Gonna be honest here… Perhaps a good tip might be don’t be so defeatist about the challenge?

People like you are exactly why OVO Power Move exists in the first place with the incentives it offers. Making the times be anything but the Peak that they are eliminates the benefits.

Try doing things like:

• Having a hot lunch
• Batch cooking at the weekend
• Change what you use to cook to something else
• Use a slow cooker - these can literally make certain meats taste absolutely amazing

Ultimately, if you’re not willing to play the game, then very well you aren’t forced to. But if you insist on that, then you won’t ever win the prize - and I’d expect you to step aside to allow those who do want to play a chance to succeed. For your information, I’ve won pretty much every single time and it’s barely caused me any inconvenience at all.

It is not a cruel and unusual punishment because OVO Power Move is optional… Unlike in some places… And before you ask, those who don’t have Smart Meters over there get AUTOMATICALLY disconnected every time Load Limiting and/or Load Shedding activates. I actually happen to personally know someone who lived there for several years.

Consider yourself lucky that the UK schemes like OVO Power Move are optional!

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.

Ditto. That’s the quickest result I ‘ve seen so far, I think, so kudos to the number-crunchers this month!

I use 3DP as well, and the outcome has always matched precisely hitherto.

I remarked elsewhere that I probably had one day’s numbers disregarded because of the ‘late arrival of the incoming data,’ so I’ll be interested to see what the email says when it does turn up. 

     Result including 2 April: 5.991%
     Result excluding 2 April: 5.855% 

In this case, losing one day’s data worked to my advantage. 

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.

… and:

QED

Hi

I'm trying to sign up for power move, but the website says "We're working on a new website for you". It's been like that for 24 hrs. Is it down, or is the link from the email incorrect?

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

Hmm, bit weird that I got sent the email then if I'm not eligible.

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 All,

Since I got my smartmeter I signed up for the ½ hrly readings from n3rgy and I’ve put them on a Google sheet here.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YOmmK5rd48bd6jzCjHSdziB46o_AdBiByOZqAzX1GmM/edit?usp=sharing

Got a £0.48 credit for the last bit of April, so far I make the readings

The e-mail for Powermove was dated the 30th, so I presume that’s when I signed up, Ovo makes the April usage 2.52%.

Our electricity usage is fairly normal year round (3k kilowatt hours or so) but my other half works overnight from home and we have solar panels and a battery, which has charged up every day so far during the challenge. So we’re VERY seasonal.

A few questions - Does 27/04/2024 00:00 count as a weekday or weekend timestamp ? (Saturday midnight).

Also am I right in recording 

 

as “Powermove” eligible or should it be 18:00 to 20:30 ?

Also is the challenge monthly or overall ? I presume monthly seeing as I already received the April credit.

Comically I might have to stick the tumble dryer on overnight in June to get the non powermove usage up to get below 11% if we have sunny weather  xD

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.

Thanks,

Weirdly those times correspond to for instance 

on the n3rgy timestamps - but I think you’re right as the 2.52% as calculated for April 30th does match OVO exactly now.

The good news is I’m at 8.74% for the month, will be able to check my worksheet further when the halfway email rolls in from Ovo.

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.

Thanks, the calculator is extremely useful. Using it in combination with the NRG data and my solar app to “look ahead” and see how likely it is I can make the challenge (The sun coming out tends to help :D)
Also going to use the NRG data and a certain other errm…. ‘tentacled’ competitor to see how their movable feast of tariffs compares against Octopus for a year whilst I’m on this tariff overall.

So cheeky for them to not really announce the change in hours - the peak hours hasn't changed seasonally in the past so I've had 4-7pm firmly in my head, got an email to say I'm way off this month.. well no wonder when the hours have changed. Would've been helpful if this had been in announced in a separate email, the email subject line, the first sentence of welcome to spring power move?! Ridiculous. OVO clearly not making enough money from us, drop the reward and hide the changes. 

You’re on your own there I’m afraid @sianmichaela .

The emails did make it very clear that the times had changed, it was posted in multiple places, announced in advance, mentioned on the Forum 10,000 times and every email update reminded you as well. If you didn’t read any of those, that’s your problem.

