Power Move - spring challenge

I haven’t had the email yet but the first Spring Power Move reward for April is now showing on my account.

By my own reckoning I did 7.98% for April, but the OVO email is always slightly different because they use a more accurate 3 decimal places in their calculations.

I’ve canned off doing the Power Move for stuff like cooking and making tea but still push washing machine / hoovering and all that outside the peak zone an never on a weekend and I managed to get £6 this month.  I consider that a bonus because the new peak times made me go “Nope, not doing that any more” when I heard them.

So people might want to try doing that.  Cooking as normal, move electric guzzlers to weekday off peak and just see if you get owt.

Sorry, but that means you’re not eligible at this time.

Did I miss the time change being mentioned clearly in an email before now? I will have to be very careful now to get back on track!

Hi @Pulpstar 

The figures given for the half-hourly time slots are the start of the slot.
So the current Power Move slots are the ones that start 18:00 to 20:30.

Each Power Move ‘reward period’ lasts for a calendar month, then you start at zeros again on the 1st of the next month.

eg. I copy/paste my half hourly figures from my online account into my own spreadsheet, and have the relevant rows highlighted as below.
You can see that on these days I cooked my evening meal in the 17:00 and 17:30 timeslots, so just before the Power Move hours..
 

Note that if you copy/paste from the account like that then the usage figures are only to 2-DP and not the 3-DP you get with an app.
That 2-DP is still close enough, unless you are right on a target borderline.
The usage figures also copy in in the form of '0.2 kWh', after copying them in I simply do a replace-all of 'kWh' with blank so that my spreadsheet then recognises them as numbers not text and calculates the totals and percentage.

I do totals and percent for each day - and then running totals/percent for the month so far, like this:

PS. An off peak idea/tip that I'm already using myself -
Late evenings and early mornings can still be chilly in summer, instead of putting the heating on for the whole house a 1-kW fan heater can provide a quick/focused boost of heat for half an hour or so, which can be cheaper than heating the whole house, and also contibutes 0.5 kWh to your off peak Power Move for each half hour that you use it.

Beware of timestamps when dealing with energy! The entire industry works on UTC (AKA GMT) all year round. I just downloaded some data (for 1 May) from n3rgy to see what it looks like, and compared with what I usually get from Guy Lipman’s site:
  

You’ll notice several differences:

• n3rgy set the timestamp at the end of the period it refers to, while Lipman (and OVO and most others handling this sort of data) stamp with the time at the start of the period.
• To get a full day’s data for Power Move and similar purposes, you have to take the 48 n3rgy figures starting at 00:30. Lipman stamps them appropriately, but there are two figures at the top of the column that belong to the previous day when using UTC. 
• If you ask for a single calendar day’s figures (like I did for this exercise), n3rgy return nothing at all, while Lipman is missing the last hour’s data. To get all the data you need, select the day itself and the following one, then be careful when selecting the figures you want.
• The current Power Move target period is, as you worked out, is the block labelled 17:30 - 20:00 by n3rgy.
• OVO’s own usage data on the Day tab don’t match either of these variants. They use an ugly fudge to fit a day’s UTC data into a BST calendar day, so the figures (and the bar in the chart) you see for 12:00am and 12:30am in fact show the usage for the last hour of the day. The ones that should be there are the ones at the end of the previous day’s chart. This makes little difference for most customers - consumption is usually light and pretty consistent from day to day. A few will be surprised, though.
• If all you need to know is how well you’re doing in the Power Move challenge, you could try Tron Burgundy’s excellent little bookmarklet in a browser that will allow it to run. This is what it showed me just now:
    

  

   
  The results match my own precisely, with one exception: in April, there was one day when my usage data didn’t turn up until in the evening, so this day’s data were disregarded. This in fact worked in my favour.