Another Power Move Homemade Spreadsheet

@waltyboy That all sounds to be (ahem) absolutely fabulous. Please be certain that I have no wish to be unkind and I had previously thought myself to be, at least, moderately technically competent but I’m afraid I got really lost in your explanation of the utility of what you have described.

Any chance of a guide for a technical idiot? (i.e. me!)

Best regards,

Mike K

Hi @Mike K, thank you for your kind comments…I’m not at all technical myself, but I’ve  found it helpful to look every day at my usage figures in my online OVO account. But then I thought it would be more useful to actually download the daily usage stats. That way I could let the spreadsheet work out my Power Move percentage for me as the month progressed.

That’s it, really. Each month ha a different “shape” of course in terms of number of weekdays and weekends and bank holidays etc. and of course this year we have a 29 da y February.  So the spreadsheet can help with that as well.

Keeping a spreadsheet is not for everyone, but once it’s up and running it takes onky seconds each day, or every couple of days, to copy and paste the data from somewhere like Glowmarkt or one of the other 3rd parties to whom we can give permission to view and present to us our smart meter daily data.

Hope that helps? There’ve been other spreadsheets offered on the forum, but being tied as I am to using an iPad I was pleased to find Mac’s Numbers for iPad is available free of charge, without any of the constant input from Microsoft when I try to use their excellent Excel, so that’s why I cobbled together my effort.

Thank you for your kind interest…all the best…

Hello @waltyboy. Despite your good efforts at elucidation and to educate me, I fear that I'm little the wiser. If there is any fault then indubitably it is my lack of comprehension rather than your explanation.

The world of Macs and iPads is, sadly, a foreign land for me. I use a bog standard desktop PC, landline and a rather ancient Nokia mobile. I've never mastered MS Excel either. Nonetheless I do thank you for your reply.

I guess that I'll just have to content myself with daily checks of my Ovo account.

Thanks and Best Regards,

Mike K

Cheers Mike, nothing wrong with pencil and paper, it’s my usual go-to, but the spreadsheet has been a fun project. A lot of time on my hands during December when I should have been doing something more constructive!
 

It may prove to be the case anyway that in a few months’ time, or certainly over the next year or two, data in our energy providers’ online user accounts will do all the heavy lifting for us and make obsolete all these homemade workarounds. Things are going that way in OVO, I think, and Octopus and others, even apart from all the initiatives popping up from third parties.  
 

All the very best, and thanks again…..

Poor little orphaned MacOS; it had Numbers first, but no one even remembers it exists!

More seriously, how do you populate it? Are you just pasting each day in at a time, or am I missing something more intricate?

(oh, and thanks!)

Hi @joanx, yes, I well remember the high regard in which Mac word processing was held decades ago, and of course still is, by authors and other professionals…I didn’t know about Numbers, though, I confess. I’m not that au fait with it actually, after all of just one month’s messing about! But it’s intuitive to use, very quick, and doesn’t balk too much when asked to do daft things like divide a number by zero (or even, ahem, when I tried to divide text by zero…), it doesn’t freeze or crash. 
 

Yes, you’re absolutely right, I just paste day by day, or every couple of days.  I’ve experimented by copying an entire 31 days of data from October and bunging it into December and it didn’t mind at all, barely blinked! I’ve not yet found a one-step way of stripping out the key kWh data from the date- and time-stamped data provided by Hildebrand’s Glowmarkt site (excellent, so dependable, previous day’s data available well before midday) for, say, a week at a time.  
 

But pasting five days at a time copied directly from Glowmarkt (no need to download zip files, you just choose “view” rather than “download”) into the top left cell of any spare three columns immediately isolates the key kWh data in the central of those three columns.  You still have to be careful to copy and paste exactly the correct 48 cells for each day, but if one is careful, it’s a trivial matter really.

I do hope you’ll enjoy having a look and messing about with it to assess whether it may be of use to you? The December one is fully populated, just as an example, really, but the January one is, I hope, a real improvement over the earlier version. I did experiment yesterday and pasted the first 15 days of the December spreadsheet into the top left of January’s (top left cell C6; January this year conveniently starting on a Monday!) and it seemed to behave OK. 
 

