Power Move Winter Challenge Update

Hi , I have hit the last 3 targets under 11.5%. I have involved my daughter who lives with me and her 11 month old son. We have an agreement not to cook between 4-7 if possible,  as the oven would be a big burner of juice. I cook between 6.45 and 7.30 so 66 %of the power is after the deadline. Cut the lights as much as possible. Not always easy with the baby and bath time. But if everyone buys in, it's possible. Using led lighting strips is cheaper too.

I have no dishwasher, which I think could be a big burner too.

Having big burner items that you can then use outside the 4-7 timeslot actually make hitting the target easier.

I was outside of even the £3 reward in the middle of the month and then smashed on loads of extra washloads and did more oven cooked food.  The £15 reward more than paid for the extra I used.

And I’ve no problem hitting targets even though I’m a low user that uses about 80p of electricity a day.

Thank heavens yesterday was a Sunday! I rarely watch TV on my old 37" non-smart Panasonic but I watched the UK Darts Open over the weekend. It was quite a shock to see my electricity usage had doubled! My normal usage from 4 to 7pm varies between 0.21 and 0.32 kwh. Yesterday it was 0.64 from a, for me on a Sunday, huge total for the day of 4.38. Ouch! (But I did enjoy watching the darts 🙂.) Other than the TV, nothing out of the norm was in use. The only time my daily usage goes above 3kwh is on laundry or bread baking days! I had no idea that the TV uses so much energy. Lesson learned! 

BTW.......my February average was 8.64% so well under target. 

I’ve got a 37 inch Toshiba non-LED compact fluorescent that was given me which I found out from the smart plugs that were sent me uses 131watts when it’s on and a horrendous 25 watts in standby.  That’s near £70 a year if left in standby!

I use a  remote thingy to turn off the TV and peripherals at the socket. It's off except for the odd occasion I want to watch something that I can't get with subtitles on my tablet. Does it still use Energy even when it's off? It's never on standby! 

Probably not, but the remote thingy does 🙂

I plugged a Tapo plug into another Tapo plug with the relay connected so that devices would be on.  It registered less than 1 watt which is in a way not useful.  I left it running like that for ages and there were on/off cycles of energy usage showing that it was basically using 0.5 watts which isn’t that bad.

Some really helpful insight @Tron Burgundy, are you finding you’re successful in most challenges? 

@Emmanuelle_OVO For the first month of the Power Move challenge I didn’t get it because I think like a lot of people on here who complain that they fail it, basically I didn’t fully understand it’s not about reducing total use it’s about doing stuff outside the peak zone.  As soon as I twigged that then doing cooking and washing outside peak hours weekdays made it loads easier.  Sometimes even waiting for a washload ready on Sunday would be done Monday.

My girlfriend has asked sometimes if we can pack it in for a month but because she watches the awful big telly mentioned above in the evenings it really hasn’t been that much of a problem.

With a pointer from someone on here I can now grab half hourly readings from OVO’s own servers so I’ll write some javascript that should let people see their current and previous month’s peak time percentage.  It won’t be pretty but it’ll mean nobody has to put anything into a spreadsheet any more.  It won’t deal with bank holidays, though.  I can’t be faffed going that far.

Be careful with those tapo plugs, the relays can get stuck, which means even though they click to turn off, they actually do not, you can tell whether it’s off or not with how much power draw it has.