Power Move con

Sorry, you are missing the point here….I cannot turn off and turn my electric storage heating between 4pm and 7pm because that’s roughly when the off peak for these heaters are on. Then of course if I did switch them off during that window, it affects my overall tariff. Shut them off when it’s a warm day, they take 36 hours to cool down. Cold day…another 36 hours to warm up. Gas central heating, radiators heat when needed quickly, turn them off when warm, they cool down quickly. Seeing as Gas will be struck off in the near future my local authority are installing these Dimplex Quantum heaters. Uncontrollable. I’ve bought panel heaters which are cheaper to run. Thankfully my house can take full advantage of the sun all day, even in winter it’s a bonus.

Unable to, as it’s fixed hours. When the storage heating is on storing heat during the 10 hours, I can’t change that. Look up Economy 7 and Economy 10. 

OK, thanks @Sleepysusie I hadn’t fully understood… sounds as though, to have any chance at all of hitting this incentive, you’re going to have a struggle. The only slight plus which you might be able to work to your advantage is that, as the incentive works by calculating your weekday peak usage as a percentage of your overall weekday usage, aggregated at month end for however many weekdays are in the month, your peak 4-7 usage is actually not much higher (if in fact it is higher at all?) than the average for any other 3 hour slot?

Please excuse my clumsy way of expressing all this, I hope it’s clearer than mud! The trick with this incentive is to make your weekday peak hours usage roughly between a seventh and an eighth (13.5%) of your overall weekday 24 hour usage. And as the 4-7 slot is exactly an eighth of the 24 hours, that’s your challenge: to make the 4-7 slot “look better than the average”! 
 

Good luck, let us know how you think you can proceed, even given the difficulties with the Economy10? For example, how do your half-hourly figures for, say, the 4 weekdays 1,2,3, and 6 November look so far this month? Do they look in the ballpark of 13.5% or are they wildly out?  Your earlier figure of 13.85% for October looks pretty good to me, well done on that! Bodes well surely for Nov and Dec with just a couple of tiny tweaks somewhere to hit the 13.5%?

Well unless you have old high wattage bulbs then it won't make much difference anyway.

Mine are 8.5 watt standard bayonet fitting bulbs. That's 0.0085 kWh per bulb when switched on.

You can buy them anywhere. I got a box  of 12 from Amazon around 4 years ago,  only one has failed in those 4 years.

Unless you have something like the old 100/150/250 watt incandescents then sitting in the dark for an hour isn't going to save much electricity at all.

My living room bulbs (the ones that I'll be mostly using) are energy saving ones so I'll find out mid-month how much more electricity usage they've added on. 

You could check your IHD in the meantime (make sure it’s set to kWh, not £) by switching on your living room light(s) over half an hour or so in daylight, maybe at the weekend? Or check your online account Usage pages for, say, 1,2,3,6 Nov rather than waiting for mid-month?

Good luck with it! I wouldn’t elect to sit in the dark either! Or indeed in the cold. Trying to tweak the many small-ish background tasks that are constantly going on in the house (like reasonable levels of LED lighting, LED TV, central heating pump, ‘fridge/freezer, router etc.) don’t really impact on the PowerMove challenge as they don’t only happen in the peak 4-7 slot, it’s the big hitters that occur during 4-7 that make the impact.

Just wondering, Walt - have you checked the rating of the TV? I’ve no idea whether mine’s LED or not, but it’s a real power-glutton compared to the other things on your list, at around 100W. 

Hi @Firedog Believe it or not, I can’t find the rating plate - I suspect it may be hidden now behind the telescopic arm! However, when we’re watching it, it ticks away at around 35 Watts. It’s only an inexpensive little (32”?) two-year old Logic, we don’t use our bigger old Sony beast, which is a nice TV (maybe 15 years old now!) in the living room any more (for the last couple of years we’ve  pretty much lived in the conservatory full time!), which has surround sound and DVD boxes hanging off it. Goodness know what the Sony would gobble up!
 

This little Logic one only has a small Now box…very economical, if basic! I believe this is the model: LOGIK L32HE20 32" HD Ready LED TV.

I wonder whether yours is perhaps a plasma screen, or, like our old Sony, is pre-streamlined LED jobbies, or has a few boxes connected to it? And of course you can alter stuff like the brightness level etc.

Actually @Firedog you've got me thinking afresh about what might be called “normal” or “background” household consumption…i.e. everything except big stuff that’s switched on deliberately to do a specific major task like cook or wash or boil water (and not including thermostats and pumps to run gas-fired DHW or CH). 
 

I don’t think I can remember anyone actually suggesting what they find their background usage is on average? I notice mine peaks very rarely at 320-odd watts for a few minutes when presumably the little chest freezer and the combination ‘fridge/freezer all kick in together with other small stuff. But normally things tick along at highs of 230 Watts for a few minutes followed by lots of lows around 50/60 Watts for minutes on end.

It seems that daytime usage averages are around 100Wh, with nighttime consumption  (including evening and sleep time) would be just under that. The TV often finishes around 9PM, and we only use one main light until bedtime (plus usually reading for a while in bed). The PV panels up here in Sunderland over the dark months don’t always help much.  For November so far we’ve generated an average of just under 2kWh per day, exported 0.4kWh per day on average, and bought just under 1kWh per day on average (washing machine on the 5th, which was a sunny day here generating 3.1 kWh). So, roughly, we consume 2.5 kWh per 24 hours (generation minus export, and plus bought import), which equates to roughly 100 Watts averaged out over the day and night. However, all this is factoring in the fact that our small 2.4kW storage battery is on “running the house” so to speak from 1615 until 0800, and recharges between 0830 and 1600. 
 

The six months or so of summertime consumption is obviously hugely different again, averaging between 3 and 5 bought kWh per month, whereas in the six months of winter we can find ourselves buying around 7 or 8 kWh per week. At least. Depending on whether we get some days with zero rooftop generation (it does happen from time to time in winter).

So, ours is a smallish NE mid-terrace, and we are fairly vigilant with our consumption, but I don’t believe there is any way on earth we could buy (import) less winter electricity than 1 to 1.5 kWh per day.

This Power Move incentive has been a brilliant way of concentrating our minds on peak time usage, because until Power Move we just lumped usage into the two categories of daylight versus darkness! 

It sure has, but not just for peak time. I was surprised when I viewed my Usage histograms for recent months and turned on the comparison to a year ago. There is a significant difference: in September, for example, my average daily usage was only ²/₃  of last year’s, so I must be doing something better than last year.

The measure of background usage that I find helpful is that for the three hours 02:30 - 05:30. I hope that I’ve seen to it that nothing inessential is running during the night, so unless an amorous pair of foxes were to trigger the outside security lights, what I use then should represent the ‘sine qua non’, so to speak. The the difference between this and the 4-7PM value should give clues to where economies might be made.
 

Re TVs: I have an archaic 32” Sony. I just switched it on to see what it was using, and I was a bit shocked when my IHD reported 100W. It’s only about 75W when I launch it from standby, though, which goes to show how much that standby mode might be costing.