All the best, and thank you for the interest….

EDIT I remember now that one of the forumites who offered a spreadsheet was @Alandamore who gave us an excellent post about spreadsheets, including a link to his own Excel template. But there were one or two others, too.

Thanks. I will have a proper look tomorrow. I am the furthest thing from a power user. I have built myself a simple graph that compares usage last year and this year. Of course without temperature values for inside and outside, it’s hard to tell if I am saving energy or it’s warmer or I am colder or both. Nothing as pretty as your lovely graphs.

I find the bright app together with the bright display unit if you can afford it very helpful. Gives trend graphs and monthy comparisons.

Cheers @joanx (and for the very kind chart comment!) and @TonyC for the helpful interest.  
 

I do find the Bright app very easy to use.  Actually, I’m very interested in getting the Bright display (which IIRC has the added advantage of offering real-time analysis) plus their temperature/humidity sensor.  Apart from the versatility with the usage data offered by Bright’s display, I like the idea of measuring the house’s daily heat loss (the building fabric efficiency, though I can’t remember the proper term used by Hildebrand).
 

 I believe anyone who already has a smart thermostat may not actually require the additional temp/humidity sensor to link to the Bright display in order to measure their building’s heat retention efficiency? But the sensor is cheaper than getting a smart stat, even with the current OVO smart stat price offer.  That heat loss metric can only be measured during a winter, so I shall probably wait until next winter for that exercise, and to seek the necessary approval from my gaffer (!) but the Bright display is definitely on my radar to get soon. 

For clarification.

The Bright App is completely free, with no adverts or junk. However the display unit does come at a price, £60 ish I think and once you have it then some additional display functions become available. 

The app and display have the added advantage that they don't get their data directly from your smart meter, but from the system where your smart meter sends its data. So you can see your data anywhere you have access to the Internet.

@waltyboy are you sure you are not ½ hour out? I was pasting the data in so 0:30 on the glowmarkt spreadsheet match 0:30 on yours. That is assuming that the 0:30 was the power used between 0:00 and 0:00. But that doesn’t seem to be right. I turned on the oven at 7pm last night, and the heater at 8. This is what I see on the ovo site

And this is what I get from glowmarkt

So it seems like the usage between 0:00 and 0:30 is marked as 0:00

Or have I misunderstood your data?

Hi @joanx, I’m not at all sure that I’m not half an hour out…it looks like you could well be right…I did notice that Noel @Firedog starts his daily segment at 00.00 and finishes at 23.30, and then I forgot!  So I may well have misunderstood the correct start and end of each day.

Back to the drawing board!

Many thanks for reminding me to re-examine this, it’s something I’ve never been entirely certain about.

And thank you for having a look at the spreadsheet…it’s very clunky anyway and needs a fair bit of streamlining, even apart from the wrong data entry points. There are some truly awful IF formulae lurking about, apart from anything else! 
 

 I noticed this morning a tiny bit of formatting at Cell AN58 weekday average kWh (needs formatting to be a number to three places of decimals, rather than auto) and for the corresponding weekday average kWh cell in each of the two tables in sheet 1 and sheet 2, and that’s just the tiny things. Goodness knows what else may be awry…but it’s been a good intro to Mac Numbers for me. I shall continue to play with it quietly on my own!!

I will ask Tim@OVO to remove the post, as the template is so misleading….

All the very best…thanks again…

you’re welcome. It made a huge difference to me. I went from 14.4% to 8.1% over the last 3 days when I corrected it. I have been waiting to 7 to turn things on.

Gosh, now that is one huge correction! Impressive, too.

Keep up the good work! 
 

All the best….

Hi @joanx, looking on the Glowmarkt forum, it seems the important thing is to start the day when the meter’s time is midnight, not necessarily “actual” BST or GMT, so starting the day at 00.00 is the way to go. Plus it’s more logical, anyway!

Could make a huge difference for those folk on Economy7, of course, and as you’ve demonstrated, for any consumer in fact.

Bests again….

I’ve now removed the link to the spreadsheet, @waltyboy - due to the popularity of this post in views and comments I’m reluctant to destroy the whole thing… 

Very kind of you, thank you @Tim_OVO