Power Move and Solar Panels - do they help or hinder me hitting my target?

We have solar panels and battery but still find the target for 4-7pm impossible during winter months. Eating a meal with lights during this time is essential to our lifestyle and not worth trying to win the £20 discount. So this is no incentive! Reduction of total daily electricity usage would work better for our household and the planet!!!

The incentive is to reduce usage between 4 and 7 because that is when most electricity is drawn and the extra usage means that some of the electricity needs to come from non clean sources. So by moving use from those times helps the environment and help prevent power cuts during these times.

As long as you have LED light bulbs there is no need to sit in the dark!

We have solar panels, air-sourced heat-pump, loads of insulation so are doing our bit for “the environment“. I only use the washing-machine and dish-washer when the sun is up and don’t have a hope in hell of achieving  the target. However I recently started using the tumble-dryer and changed the heating to go off between 4 & 7, meaning. that it works overtime the rest of the day. This should allow me to get my bonus, but at the cost of being terribly environmentally-unfriendly!

Another example of governmental joined-up thinking!

I’m no fan if this (or most other) government interventions but this isn’t a government scheme. This and other peak reduction schemes are intended to explore how people react to the ability to reduce peak use as that is when high carbon generation is needed. 
I think eventually we will arrive at a time when energy will be priced depending on consumption which some already supply as ‘time of use’ tariffs

What size of battery @ian_harrow? we've a 10kwh and have no issues getting under the target. Even with eating dinner and small children. 

We just avoid using the white goods between 4-7 

Hi @Hundon19 the power consumption would have been measured as taken from the grid. It also compares to your normal use during that time

Thanks for those comments.  It sounds like my suspicions were correct - whilst daytime use may have been subsidised or even nullified by the solar generation, any usage after dark (4pm to 7pm in winter) would almost immediately put us into the red, so to speak. I suggest a fairer gauge on people “trying to do the right thing” would perhaps be to incorporate and compare a historic usage pattern of this evening time period, rather than just daytime / evening time, if we were trying to shift the population’s consumption behaviour on behalf of the National Grid. Shouldn’t be that difficult if smart meter data is already being used for the daily calculation - surely a spreadsheet calculation. Though if this was to become a permanent national thing even this wouldn’t work after, say,  a year as you would be comparing this years’ attempt against last years already modified behaviour. Oh well.

I have a small 2.4kW battery (24 volt 100AH LiFePo4) which effectively means 1.8kW, and ten year old solar panels with Fronius inverter. Between 4PM and 8AM (winter darkness hours) we average 100Wh which the battery handles, so we buy a total of something under 0.1kWh for those 16 hours, effectively zero.
 

During the remaining 8 hours between 8AM and 4PM we recharge the battery (1800 Watts) and consume in addition an average of 150 Watts per hour (=1200 Watts). This extra average hourly consumption spread over the month is due to 5 or 6 wash loads at 0.6kWh per (cool) wash, electric cooker top oven 3 or 4 hours per month, a few hours microwave and air fryer, and a couple of sessions with the electric chainsaw and/or the table saw (we have a log burner for winter use). We never use a tumble dryer. The key thing is to avoid that crucial 4-7 segment every day and if possible move some weekend activity from the “invisible” weekend hours to the visible weekday hours (outside the 4-7 segment of course!).

Our total daily household consumption therefore equals around 3kWh. In winter, the solar panels make hardly any contribution, perhaps 20 or 30 kWh for the whole month, so we have to buy around 60 or 70 kWh of electricity per month in winter, depending on which winter month and how dark the daylight weather has been. In the summer months we only buy about 5kWh of electricity per month. 
 

