The 6-9 pm time is too long and is basically eating up the whole evening? If someone who works a regular job wants to get in this, they have to either skip dinner or start cooking after 9, which then delays sleep. 

You se m to be missing the point of Power Move. It's not to fit in with anyone personal usage pattern but to change people's usage pattern. As such it's looking kely to make you rethinking your energy use. If you can't avoid using electricity between 6pm and 9pm this is not for you. What I have seen ne is avoid using dishwasher and electric shower during peak times and install a battery storage system which I can use to reduce my electricity usage to zero if needed to hit the target.

Hope this helps

I’ve posted this on another thread associated with Power Move, but repeat here:

If I have a Smart Car charger, does the OVO accounting system know about this, and recognise that I am already taking a lot of electricity during off-peak, so I would automatically ‘win’?

The domestic peak hours are 6-9 in large part because that’s when many people are cooking their evening meals, that’s what makes them the hours with a high domestic energy usge.

And that’s the whole point of Power Move - to reduce that overall peak hour usage if you can by moving your own usage from those hours.

Not everybody can move their usage (not everybody wants to try).
So Power Move is not for them.

Which is fine, nobody is being forced to join Power Move if they don’t want to.

The idea of Power Move is to help reduce peak time energy use, and some users are happy to do that with no reward - the rewards that it can give are just an ‘extra’ to help encourage more people to at least try.

If you can’t take part in Power Move for whatever reason then you are not “losing” anything, you can’t lose something ‘extra’ that you never had in the first place.
(And even if you do take part nobody is guaranteed to meet target and get a reward each month).

as l said before we have our dinner between 8.30pm. that means cooking around 8.00pm. so l am not going to worry too much. l have other things to think about.

Well while I’d suggest that would only mean a move of 1 hour to do it after 9 that is of course entirely your choice to make.

Enjoy your meal whenever you choose to cook/eat it.

@Emmanuelle_OVO do bank holidays count as weekends, as in the energy used on those days will be used as part of the calculation?

I’m rewriting the automatic peak energy calculator and it’ll have an effect.  There isn’t a bank holiday until the end of August but I’d like to get it coded now.

Thanks.

Hey @Tron Burgundy 

I checked this with the Power Move team and they’ve confirmed Bank Holidays aren’t included in the calculations.

Hope this helps clear that up for you.

Thanks.  I need to make double sure, though.  Does it mean the entire day for bank holidays isn’t used in calculations at all so the data for the entire day can be ignored?  Or is it not included in that it’s treated like a normal day now?

Hi @Tron Burgundy,

The team have said “Bank Holidays are not used in the calculation, they’re neither peak or off-peak.”

Hope this helps.

Despite what OVO says, they have made the Summer targets tougher than Spring, and hidden it by including weekends!

If you had absolutely flat hourly energy consumption in Spring , 12.5% of your elec would be peak which would just scrape into Level 2 payout 

If you are flat in July it would be 9.27% which doesn’t even hit Level3! Slightly improvement to 8.75% in Sept but still misses Level3

Come on OVO , don’t take us for mugs - at least admit you’ve made it harder…

Of course they have made it harder.

The idea of a Challenge is to, err, challenge you.

A target that that is easy to attain isn’t a challenge at all.

Like with many challenges, after a while the bar gets raised and you are going to have to up your game and push yourself that bit more if you want to continue meeting the targets and getting rewarded.
The weekends being included as all off-peak for Summer PM will help, but won’t do it all for you.

There is of course the risk that as they gradually make the PM challenge more difficult to meet then people are just going to drop out if/when they can no longer meet it, and may then go back to their old ‘peak-hour wasteful’ ways.

That’s always going to be a balancing act because if they have made the targets too difficult then people will drop out and are unlikely to try again even if the targets go lower again.

One thing the new regime does is remove the incentive to shift weekend consumption to weekdays. It used to help towards the target if you hoovered or ran the washing machine on Friday evening (after 9)  instead of Saturday morning. That’s no longer the case. Now the only thing that matters is not using power-hungry appliances during the weekday peak periods.

With really low usage and trying really hard keeping everything in off peak that I possibly could and cooking in off peak hrs,  in winter I achieved level 3 throughout, in spring I've done exactly the same and was in level 2 although June I've scraped into level 3. Lasting as long as I could before putting a light on is what made the difference as I dont need it til after 9pm now.

