We tried everything to reduce our usage but still didn't meet the Power Move target, any hints and tips?

It doesn’t seem very easy to join the group.  All you get is a response saying ”Your join request has been sent, please wait”.  

I’ll poke @Chris_OVO and @Emmanuelle_OVO . They can press the button out the back to finish the process.

The group is private to prevent unwanted guests from sneaking in. As you’re on PMF, you’ll be granted access once they check the queue.

Morning @DuncanL, 

I jumped on the group this morning and accepted your request so you should have access to the group now. Apologies for the delay and thanks to @Blastoise186 for the tag! 

Thanks for your help - and Blastoise186. 

Our first month of trying to reach the power move target and got it to 14.21% so didn't earn any credit for October. We didn't use the dishwasher, washing machine or charged up anything between 4 and 7 but I did use the oven and hob. We are both retired and we usually eat between 5 and 6. Any tips for using the oven and hob less without moving our meal time?

Hi @Belinda5 

I’ve been doing PM for over a year now and have plenty of cooking tips.

Moving electric cooker use out of the PM hours is the best way to meet the PM targets.
I quickly realised that and have had the maximum PM reward every month.

If you can do that too then you should easilly meet the PM targets.

If you want to eat during the peak hours then use the microwave, a slow cooker, or an Air Fryer instead of the electric oven/hob, they use much less energy to cook the food.

PS. Try to avoid using the electric kettle during peak hours too, many of us fill a thermos flask just before the peak hours and use that to make hot drinks during peak. (See more about using Thermos flasks below*).

I tend to cook things outside of the PM peak hours and then reheat in the microwave if I want to eat during the peak hours.

For example yesterday afternoon I batch cooked a big pan of stewed beef with tomato and onion, once it had cooled its was portioned into plastic’take away type’ trays and frozen for later use.
I also batch cook and freeze stews, casseroles, soups, curries, pasta sauces, etc. for later use.
Remember to take out early and defrost at room temperature (to save energy defrosting) and then just a couple of minutes in the microwave to reheat.

You can also freeze cooked mashed potato and cooked veg like that.
You could even freeze them together in one tray/container to make you own ‘microwave ready meals’. You can even buy freezer trays with partitions for doing just that.

Using instant mash (use water from a thermos rather than boiling the kettle) and microwaving tinned veg is also energy efficent, as are oven chips done in an air fryer (not in the oven).

A bit more adventeurous?
*I also use a Thermos Flask for cooking, it’s a great energy saver.
It’s a method often used by hikers and cyclists, they can be cooking their meal in their backpack while travelling along, you can use it in the kitchen too while you are doing something else.
Anything that you normally boil you can cook in a thermos, as long as it fits.
It’s particularly good for cooking rice and pasta, I find that it’s the best way to cook rice just right.

Again, you can cook things in a thermos early before the peak hours and when done empty them out to cool, then qucikly reheat in the microwave later when you want to eat.

Here are my tips on Thermos cooking, I even posted a recipie for Mini Meatballs and spagetti which I make quite often.

https://forum.ovoenergy.com/my-account-140/what-s-this-email-about-power-move-flex-17680?postid=117680#post117680

It’s all a personal decision over what lengths you wish to go to in order to earn the returns.  If you are retired, it might for some also be a question of which is more important to you - your health or your wealth.

Let me make this clear once again. POWER MOVE IS NOT intended to be about cutting down your usage, and absolutely not about nuking essential usage.

It's about moving it around. Please read the docs again for more details.

DO NOT put your health at risk just for free credits. 

Nukecad, thank you so much, your reply is very helpful. I'm probably going to sound weird, I don't have a microwave! We recently had a new kitchen and I cleared as much of the worktops as I could, gave my microwave to my daughter 🙄. I don't have an air fryer either, I have a Tower halogen oven that ive not used yet, that's got to be a lot cheaper than the range. I'm going to use your tips for a thermos during peak and batch cook off peak or use my slow cooker. All sound advice so thank you again.

DuncanL, thanks for replying, I'm not turning things off, so we aren't going hungry or getting cold. Thank you for your concern.

Blastoise186, thank you for commenting. That's exactly what we are trying to do, we aren't going without anything, we are just moving what we can out of peak. You won't find me cuddling a hot water bottle in the dark with no TV 😉. It's nice to know people care so thank you.

@Belinda5

I would look again at getting an air fryer if you can.

Don't think of it as a ‘fryer’ because it isn't, it's a small fan oven where the heat comes from a grill type element at the top (on most of them anyway). So for burgers, sausages, steaks, chops, it's more like a quick fan assisted grill.

