A debate on marginal pricing and incentives to move energy usage to weekday off peak times
Updated on 06/03/25 by Ben_OVO
Our Power Move peak times have changed to 5pm - 7pm weekdays. If you hit the saving targets you’ll be entered into a prize draw with a chance of winning some great prizes (the top prize is a year’s free energy!). You can learn more and sign up here, and visit our FAQ’s page here.
Here’s a helpful Forum topic where our community have shared ideas around hitting Power Move targets:
| Interesting we signed for Power Move a few months ago in the nice weather. Now we are in Winter mode and turned off almost everything in October & November, trying not to cook between 4-7. Yet average peak time electricity use was 20.72%. So didn’t hit the Power Move target of 13.5% or less. So difficult to achieve 😢 Are we the only ones. |
We have been struggling to achieve it too. We have a Smart Smart meter and use the Bright app. Between 4 and 7pm we were using 0.2kWh per hour but that was too high - coming out at 20%. I realised that the GCH boiler pump was using about half of that, so we have changed the heating so it comes on in the afternoon and it goes off just before 4pm and then comes back for an hour just after 7pm.
There are 2 of us mostly working from home, we mostly batch cook already, hardly ever use the oven (except for Pizza Friday every two weeks, which has become Pizza Saturday), use a slow cooker during the day a lot and reheat using the microwave within 4-7pm. We have solar panels so we try and use that energy when we produce it as we get a piddling amount for selling it; far lower than it costs to buy electricity. That seems to count against us as we are not high users so our total percentage is pretty low, usually around 4KWh per day in winter.
Our learnings - by changing the heating settings we are going to hit the target this month for the first time. I like a challenge so have been thinking of everything we can do, like boiling the kettle before 4pm and filling a thermos. It does feel a bit “make do and mend” like WW2 but I’m not bored of it yet…
It does seem to us that the only way to hit the target is to be a higher user earlier or later in the day. So the washing machine is going on a little more often and the dehumidifier to dry the washing. We used to be really parsimonious but that doesn’t pay on this scheme!
I used our fairly modern oven at the weekend to make a cake (30 mins) and two trays of mince pies (50 mins). We used nearly 8kW that day! Be warned… the oven is a HUGE user. The single biggest change you can make is to reduce your oven usage at any time of the day!
I’ve included some links below to some handy pages on our website that give tips on understanding your usage and reducing it 👇
https://www.ovoenergy.com/help/article/how-we-show-your-energy-use
https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/how-to-save-money-on-your-energy-bills
For more energy saving advice, i’d recommend a Google search: ‘[name of local/council area] energy saving advice’. You’ll find that many local councils offer free energy saving tips, links to grants and help with green tech / energy saving kit installation. There are also many organisations and charities that offer this sort of assistance.
