Power Move - spring challenge

Yes that’s an option.  Just kind of makes sense for Ovo to join the dots between their products/offers.  I’m new to EVs (3 weeks in) so not sure if the app or car will get confused if it calls for charge but the charger says no because it’s within a blocked out period.

It will be interesting to see how the online usage charts and half hour figures cope with the change.

Hi @justmusic, I agree with, joining the dots would be a good thing…I hope someone gets back to you on this, because I’ve seen this very subject raised before in this forum.

Three weeks, hope it’s going brilliantly for you…you’ve beaten us by maybe a year or so, can’t wait! 

All the best…

I remember this being a talking point on the Forum last summer, will keep an eye on your feedback and raise it internally if necessary! 

Brilliant to hear about your new EV! I’ve added a badge on your profile so that other green tech enthusiasts can recognise you 😊 It might be worth making a separate ‘post’ in the ‘smart home’ area of the Forum, we have lots of Community Members who’re able to offer advice and tips. 

Thanks! Luckily, it’s neither here nor there as far as the March PM challenge is concerned, because none of the eligible days is in BST. However, the transposition of the last hour’s data each day was a problem for some users (here and here) and I’m eagerly awaiting next week to see whether it’s been fixed.

March’s challenge is now over, since there aren’t any eligible days left. This was the result for me in graphic detail:
  

In case that makes no sense, this might help:

• The red worm indicates the day-to-day peak period usage, rising to 3.2 kWh by yesterday.
• The pale green line shows 11.5% of my total weekday consumption to date, while the dark line shows 14.5%, the ceiling above which no reward will be earned.
• The green line shows how my performance (measured by the peak period’s percentage of total usage) changes from day to day. It fluctuates wildly in the first few days, because a change in usage for one day has a greater effect when there are only a few days in the calculation. It soon settles down to a gentle wobble as the month progresses. The arrowhead at the end of the line points to the final result, reproduced in the top right-hand corner of the image. 
• The green line’s value at 15 March was 4.568%. The mid-month email told me “Your average use during peak times is 4.57%”, so spot on give or take a Wh or two.
• The height of the curves stays at Friday’s level over the (pale blue) weekends, because there’s no change in weekday consumption.

Next quarter will be interesting. My consumption has hitherto leapt at 7PM, because (a) the kettle is boiled, (b) the laptop starts charging up again, (c) a couple more lights get switched on and (d) most significantly, the TV is switched on for the Channel 4 news. My aged TV is quite capable of drawing up to 100W, so it’s a major factor. I wonder if I can get used to not watching the news until 10PM. I’m quite happy to delay cooking until 9PM, if it happens to be a hot meal day.

Half-hourly weekday usage for the whole period looks like this:
  

It’s clear that the main driver of my low percentage is the daily (electric) shower between 8:30 and 10:30. Usage in the peak period isn’t much more than it is during the quiet hours of the night.
  

Excel is brilliant at producing visual representations of data like these:
  

PS A click on an image should reveal a larger picture.

Nice clear charts…and impressive figures, too.  A spreadsheet is indeed invaluable at highlighting patterns and tracking goals, apart from happily munching data, and these charts demonstrate that brilliantly…cheers…

EDIT: Oh, and admirably low usage is clearly and reassuringly no bar in itself to achieving Power Move targets, given consistently low peak hours usage, plus stratagems such as that regular morning splurge of power

Thanks! I’m willing as always to share the Excel file. If that’s not so appealing, then an alternative is just to pass the data to me and I can easily plug them in to produce similar charts for anyone interested. It’s easy enough to paste them (as plain text, e.g. CSV) into a PM to me at https://forum.ovoenergy.com/members/firedog-3673 

You might call it a stratagem, but to me it’s a natural common task in the daily round - I would rarely think of having a shower between 4 and 7PM, except perhaps if I’d got myself dirty during the day.

A shower like this is equivalent to baking a frozen pizza or a plate of oven chips, tasks which could be moved from the peak period but probably not without causing some hardship. If I were in that situation, I’d balance the value of the reward against the discomfort earning it might cause. For a household struggling with the electricity bill, the reward would undoubtedly be worth it. 

That’s why it’s a good idea to keep track of the percentage from day to day; it could well be that delaying (or advancing) oven activity would only have to happen a few times during the month to get the percentage into the reward-earning field. 

Thank you, that is an extremely kind and generous offer…

I’d be surprised if nobody takes up this offer of @Firedog ? It could well amount to a “get a tenner with every offer” special, if it helps people achieve their target!  Noel will recall how, when he advised me via some kind PM exchanges back in November, I took him up on this very offer for November 2023. Without it I wouldn’t have had the first idea of how to go about attempting to cobble together my own (rather inelegant compared to Noel’s) iNumbers spreadsheet for iPad.  For example, at one time back then I what been attempting via Glowmarkt data to calculate Power Move based on my day starting at 0030 instead of 0000!  
 

So, apart from concentrating the mind on current Power Move for a particular month, it does provide a spur to thinking about how to play around at manipulating usage data tailored to one’s own preferences. Now I would find it hard to envisage monitoring my usage data (let alone attempting Power Move) without the ease and “instantaneousness” of my spreadsheet.

Highly recommended!