I've just revised the figures to include the weekend data as off peak and with the new targets, April  & May would be level 1 and June  level 2.  It just means what I moved to a weekend I can now do anytime off peak in the week instead but for either £2, or if extremely lucky on the borderline for £5. There is nothing else I can do.

To help keep low users engaged why not have different tiers for low/med/high users? The incentive would be to change brackets thereby using less power, but also give incentive to lower usage within the brackets as well. 

I think that having different bands for different users would be a complication too far.

And working on percentages moved takes your low/medium/heavy use into account anyway

In the end it's about all of us moving as much electricity use as possible out of the peak hours.

Of course heavy users will be able to move more than lighter users - which is why Power Move works on percentage targets rather that just kWh moved.

It's not how many kWh overall you can move that counts for Power Move but how much of you ‘normal’ use that you have shifted.

The very different Power Move Plus and Power Move Flex schemes do work on kWh figures not % - so even if a low user can meet those by moving a little bit they will only get little pennies reward for moving that little bit. (Most low users have decided that those two schemes are not worth the extra effort).

This has become completely pointless now if you do not cook on gas. I reduce electricity usage as much as reasonably possible that cooking is one of the larger chunks of my usage. I will not be avoiding cooking for my children after I finish work to try and meet this insane target.

I normally spend a night away every week or two, and when I go away, I switch off my boiler as I won't be using any of it until I get back and then just switch it on for an hour which gives me enough hot water. 

What I didn't realise is that this makes my day completely flat - so the money I save by not putting the boiler cam actually cost me that £10 bonus. 

So now I leave it on, using more energy but not £10 worth... And if a day is flat for another reason, I'll put a wash load on just to make the off peak hours higher in consumption. 

How is this helping the planet?

Yes

I’m achieving the middle power move target purely by charging my PHEV outside peak and making sure it charges on Friday after the cutoff, not Saturday morning, and Monady after 0:00 rather than Sunday evening - i use about 200 KW hours for my car in a month - with the new targets this won’t work as well and I’ll nedd to modify my checking spreadsheet!

I won't be joining this.

Now the parameters have changed, it's not really feasible, especially when they are looking for such a large reduction in usage.

The timings are not compatible with our normal lifestyle. 4 till 7 was manageable but not this.

 The rewards are also too poor to be tempting.

I to use a spreadsheet…

Is it wrong to feel smug?

That’s really the point - to promote change to lifestyles to try and reduce the demand for electricity when it’s most planet-unfriendly. If we all did what we’re asked to, we could help flatten the peak shown in the picture. It shows the GB consumption of  gas  and  coal for electricity generation yesterday, peaking after energy production from wind and solar power wanes in the late afternoon. 
  

The change from 4-7 to 6-9 is only a shift of one hour, because of British Summertime.

Not achievable.

I switched off the immersion on 1st July and switched on the oil boiler again. using the immersion during the summer months was the only reason Power Move became useful to us. As I have said before, it seems daft to get a reward for doubling the electricity consumption. If the grid had been decarbonised it may have made some sense but as it hasn’t, it makes none at all.

just had oil at 56p per litre so it’s much cheaper to heat hot water with oil anyway.

Very suspicious that OVO has no meter smart meter readings for 30th June or 1st July. My scam detector is twitching.

Power Move is entirely voluntary, your choice to try or not.
It doesn’t cost you anything to join.
It doesn’t cost you anything to take part.
Nobody is taking anything from you, just the opposite.
You may get a reward - great if you can.
You may not get a reward - but you haven’t lost anything by trying.

Where do you see a scam there?

Meter readings and usage data (two separate sets of figures) for 30 June are retrieved on 1 July. This just happens to be the first day of a new quarter, when most of 30 million smart meters all have to be updated with new tariff data. That is an awful lot of data to be pushed around the DCC’s network, so it’s not surprising that routine stuff like usage data takes a bit longer than usual to turn up in your account. 

There was no sign of usage data for 30 June in my account when I looked at 02:00 this morning 2 July. By 08:00, they had turned up. No scam involved, I assure you - and anyway, 30 June’s data didn’t count for the spring challenge.

Likewise, if you’re cheating the system, then you’re only scamming yourself.

We’ve said this before, but deliberately inflating your usage just to make targets easier to hit is cheating and you’re only cheating yourself anyway by doing it - because your wallet will get punished more than rewarded.