Being small it heats up just as much space as you need rather that having to heat up a big oven for a small portion of food.

I do still use my big oven, for cooking larger things like full size loaves, tray bake cakes, etc. (But I'll also bake 4 medium size bread rolls, individual pies, biscuits, etc in the air fryer. Which I use depends on what I'm cooking.

For example, if you like chips then frozen oven chips will take 20 mins in the big oven, and that is after you have had it on for 20 mins to heat up.

But in an air fryer you can just throw them in and cook them in 10/15 mins overall.

I think some people don’t really understand it; you need to use as normal outside the move hours. The person using only £80 a month is very low usage anyway so will find it harder to meet. Going  away on holiday won’t really help as it’s on your whole usage. We were late into it, got a medium reward Sep-Oct then the full £12 Nov and Dec. I reduce my lighting, have the PC on, don’t use any of the big four appliances. We now find it easier to wash on a Saturday. We cook our lunch before 4pm and boil the kettle at 3.55 then wrap it up well. We reboil it later. We put the gas heating on 3.30-4pm and use an electric heater or the hob for a quick burst if necessary. Now it’s Jan I am not going for the max reward, hoping to get £5 back as, well it’s Jan, and I will need to put the heating on. Your lights not really relevant. Oh and I now have a gas hob kettle as boiler never gets hot water to kitchen tap so I used a spare electric kettle for ‘grey’ water. 

Having used ​@Nukecad's tips above (thanks again) we just missed the top target and got to 8.13% average peak use in December so £6 off the next bill - yay us! 😂

Brilliant news ​@Belinda5! Well done 😊

As a personal note it's great to see people who are low users succeeding at Power Move because it does show that if you follow the great advice from people like ​@Nukecad and others that it can be done with the right equipment and a bit of thought and planning. I'm going to call out to ​@Emmanuelle_OVO to ask if we can get a User Guide to Succeeding at Power Move (snappier titles are available) done for the remainder of the winter power move so that we can all point to the best practice whenever we see customers struggling with this.

Peter

Happy New Year, ​@Peter E  🍾
  

I’m only 5’2” - does that make me a low user?

Low, medium and high will always be subjective assessments when thinking about energy consumption. Ofgem has its ‘typical’ usage levels, ranging from ~5 to ~18 kWh of electricity per day (1800 - 6700 kWh/year), which makes me at 2.9 kWh/day in 2024 an utter midget. I still manage to make the PM grade, even though I don’t get rewarded for doing it:
  

Sorry if this is a bit confusing.

• Grey shading demarcates the current month.
• Blue shading shows weekends etc. I suppose bank holidays (25 and 26/12) should be marked specially, since they’re now treated differently from weekend days. I’ll try harder.
• The red and black lines show cumulative figures as time goes by. The white balls are trying very hard to stay below the thin black line, and succeeding. 
• The grey and green lines show percentages, what we’re all aiming for. The green line just has to be below the grey ceiling at the end of the month.  

Yes, I should get out more ☺️

Happy New Year to you as well.

We could have fun with the definition of low.

I would call the use of the word Low to mean less than the average although I haven't explicitly said that I'm using the word Low as a shorthand way of saying ‘lower than average’. Similarly High would mean higher than average. No one has a medium consumption because you would have to define two subjective boundaries either side of the average to define the medium category.

The graphs are excellent and similar to mine when I was doing PM and it does provide day by day guidance on where you are so you know if you have to tighten up your consumption or if you can relax it a bit. My graph had three horizontal lines corresponding to the different target levels.

It's too cold to go outside anyway. I've just seen a brass monkey looking for a welder.

Funny you should say that. Ofgem shied away from using averages, because they are too susceptible to distortion by a few outliers. It wouldn’t give a true picture of what we understand by ‘average’ usage if it included, say, a few rarely-occupied holiday homes in Cornwall or shooting lodges in Scotland, or at the other end of the scale the odd cannabis farm that hadn’t yet been discovered. I think they discard some percentile of data at each end of the scale, then take the median of the rest to find a ‘typical’ usage level. However, I wouldn’t accept that a consumer in the 49th percentile was a ‘low user’, nor one in the 51st a ‘high user’. They’re both pretty middle-of-the-road. I’m sure the data are available somewhere …
    

~~~ 🤣 ~~~

For example, Subnational electricity and gas consumption summary report 2023:
  

Very OT: charts like this always remind me of the church in whose choir I had the privilege of singing, and in which one of my marriages took place sometime last century:
  

It looks like that church is suggesting we aim for the middle of the charts! :P

Chart 7 is a Poisson Distribution. Something fishy going on there