What's the biggest impact changes I can make to my usage to help me hit my Power Move target?

Yesterday I tried to use as little electric as possible between 4 - 7 pm and at about 7.05 I put the kettle on, got dinner on, put tv on …and I can see in from my ovo account looking at daily usage there is a big spike (oven, kettle, Tv etc!) registered at 7pm. Does anyone know if the 7 pm reading is used in the calculation - do I really have to wait til 7.30 to start dinner?  

Thanks @Tim_OVO   - dinner on at 7.01 it is then - Yes! 

We’ve been trying to go without electricity between 4-7pm as suggested. It’s very dark and very cold with it raining it feels very damp. I do washing in the morning prep lunch say home made soup for lunch and dinner in a slow cooker or via microwave?

can’t see much difference fir this on my smart meter??

still it’s a sacrifice for the better I hope!?

I’m thinking the Sunday Roast will have to be a weekday roast, and all baking will have to be done during the week!!! It’s proving very difficult to reduce use to 12.5% without deliberately increasing use outside of the target hours. I feel less guilty around boiling the kettle for a hot water bottle though on a weekday night

I’m on target too, but closer to the cut off than you! My shifts have been to move the afternoon cup of tea to 10 to 4 or 5 past 7, and to move use from weekends which don’t count, to the week - so tonight I have done a load of baking which I would normally do on a weekend (electric oven), so that pushes down the % of the 24 hour total used between 4-7pm. I didn’t think I was going to be on target from looking at my use via the website so that was good news for me today.

Glad our efforts are paying off. Having people round is hard when you want to cut light and heat. We warm the house up before and after if needed. Hot water bottles and blankets come in handy. Will be a test when it’s actually colder than it is. Shame there isn’t an overall reward scheme for cutting power usage. Certainly makes you think about when you use appliances. 

Changes we’ve made (couple with no kids, pure electricity household):

• turning a bunch of appliances off at wall, including boiler, heated towel rail, TV, smaller fridge, oven, dishwasher, washing machine, chargers (basically everything except Wi-Fi router, fridge-freezer and screen for work monitor)
• using high power appliances outside of peak times
• waiting until 7pm to cook dinner
• not having lights on and using pre-charged devices (phone, laptop) for entertainment, or going on evening walk

Email says we’re running at around 8% - it’s pretty fun for the challenge, but not possible for every evening depending on when we need to start food. 

I’m in so far with 10.99 %  - Yeah! - but I don't feel I have much wiggle room and feel it has been harder than expected. Between 4 and 7 I have 1 light on and either when working, the laptop running on a full battery charged before 4pm (so not using electricity) and if not working then its tv that's plugged in. Between 4 - 7 I do not use, oven, hob, kettle, washing machine, toaster, microwave etc - Nothing other than 1 light and perhaps TV.  I had a Tesco delivery and felt really bad as I didn't dare put the outside light on!  I needed an engineer for a boiler breakdown and was anxious that they might turn up around 4 pm! 

We are at 15.09%. Have always done cooking evening meal after 7.00pm and hoovering before 4.00pm

Will try turning off TV recorder and one or two other things except FridgeFreezer and router. Central heating is via gas so need to keep the pump going as the evenings are getting cooler.

Will see what the next half brings!!

I’ve just been going over some of the other posts. 

The obvious big hitters are the high wattage items.

For instance, a kettle for 1 minute is the same as a 50 W bulb for about an hour.

So, its not worth being too draconian with the lights, nor falling down the stairs in the dark in an attempt to save a tiny portion of a kWh. But it is worth turning off unnecessary lights if they might be on for long periods, turning on and off the lights depending on what room you’re in between 4-7.

The electric shower is the really big “mover” if you have one,

Every minute in the shower is the same as a 50 W bulb for about 2.5 hours.

5 minutes in an electric shower is a significant part of our daily consumption.

(8 kW*5/60 = 0.67 kWh).

Moving that 5 minute shower makes a huge difference. If anyone uses the electric shower for 10 minutes, the effect is doubled, or you can use a longer shower late at night to swing the stats a bit. If you were close to the 12.5% and not quite meeting it, you could swing the stats by having a slightly LONGER shower later at night, thereby using MORE electricity than usual, but reducing your 4-7pm proportion. Someone could do the calculation about how long extra you could afford to stay in the shower at 34 p/kWh, if it meant that you crossed over the threshold and got the £20, that otherwise you might not have done. Not really the “spirit” of the scheme, but the rules of the scheme are what they are,

We also have an electric towel rail. That’s now timed to only come on later in the evening, coinciding with when we are “allowed” to have an electric shower.

Out TV etc. uses almost 400W so its a large effect. We don’t really sit down until after 7 PM anyway, so that works in our favour for this scheme. We’d struggle a lot more as a family if it was 4PM-8PM or 9PM.

There are also some small interventions that can be made that also help.

I noticed that our gas boiler actually uses 140 W or more when its pumping. So far its not been very cold this November, and we are trying to reduce our use of the heating in general. However, it needs to be on a bit to purge the damp from the house. So, although its a gas appliance, if you set a timer so that it runs the heating only before 4 or after 7, that can make a small contribution difference. It all helps.

Me to to all of this. All LED bulbs, one light on, cooker, microwave, kettle unplugged, heating off, no hot water, no TV. I could go on and on, but still not reaching my target.

Maybe I have a Cheeky Gremlin in the works ?

We haven't used our dryer since February. We have a house full of smart plugs and bulbs. But what a lot of people forget is that even they use around 1w just to be on WiFi. It's not a lot, but if you've got a lot of them it mounts up. So we're using them as normal bulbs (on/off at the switch as needed) and just using them as smart if we're not at home.  The 2.1 surround system for the TV hasn't been used since March. That was a minimum of 40w in use, so almost 0.5kWh/day, more if the volume was up.

Our old fridge and freezer were using 3kWh/day between them. We bit the bullet and replaced them in March, and the new ones currently average about 0.6kWh/day between them.