Power Move times in relation to recent clock changes

I hit every one of the £15 targets and I’m a small energy user.  I just made sure I did everything that used more energy on a week day and out of peak hours.  Washing machine, kettle, induction cooking, chip pan, hoovering….

@deanphillips2005 if you press F12 in your browser and go to the network tab you can set the filter to Fetch/XHR and look for requests ending in ?date= and look at the response.  You can see the data Ovo uses for the page.

 

Well, that shows that you were indeed drawing 400W between 20:00 and 20:30, and I would say that that was BST. Something very strange is happening if it was in fact UTC.

There is a bigger spike at 07:30; was this something you were in fact doing at 08:30, like cooking breakfast? 

As Tron Burgundy pointed out, you can check the data underlying the web page. Sign in to your account, then visit this URL in a new tab in the same session, putting your own OVO account no. instead of 1234567: 
https://smartpaymapi.ovoenergy.com/usage/api/half-hourly/1234567?date=2024-04-10 
Change the date if necessary to match the one your screenshot refers to. The timings on the API page are shown in UTC, for example 2024-04-10T20:00:00.000 is 9 PM on 10 April. The ‘T’ between the date and time is the indicator for UTC. 

I don’t like to suggest that the clock in your kitchen is wrong, but that has been known to happen (BTDT!). As they ask in police interrogations, what was on the TV or radio while you were cooking?

Meanwhile, I can assure you that the Power Move times are local, i.e 6-9 PM BST. 

Hi, thanks for your detailed response. I will read in more depth soon. Regarding the usage in the listing at 07:30. Yes, the real time (in BST) was 08:30 and involved an electric shower. I’ll have a check at the link you gave to view underlying data also. I am struggling to get my head around the fact that a simple hours’ change can result in such chaos, and struggling even more to get my head around the fact that OVO cannot provide a fix. The timings from March 31st on my side are still showing an hour out of sync - some 11 days later. 

OK, interesting. I’ve not heard of this phenomenon before. I wonder if it has anything to do with the tariff you’re on; some of the exotic multi-rate ones adjust for BST, so that might put a ‘UTC’ or ‘GMT’ flag on your account if you have different day and night rates. Do you?

As regards 31 March, the usage page on clock-change day is a mess for everybody. They have somehow to fudge displaying a day’s usage when there are only 46 or 50 half-hours in the day, so it’s not easy to make sense of the page.  

I’m on the standard tariff, ”Simpler Energy” for both electricity and gas. It is the same rates for both day and night. In my opinion, if OVO have technical issues with clock changes, as clearly they do in this case, then they should not offer their Power Move rebates. I was informed by OVO that the issue would “likely be just for this month”. They really need to get some kind of solution in place for clock changes. Or an even better solution: the powers that be do away with clock changes full stop. 

That was just an idea. I just can’t see how a single account can fail to move with the times when everyone else’s does, and it’s not a sign of any general fault. I hope you get to the bottom of it.

Meanwhile, I can only suggest that you stick to following your kitchen clock when working around the PM target peak time. Only if you fail to earn the reward would you have to bother Support to grumble about it, with good reason that I’m sure would be taken into account.

I’ve asked the Power Move team about this and will report back 😊

I’ve had a response from the team:

In the OVO app - you're seeing your usage shown in UTC (coordinated universal time) - we're currently in BST so you're seeing everything as UTC +1. So when we get the consumption back from usage app and we assess the peak hours (stored in product-service with no time zone information), we convert it to UTC so 6pm BST is 5pm UTC and this is the time we use from the usage app to determine the peak consumption which is what the customer used at 6pm BST. We're still measuring your usage between 6-pm and evaluating your Power Move peak usage off correct data.