the patterns of your weekday usage that will interest you, especially the consumption of electricity in the crucial weekday 4-7 slot as a proportion of your total weekday (bought) consumption. And remember to use kWh, not £.

Good luck with it!

Hey @PhilHollington,

Welcome to the OVO Online Community,

We have lots of Articles and FAQs about Solar PV you may find interesting:

I have a grid tie inverter , with monitor to throttle it to not send power to the grid, only my home use . Along with batteries and solar.

Charge batteries during day, set inverter to run from 4-7 pm, so my usage is zero during power move.

Also I have a light detector to turn on inverter when sun is out and turn it off when cloudy to make sure my batteries are always well charged.

Sounds well organised @Johnoutthere!

Are you finding in the darkest part of winter that your PV panels can’t actually contribute much to your battery charging?  I have a similar setup myself (minus the light detector), and it’s a real struggle (up here in Sunderland) for the panels to contribute anything much over 1 kWh a day.  Some days it’s only a few hundred Wh!  And I always have a couple of zero days scattered through December and January. 
 

You’re absolutely right, yours is a good method.  I only have a relatively small battery, but still manage to run the house from 4PM to 9AM totally off the battery, at a cost of around 1.5 kWh purchased daily from the Grid.  Today was a sunny day, which meant washing machine (cool wash!) plus battery charger, at a cost of 0.69 kWh purchased today, a nice change!
 

There’s been some talk on here about folk using cheap overnight tariff energy to charge their battery…some of those tariffs available are impressively cheap.  Is that something you might consider? It’s probably beyond my own present requirements at the moment as we manage OK with my present system, especially for the 9 months February to October; if and when we can consider an EV then I guess that would be a real incentive to weigh up those attractive tariffs?

Solar panels plus 13 KWH battery pack. For winter months battery pack set to charge to 100% on low rate midnight to 7:00 am. Seems to provide enough capacity combined with the limited amount of solar generated during the winter to keep us going from 7:00 am through to 7:00 pm and beyond. On the few nice sunny days we can see the battery pack being topped up and on occasions a little drop going back to the grid! Right now at 17:00 we still have +/- 8.84 KWHs in the bank as they are only allowed to discharge down to 15%. During summer months we set the max SOC for the battery pack to 20% for the overnight charge and hopefully will not be exporting too much to the grid at 4p per KWH! EV is set to charge between 7:00 pm to 4:00 pm to avoid the Power Move hours and still benefit from the smart charger rates. During the day with 2 people working from home (2 pcs plus 3 or 4 screens) we are only using around 4.0 KWHs from 7:00 am to 5:00 pm. Since start of 2024 we generated 84.7 KWH so that’s +/- 2.29 KWHs per day - down south in Essex.

Hi @Phil225xe, that all sounds like a perfect set-up…if you can get through the worst month or two of winter as you have been doing, that’s brilliant! 
 

As for Power Move (not Power Move Plus, though, I should imagine) there’s no reason on earth why you shouldn’t be hitting the target…your peak hours will still be a tiny percentage of your average weekday hours, even though your weekday hours are admirably small.  
 

I’m well impressed with that battery capacity…we’re aiming to add another 4.8 to our existing diminutive 2.4 kWh this year…small beer! But batteries are definitely the way to go, and we find it helps us to achieve our PM target.
 

And of course Power Move is based on kWh, not £, so keep plugging away at those attractive tariffs!

Managed less then 1.5% in our first month of the challenge, mainly due to having a battery and solar panels.  We get most solar generation in the morning, due to a SE roof orientation, so I’ve set the battery to charge from the grid between 2 and 4 pm.

Sounds good @Ian in Somerset…do you manage to have your battery run all night from 4PM, or do find you need the grid before the solar panels start again in the morning?

PV system was installed last Autumn, so haven’t experienced the full seasonal range yet.  Recently the battery has been lasting until the early hours, but sometimes as late as 7 am if we’ve eaten out instead of cooking the previous evening.

Great @Ian in Somerset, the three months around the shortest day are the worst for the PV panels but even then, because of the flexibility afforded by the battery, they still make about a 50% contribution to our own fairly modest electricity consumption…in Somerset you may well have slightly sunnier winter weather, but in my experience even up here in sunny Sunderland (not!), all the way from February to October the panels make a really hefty contribution, often 100% or approaching 100% with the battery storage, so you’re definitely onto a winner, even in darkest Nov, Dec and Jan.  We are low users, though, in a smallish mid-terrace.

You will have fun monitoring the situation as the days get steadily longer now.  Although having said that, I see there’s some dark weather forecast for this second week of February, but even so…

Good luck, do let us know how you get on over the Spring months with balancing the panels, the battery, and your consumption: like you, my panels face SE (the other SW pitch of the roof means in effect half my panels get zero sunshine between end Oct and end Feb) and I use the battery at night and charge during the day. It makes a huge difference: although we’ve had our PV array for over ten years, this last 12 months is the first period that we’ve had a storage battery, and a relatively small one at that, and we’re well pleased with it and the difference it’s made. So your story is on a subject that’s of great interest to me and I’m sure many others on here…all the best…
 

Very interesting comments I have solar no batteries. I tried during power move to turn most electric equipment off. Sat in dark watching battery driven tablet with gas fire on. I got 37p. Not worth the sacrifice.  Mantra in this household Sun out washing in. I always look for sunny days to use washing machine and tumble dryer 

Hi @SRF, yep, Power Move Plus is difficult when you have solar panels, because as you say most heavy usage is already shifted from peak hours to sunshine hours.  And of course there are only a handful of Power Move Plus events anyway.  
 

Now, Power Move itself (not Power Move Plus), that’s a whole different kettle of fish, as even with solar panels there’ll still be a contribution, especially during the winter, from the grid for heavy items even when the sun is shining.  Unless one has a massive array, or has a charged storage battery ready to help out, I’m guessing most panels in a UK winter just can’t cover surges demanded by ovens, washing machines, electric kettles, tumble driers etc. especially when additional “always on” stuff like ‘fridges and freezers etc are constantly cutting in and out as well.  Actually, even in summer sunshine my own panels can’t completely cover most heavy items: maybe microwave, our modern hoover, anything up to around 2 kW, but definitely not in winter!  Some Dec/Jan winter days I’m lucky if we generate an average of 100 Wh for the six or seven hours of daylight! ! So, Power Move (the OVO monthly one) is still definitely on I find, even with solar panels, as there is still that potential to make the 4 - 7 peak hour slot smaller than the average three hour slot in the rest of the weekday. 
 

So, even though you are efficiently moving heavy tasks to daylight sunny hours, maybe you could still have a look at your monthly average weekday consumption, your average weekday peak hours consumption, and also check your weekend consumption in case you can move some tasks to a weekday non-peak-hour slot, and see whether you can perhaps juggle tasks so that your AVERAGE (odd anomalies now and again during the month don’t necessarily matter) weekday peak hours electricity consumption is around 11-12% of your AVERAGE weekday electricity consumption?

But, most definitely, do not aim to sit in the dark or cold!  Brrrrrrr, no thank you: if we are amongst those in the fortunate position nowadays of being able to afford energy to keep ourselves fed and watered in reasonable security and warmth, then let’s please do that! But if we can shift usage, especially heavy usage, around a bit to help overall grid usage patterns, and earn into the bargain the equivalent of 50 kWh or so of electricity per month, then it’s definitely worth a serious look I reckon!