Hi Knukes, welcome to the forum.

Much depends on the rate of heat loss at your home and its thermal mass.

One thing that you could try is to raise the indoor temperature slowly by 1C or maybe 2C during the warmest part of the afternoon when your heat pump is operating at its most efficient. Then drop the setpoint back to its original setting and see if the heat pump stops running for more than the one hour, if necessary also turn your heat pump off for the designated period.

Even if you do not save much energy at home, it could do so elsewhere by reducing distribution system losses and also the needed to run less efficient generating plant.

Please post your results.

Thank you very much @derek-m for your kind welcome and response.

We don't currently have the internet service gateway for our ASHP due to Stiebel Eltron shortages, so I have to rely on the Heatmiser stats info. The house has very thick walls and a huge slab of UFH downstairs, so I'll give it a go this afternoon and see what happens. I've included yesterday's data for our living room, which seems pretty consistent to me with outside temperatures between 5 degrees and 10 degrees yesterday (that would be weather forecast data though).  

File attached this time!

@knukes

Looking at the data, it would appear that the indoor temperature increases naturally during the afternoon due to solar gain, which is to be expected when operating on weather compensation.

I suppose the easiest way to shutdown your heat pump for the designated period, would be to turn down your Heatmiser thermostat to say 20C. Once the required shutdown period has been completed, reset the thermostat to 23C and see how your heat pump responds.

I’ll be turning mine down

yes it could cost a bit more the following hour (and ours is in room adapt so it’ll adjust flow temp upwards slightly)

but the layout is £2+ /kWh. So compared to 30p you could spend up to 6x more the following hours and still be in pocket. So I defo think it’s worthwhile. 

Thanks @derek-m - I'll give that a try. That way is easier than turning off the pump.

That's a good calculation @benseb and I'm hopeful the temperature won't change too much anyway in that hour.

This is what we're doing, yes. I'm also doing as @Derek-M suggested and raising the flow temperature during the day and using the thermal mass of the house as a heat battery for that hour period (we do this anyway, I'm just timing it differently).

One curious feature of the Octopus scheme is that, because it uses the average usage during the same time period over previous days/weeks as the baseline for calculating how much electricity you are not using, it is incentivising me to shift my usage into the 4pm-7pm peak hours on days where there are no saving sessions, so that I have a higher baseline to drop from. For example, if I'd normally put the hot water on at 3pm so that it's warm for the evening, I'd instead put it on at 4pm. This way my baseline for a future 4pm-5pm Saving Session will be higher, making it easier to "save electricity" by shifting the hot water back to 3pm. I'm on the Go tariff so it makes no difference cost wise. You're obviously doing it for positive societal reasons too, so perhaps this sounds like a terrible idea, but I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking it!

Ovo's scheme seemed like a better idea to me, where people are paid money based on what fraction of their usage falls within vs outside of the designated peak period. Basically targetting a usage pattern that they want people to follow and incentivising people to follow that pattern, even if it means rewarding people who would have followed that pattern anyway without incentives.

I am not sure what to do as with the battery we don't really use anything anyway. Octopus said they'll work out any reduction, but they don't say what I usually use anyway. I'll sign up, but fully expect to get nothing back.

@batalto Maybe they should be paying a higher export tariff for the same time period

Posted by: @scrchngwsl

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One curious feature of the Octopus scheme is that, because it uses the average usage during the same time period over previous days/weeks as the baseline for calculating how much electricity you are not using, it is incentivising me to shift my usage into the 4pm-7pm peak hours on days where there are no saving sessions,

You say "curious", I say "stupid and unethical"!

It also doesn't reward longterm energy reducers, unless we also load shift into peak on non-saving days. I'm really disappointed in octopus over this.