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

Cheers @Katymac, given those helpful details and with your daily weekday average (bought, not self-generated by your PV panels) of 3 to 4 kWh and 25% of that consumed in the 4-7 slot weekday peak slot, then you’ve got a very good chance indeed of hitting the Power Move incentive for December. In other words, although your usage is admirably low, with the 4-7 slot consuming 800 Wh or more, this definitely seems to me  to give you good scope to reduce the 4-7 usage? It may only be TV, LED lights, and the usual background stuff like ‘fridge etc., but if you were able to reduce things to, say, 500Wh in the weekday 4-7 by moving 300 or more Wh into the rest of each weekday on average, then by that action alone you would have reduced your percentage to around 16%, down from 25%. 
 

Only you know your precise usage and what’s available to reduce in 4-7, or, just as effective in terms of percentage, what to move from the weekend into the weekday (not into the weekday 4-7 slot, though!) to massage your 4-7 percentage.

The 15 quid is not a huge amount, but it covers the monthly elec standing charge, for example, or is equivalent to 50-odd kWh of electricity per month, plus its main impact for me has been sharpening my awareness of the importance of that weekday 4-7 peak slot. Previously, I’d chiefly considered my usage only in terms of daylight versus dark hours! And for low users like yourself, and I include myself here, £15 represents a respectable chunk off the monthly electricity bill.

I quite agree: inspecting an East Anglian winter roof is not to be undertaken lightly! Do have another close look at your precise half-hour usages (using your account usage pages) and see if you can match those usage figures (especially the 4-7 weekday slots) to your actual equipment/appliances etc. That’s the really interesting bit, what the bought electricity kWh represent in your daily patterns. I mean, you’re not going to remember every cup of tea or even precisely every time you use the iron or cooker or washing machine etc. (although definitely avoid any of those 4-7!) but it’s the patterns of your weekday usage that will interest you, especially the consumption of electricity in the crucial weekday 4-7 slot as a proportion of your total weekday (bought) consumption. And remember to use kWh, not £.

Good luck with it!

Hey @PhilHollington,

Welcome to the OVO Online Community,

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I have a grid tie inverter , with monitor to throttle it to not send power to the grid, only my home use . Along with batteries and solar.

Charge batteries during day, set inverter to run from 4-7 pm, so my usage is zero during power move.

Also I have a light detector to turn on inverter when sun is out and turn it off when cloudy to make sure my batteries are always well charged.

Sounds well organised @Johnoutthere!

Are you finding in the darkest part of winter that your PV panels can’t actually contribute much to your battery charging?  I have a similar setup myself (minus the light detector), and it’s a real struggle (up here in Sunderland) for the panels to contribute anything much over 1 kWh a day.  Some days it’s only a few hundred Wh!  And I always have a couple of zero days scattered through December and January. 
 

You’re absolutely right, yours is a good method.  I only have a relatively small battery, but still manage to run the house from 4PM to 9AM totally off the battery, at a cost of around 1.5 kWh purchased daily from the Grid.  Today was a sunny day, which meant washing machine (cool wash!) plus battery charger, at a cost of 0.69 kWh purchased today, a nice change!
 

There’s been some talk on here about folk using cheap overnight tariff energy to charge their battery…some of those tariffs available are impressively cheap.  Is that something you might consider? It’s probably beyond my own present requirements at the moment as we manage OK with my present system, especially for the 9 months February to October; if and when we can consider an EV then I guess that would be a real incentive to weigh up those attractive tariffs?

Solar panels plus 13 KWH battery pack. For winter months battery pack set to charge to 100% on low rate midnight to 7:00 am. Seems to provide enough capacity combined with the limited amount of solar generated during the winter to keep us going from 7:00 am through to 7:00 pm and beyond. On the few nice sunny days we can see the battery pack being topped up and on occasions a little drop going back to the grid! Right now at 17:00 we still have +/- 8.84 KWHs in the bank as they are only allowed to discharge down to 15%. During summer months we set the max SOC for the battery pack to 20% for the overnight charge and hopefully will not be exporting too much to the grid at 4p per KWH! EV is set to charge between 7:00 pm to 4:00 pm to avoid the Power Move hours and still benefit from the smart charger rates. During the day with 2 people working from home (2 pcs plus 3 or 4 screens) we are only using around 4.0 KWHs from 7:00 am to 5:00 pm. Since start of 2024 we generated 84.7 KWH so that’s +/- 2.29 KWHs per day - down south in Essex.

Hi @Phil225xe, that all sounds like a perfect set-up…if you can get through the worst month or two of winter as you have been doing, that’s brilliant! 
 

As for Power Move (not Power Move Plus, though, I should imagine) there’s no reason on earth why you shouldn’t be hitting the target…your peak hours will still be a tiny percentage of your average weekday hours, even though your weekday hours are admirably small.  
 

I’m well impressed with that battery capacity…we’re aiming to add another 4.8 to our existing diminutive 2.4 kWh this year…small beer! But batteries are definitely the way to go, and we find it helps us to achieve our PM target.
 

And of course Power Move is based on kWh, not £, so keep plugging away at those attractive tariffs!

Managed less then 1.5% in our first month of the challenge, mainly due to having a battery and solar panels.  We get most solar generation in the morning, due to a SE roof orientation, so I’ve set the battery to charge from the grid between 2 and 4 pm.

Sounds good @Ian in Somerset…do you manage to have your battery run all night from 4PM, or do find you need the grid before the solar panels start again in the morning?

PV system was installed last Autumn, so haven’t experienced the full seasonal range yet.  Recently the battery has been lasting until the early hours, but sometimes as late as 7 am if we’ve eaten out instead of cooking the previous evening.

Great @Ian in Somerset, the three months around the shortest day are the worst for the PV panels but even then, because of the flexibility afforded by the battery, they still make about a 50% contribution to our own fairly modest electricity consumption…in Somerset you may well have slightly sunnier winter weather, but in my experience even up here in sunny Sunderland (not!), all the way from February to October the panels make a really hefty contribution, often 100% or approaching 100% with the battery storage, so you’re definitely onto a winner, even in darkest Nov, Dec and Jan.  We are low users, though, in a smallish mid-terrace.

You will have fun monitoring the situation as the days get steadily longer now.  Although having said that, I see there’s some dark weather forecast for this second week of February, but even so…

Good luck, do let us know how you get on over the Spring months with balancing the panels, the battery, and your consumption: like you, my panels face SE (the other SW pitch of the roof means in effect half my panels get zero sunshine between end Oct and end Feb) and I use the battery at night and charge during the day. It makes a huge difference: although we’ve had our PV array for over ten years, this last 12 months is the first period that we’ve had a storage battery, and a relatively small one at that, and we’re well pleased with it and the difference it’s made. So your story is on a subject that’s of great interest to me and I’m sure many others on here…all the best…