Ready for the Power Move summer challenge?

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

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).

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.

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.🙂

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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 to use a spreadsheet…

Is it wrong to feel smug?

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.

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.