Power Move times in relation to recent clock changes

Hey @deanphillips2005 ,

From what I understand, it’s 6pm to 9pm in the current timezone i.e. BST right now.

Thanks for the response. That wasn’t my issue though. I am aware that it is 6-9pm BST but the system is recording my usage an hour earlier, which may affect the Power Move reward.

Ahhh gotcha.

Let me see what I can find backstage on this. You OK to hang on for a bit? We might have some notes somewhere...

Thanks!

Just looking at my own chart from yesterday it appears to be correct.

I cooked at 5.30 just before the PM period, air fryer, microwave, and kettle all in use, and that is refected in the usage spike there (a similar spike was when I cooked lunch at 12:30):

PS. If anyone is wondering the biger spikes just after midnight are due to a 1kW fan heater.

I wrote a few notes about this here.  The system records all usage in UTC, but it depends on where you’re looking whether you see UTC or BST timings. The online usage pages show BST, but with a fudge for the first and last hours of the day. Where are you seeing last night’s cookery recorded before 21:00?

Nukecad wrote:

Just looking at my own chart from yesterday it appears to be correct.

I cooked at 5.30 just before the PM period, air fryer, microwave, and kettle all on, and that is refected in the usage spike there (similar spike to when I cooked lunch at 12:30):

 

Thanks for the response. My usage are recording like yours but 1 hour earlier. This has been the case since the clocks went forward on Mar 31.

I’ll have a look at those notes. I am unable to get screengrabs of the are, but where I see it being recorded 1 hour earlier is in the daily usage stats (where they are represented in bar charts with the times listed underneath. I was advised by OVO colleague to go with the 7-10pm but this is a pain for me and I don’t think I should be getting singled out in such a manner. 

Your note, here definitely applies in my case:

“Those attempting the Power Move challenge should be wary of the change. I'm not sure whether the weekday consumption is measured from midnight BST or UTC, even though the peak timings are obviously BST. Again, this won't make much difference for ordinary users, but for those of us who like to get precise results, it could make the difference between earning and not earning the reward if we're on the borderline.”

I do wonder if to many of us were achieving the maximum £15 cash back during the past powermoves. I use such a small amount of electicity that without switching off the fridge/freezer I can’t see me reaching the £10 target this season, which is a real pain as my standing charges are now more than my energy used so it feels I will lose out both ways

I hit every one of the £15 targets and I’m a small energy user.  I just made sure I did everything that used more energy on a week day and out of peak hours.  Washing machine, kettle, induction cooking, chip pan, hoovering….

@deanphillips2005 if you press F12 in your browser and go to the network tab you can set the filter to Fetch/XHR and look for requests ending in ?date= and look at the response.  You can see the data Ovo uses for the page.

 

Well, that shows that you were indeed drawing 400W between 20:00 and 20:30, and I would say that that was BST. Something very strange is happening if it was in fact UTC.

There is a bigger spike at 07:30; was this something you were in fact doing at 08:30, like cooking breakfast? 

As Tron Burgundy pointed out, you can check the data underlying the web page. Sign in to your account, then visit this URL in a new tab in the same session, putting your own OVO account no. instead of 1234567: 
https://smartpaymapi.ovoenergy.com/usage/api/half-hourly/1234567?date=2024-04-10 
Change the date if necessary to match the one your screenshot refers to. The timings on the API page are shown in UTC, for example 2024-04-10T20:00:00.000 is 9 PM on 10 April. The ‘T’ between the date and time is the indicator for UTC. 

I don’t like to suggest that the clock in your kitchen is wrong, but that has been known to happen (BTDT!). As they ask in police interrogations, what was on the TV or radio while you were cooking?

Meanwhile, I can assure you that the Power Move times are local, i.e 6-9 PM BST. 

Hi, thanks for your detailed response. I will read in more depth soon. Regarding the usage in the listing at 07:30. Yes, the real time (in BST) was 08:30 and involved an electric shower. I’ll have a check at the link you gave to view underlying data also. I am struggling to get my head around the fact that a simple hours’ change can result in such chaos, and struggling even more to get my head around the fact that OVO cannot provide a fix. The timings from March 31st on my side are still showing an hour out of sync - some 11 days later. 

OK, interesting. I’ve not heard of this phenomenon before. I wonder if it has anything to do with the tariff you’re on; some of the exotic multi-rate ones adjust for BST, so that might put a ‘UTC’ or ‘GMT’ flag on your account if you have different day and night rates. Do you?

As regards 31 March, the usage page on clock-change day is a mess for everybody. They have somehow to fudge displaying a day’s usage when there are only 46 or 50 half-hours in the day, so it’s not easy to make sense of the page.  

I’m on the standard tariff, ”Simpler Energy” for both electricity and gas. It is the same rates for both day and night. In my opinion, if OVO have technical issues with clock changes, as clearly they do in this case, then they should not offer their Power Move rebates. I was informed by OVO that the issue would “likely be just for this month”. They really need to get some kind of solution in place for clock changes. Or an even better solution: the powers that be do away with clock changes full stop. 

That was just an idea. I just can’t see how a single account can fail to move with the times when everyone else’s does, and it’s not a sign of any general fault. I hope you get to the bottom of it.

Meanwhile, I can only suggest that you stick to following your kitchen clock when working around the PM target peak time. Only if you fail to earn the reward would you have to bother Support to grumble about it, with good reason that I’m sure would be taken into account.

I’ve asked the Power Move team about this and will report back 😊

I’ve had a response from the team:

In the OVO app - you're seeing your usage shown in UTC (coordinated universal time) - we're currently in BST so you're seeing everything as UTC +1. So when we get the consumption back from usage app and we assess the peak hours (stored in product-service with no time zone information), we convert it to UTC so 6pm BST is 5pm UTC and this is the time we use from the usage app to determine the peak consumption which is what the customer used at 6pm BST. We're still measuring your usage between 6-pm and evaluating your Power Move peak usage off correct data.

Awesome responses from all on here. Firedog (Noel): I checked my time in Windows and, whilst it was set to the correct time, it wasn’t adjusted for DST for some reason. I changed this setting and the time jumped an hour back but then I set clock to “set the time automatically” and it jumped an hour forward to the correct current BST time. I’ve just logged onto the usage section and the times have now appeared to have changed to the proper time. I’ve gone back historically, and it looks like this has solved it. Wow.! Thanks! Without this solution, I’m pretty confident that I would in the same situation up to the next clock change.!

Thank you!

Brilliant - I’m glad we got there in the end 🙂

I’ve added this edge case to the notes I wrote.