Our winter and summer electricity consumption doesn’t actually vary by very much: we use maybe an extra 400 Wh of a winter evening on extra lighting obviously and perhaps a few extra hours telly, too. We rarely use our big old Sony TV in the living room with the surround speakers and DVD, being quite happy with our modest 32” LED in the conservatory. We are a pair of pensioners living in quite a small mid-terraced house in Sunderland, so I appreciate it’s easier for us to organise our consumption than it is for working folk, but the following are never switched off and the battery handles them fine: mains landline base unit/answering machine plus two additional mains landline handsets, 4 interlinked smoke and CO alarms and 1 additional CO alarm near the combi boiler (the boiler, too, is never switched off, nor its three mains-driven controls in the living room: room stat, timed stat, and timer), mains doorbell push (although not illuminated), router, cooker clock/timer, microwave cooker/clock, electric toothbrush base unit, the two inverters, small Curry’s chest freezer, mid-size Bosch fridge/freezer combination, the yard PIR which after dark operates its associated 4 LED floodlights and porch light when activated, one elderly mechanical timer on the battery charger, plus all the various neon indicators on switches, FCUs etc. and our two iPads and mobile ‘phones are always being charged up at some stage during the day or night.; we did ditch the mains clock years ago, horrified at what it was costing us every year. 
 

We don’t have an electric shower, and apart from when we run the combi for DHW we don’t use its pump at all: we have the log burner in winter for heat and also for cooking on. So our winter and summer purchasing of electricity is differentiated only by how much contribution towards our daily 3kWh usage the solar panels make each day. In summer they can generate 2100 Watts during bright sunshine, maybe 18kWh a day, and in winter they can vary from a (fortunately rare) 0kWh daily to an average of perhaps 0.5 kWh in December to maybe 3.5kWh in February. This September we’ve only so far bought 12kWh in total, so the PV panels have contributed well.
 

I would heartily recommend anyone with solar panels to get a storage battery and a small secondary battery driven inverter to power their house at night if yiu can possibly afford it. It’ll cost a lot more than any £10 monthly Power Move dividend, but what a saving over time.  We’ve only been able to afford to do this 6 months ago, and my goodness me, what a difference.

But even without panels or battery, you don’t have to sit in the cold and dark between 4-7, not even eating! 4-7 is 12.5% of the 24 hours, so just using your hourly average in that segment is fine, saving big hitting stuff for weekday usage outside that 4-7 slot. Is there perhaps a Saturday washload you can do on a Friday around 7PM? Or a Sunday baking session you can do around 8PM on a Friday evening? Maybe iron the children’s school uniforms on a Thursday evening if you have spare uniform sets? 
 

And of course it’s nit a question of *increasing* consumption overall, that’d be totally counterproductive! Rather, for the purpose of the Peer Move exercise, moving consumption around a bit, time-shifting as it were.  And for the curious, we did experiment with switching as much as possible off at night,but our secondary inverter hates it when household consumption drops to zero, it appears to panic and keeps buying 20 or 30 Watts as if to reassure itself it’s still alive! Quite what it does with those Watts I have no idea! But we find it’s better to keep a constant “vampire” consumption going in the house for those periods when the fridge or freezer motors aren’t kicking in, and the inverter sensibilities aren’t offended! It seems to be happy to constantly buying 4 Watts to offset low usage rather than being randomly startled with sudden zero household demand. Must be something to do with the reduced sensitivity of its clamp-on CT at ultra-low consumption figures of less than, say, 20 watts.

Good luck everybody, and for goodness’ sake don’t even attempt to sit in the dark and cold during 4-7. It won’t actually help much towards your 12.5% target in any case, as you'll be doing little else than just mimicking your sleep time consumption! Similarly for being away on holiday, say, for a week: how would that mean that the 4-7 slot was using less than 12.5% of the daily slots?!

And remember the Autumn Power Move is more generous, at 13.5%. 
 

I shall carry on with my previous policy of using the washing-machine and tumble dryer after 8:00pm in order to get the reward DURING THE TRIAL, and revert to the more environmentally sound idea of using them during daylight hours because the scheme does not take solar panels into account.  So I am being encouraged to be less-environmentally-friendly!