And on top of that, the Forum Volunteers - myself included - have spelled it out quite a few times. If you still didn’t get the message, OVO can’t do much more than that.

Caveat Emptor as they say.

Sorry if you were offended by my feedback @Blastoise186 not a personal attack on the forum moderators/volunteers, I've never really used the forum before in my 10 years with OVO. I open and check all emails from OVO and went back through them to locate the change. As I said no pop-ups in the app, and no indication of any changes to look out within the email intro or subject line, so relies on reading the full email which all other months tells you the same info, which I no longer read in full after being in power move for over a year. Obviously this is a nice to have, a perk, so they're not obliged but as this is the first change of this nature (the changes to reward levels were more clearly announced) it seems a little sneaky to bury it. I've not missed other changes (that I'm aware of!) Clearly the forum is the place to be, but as far as I was aware this was an add on optional feature for those who needed support not where communications were primarily delivered. Would love to see these multiple channels, and announcements - they didn't make their way through in the way you've described via email or app notices. 

Nice to have such an empathetic welcome to the forum though..

I've just been snarkily told it's just me who missed the change. It is included in the emails from Spring/April onwards, but no specific or dedicated email announcement of this new change, like they do for other issues. Glad I'm not on my own after all. 

Just wondered if you did contact them about the time change, and what they said? I'm lucky I suppose as I've only just started going off track so have only just realised there was a change! Would be interested to hear if they responded, as in 3 months there was never a change in comms to redress or clarify. Wonder if this will remain throughout Summer and Autumn as the new peak time or change again. 

The times so far have been 4pm-7pm Autumn/Winter Challenges, and 6pm-9pm Spring/Summer Challenges. I suspect that’ll probably continue.

With that being said, I’ve just had a chat with one of my contacts at OVO who knows a few things about Power Move (thanks Addy!). Man, OVO’s Live Chat is overpowered today. :D

It’s been confirmed that what I’ve said so far is more or less accurate. However, OVO Support have commented that if you feel very strongly about this, get in touch with them and they’ll talk about it with you. Can’t promise anything, but they’re willing to talk.

As for making this more obvious in future emails, leave that with me - it’s been submitted for review because my contact agrees that it could be a bit easier to find.

Hey @sianmichaela 

Sorry you felt the communication of the spring challenge time change wasn’t clear enough. As Blastoise186 mentioned, this hasn’t tripped too many people up but there have been a few others who have felt the same way, so we did double check with the Power Move team what the communication of this change was, and they have taken on the feedback for future changes.

I double checked with the team that there had been an email that detailed the time change on the spring challenge, and they did confirm emails were sent out with the new time, £ and % on 1st. The email should look a little something like this one below.

 

I’m sorry you’ve not been on target so far, but there’s still time to bring that % down. I know it’s not easy for everyone, and it’s why the challenge is optional, as it may not work for everyone’s lifestyle, there are a few helpful topics below from others who’ve previously struggled to meet the target, with lots of hints and tips on shifting power outwith the timeslot:

 

 

Keep us updated with how you get on with the challenge. 

Like Blastoise186 also mentioned you can reach out to the Support Team to open a complaint on the matter.

It is something the team have already taken on board, hopefully future changes will be communicated more clearly.

Hi @Abby_OVO thanks for the message. I was able to find the emails once I knew there was a change to search for. Usually when there's a change it's actually announced not just included in the brackets.. which if you were reading quickly could easily be missed. Not worthy of a complaint, it's a perk after all, more an observation of disappointment and frustration as I had changed my habits to be a part of power move to then see it's been for nothing for the last 3 months (nothing, aside from my inconvenience) is disappointing and means I'm not making best use of the grid. If power move was truly to support us in using off peak it would've been a headline change in the email so we could adjust our habits accordingly and not just from April, but ahead of time so we knew change was incoming. Especially as for those of us who've been part of the challenge for a while last Spring/Summer peak was still 4-7pm for the challenge. I'll wait and see what comes of the Summer challenge this year.. and these 'peak' usage times.