How Can I Optimize My Time of Use Electric Rate Plan?
July 25, 2022 6:24 PM Subscribe
We just signed up for a plan that charges 110% of our prior kWh rate for usage between 6am-11pm, and 60% of our prior rate for 11pm-6am. Other than the obvious, are there other ways to optimize our time of use?
Recently, our utility reached out to us about trying a time of use electric plan. Based on our prior 12 month usage, the savings are relatively small (a couple of dollars per month), but we recently bought an EV and can configure it only charge it between 11pm-6am. As a result, switching plans a no-brainer and should save us a couple hundred dollars per year easily.
I'm intrigued by this, both because I like to save money, but also because I'm inspired about the possibility of helping the environment by doing my small part to smooth electric demand and reduce usage of environmentally-unfriendly fossil fuel plants that disproportionately serve peak demand.
Under the plan, we will pay 110% of our prior kWh rate for usage between 6am-11pm, and 60% of our prior rate for 11pm-6am. Our EV will charge during the night, but are there other creative ways to shift usage? We typically go to sleep by 11, so doing laundry or dishes late at night is not an option.
I'd also love to hear others experiences with these plans and how they've worked out. The last AskMe post I've seen about this is over a decade old with few responses.
Recently, our utility reached out to us about trying a time of use electric plan. Based on our prior 12 month usage, the savings are relatively small (a couple of dollars per month), but we recently bought an EV and can configure it only charge it between 11pm-6am. As a result, switching plans a no-brainer and should save us a couple hundred dollars per year easily.
I'm intrigued by this, both because I like to save money, but also because I'm inspired about the possibility of helping the environment by doing my small part to smooth electric demand and reduce usage of environmentally-unfriendly fossil fuel plants that disproportionately serve peak demand.
Under the plan, we will pay 110% of our prior kWh rate for usage between 6am-11pm, and 60% of our prior rate for 11pm-6am. Our EV will charge during the night, but are there other creative ways to shift usage? We typically go to sleep by 11, so doing laundry or dishes late at night is not an option.
I'd also love to hear others experiences with these plans and how they've worked out. The last AskMe post I've seen about this is over a decade old with few responses.
Best answer: We have a time of use plan with an EV (and also solar, although our inverter needs to be replaced with the associated supply chain drama so we haven't produced through July, which is so so sad). A few thoughts:
- The biggest savings outside of the EV is AC. If you're in a place where you need AC, sleep COLD. Get your house 5 degrees or more colder overnight than you want it in the day, scheduled to start at 11pm, resuming at 6AM. Your house will slowly warm up starting at 6AM, but you'll use substantially less electricity in the peak period. Sleep with light blankets if you need; you're banking cold overnight. It won't change your consumption overall, but it will shift it to overnight.
- Most modern dishwashers do have a delay setting from 1-23 hours. You might be able to run your dishwasher overnight. Laundry might, not sure.
posted by true at 6:36 PM on July 25, 2022 [6 favorites]
- The biggest savings outside of the EV is AC. If you're in a place where you need AC, sleep COLD. Get your house 5 degrees or more colder overnight than you want it in the day, scheduled to start at 11pm, resuming at 6AM. Your house will slowly warm up starting at 6AM, but you'll use substantially less electricity in the peak period. Sleep with light blankets if you need; you're banking cold overnight. It won't change your consumption overall, but it will shift it to overnight.
- Most modern dishwashers do have a delay setting from 1-23 hours. You might be able to run your dishwasher overnight. Laundry might, not sure.
posted by true at 6:36 PM on July 25, 2022 [6 favorites]
If your house is well insulated and sealed and you have a decently modern AC unit, and your overnight low temps are cool, you can save a little power and money by overcooling your house at night so that it runs less during the day. This is sometimes (annoyingly) called "supercooling" your home, and if the above criteria are all met it's decently well supported by research and evidence.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:47 PM on July 25, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:47 PM on July 25, 2022 [1 favorite]
You could get solar chargers for your portable devices to refrain from plugging them in during the day, and mostly charge tablets and phones and whatever else overnight. Similarly, there are a lot of nice looking lamps that are designed to be portable like lanterns that sit on a charger most of the time. You could just keep them off the charger until you go to bed.
My Roomba unfortunately needs light to work (it performs very poorly in dim spaces or at night) but you could maybe keep the charging station unplugged during the day and plug it in before bed so it’s fully charged for the next morning. No clue how other brands of robot vacuum behaves.
Laundry can totally chill in the dryer overnight, so just try to time it so you pop a load into the dryer before going to bed. Some machines have wrinkle guard settings where it does a few rotations every twenty minutes or so to keep creases from settling, but anything where you care enough about creases for this to matter you can just hang up to dry or iron later.
Plenty of kitchen appliances have timed modes where you can set them to have things ready for you in the morning. Depending on your schedule you could have coffee get made at like 5:30 or oatmeal made in a fancy rice cooker and just left on the warm setting for the morning. At that point though you may be shifting the environmental impact from fractional energy use to more unrepairable plastics and electronics that probably want to connect to a website via a tiny screen on your fridge door or whatever so it probably doesn’t result in a net positive.
As a nocturnal person, if I’m ever able to get on this off-hours discount thing, rest assured that I and others like me will do our parts to even out the energy usage over a 24hr period for all you daytime people.
posted by Mizu at 7:31 PM on July 25, 2022 [1 favorite]
My Roomba unfortunately needs light to work (it performs very poorly in dim spaces or at night) but you could maybe keep the charging station unplugged during the day and plug it in before bed so it’s fully charged for the next morning. No clue how other brands of robot vacuum behaves.
Laundry can totally chill in the dryer overnight, so just try to time it so you pop a load into the dryer before going to bed. Some machines have wrinkle guard settings where it does a few rotations every twenty minutes or so to keep creases from settling, but anything where you care enough about creases for this to matter you can just hang up to dry or iron later.
Plenty of kitchen appliances have timed modes where you can set them to have things ready for you in the morning. Depending on your schedule you could have coffee get made at like 5:30 or oatmeal made in a fancy rice cooker and just left on the warm setting for the morning. At that point though you may be shifting the environmental impact from fractional energy use to more unrepairable plastics and electronics that probably want to connect to a website via a tiny screen on your fridge door or whatever so it probably doesn’t result in a net positive.
As a nocturnal person, if I’m ever able to get on this off-hours discount thing, rest assured that I and others like me will do our parts to even out the energy usage over a 24hr period for all you daytime people.
posted by Mizu at 7:31 PM on July 25, 2022 [1 favorite]
Just go down through the list of biggest energy users and see if you can do some or all of them at night if you use electricity for them:
Space heating and cooling (set these to start up around 4-5am with a low/high set point and then coast in the day as much as possible).
Hot water (set the tank on a timer to only heat up hot water after 3am or so, this should be fine as long as your tank is sufficiently large and you don't use a tonne of hot water).
Dishwasher and washing machine (run on a delay, ideally around 4:30am for the washing machine so your clothes don't spend too much time sitting wet in there).
It's not really practical to run your fridge or freezer only at night. The rest of your usage is either cooking (not much you can do about that) or just a bunch of small draws that don't add up to much unless you're using incandescent bulbs or doing something weird. Space heating/cooling, hot water and your EV are going to be the vast majority of your usage if you use electricity for them.
posted by ssg at 7:33 PM on July 25, 2022
Space heating and cooling (set these to start up around 4-5am with a low/high set point and then coast in the day as much as possible).
Hot water (set the tank on a timer to only heat up hot water after 3am or so, this should be fine as long as your tank is sufficiently large and you don't use a tonne of hot water).
Dishwasher and washing machine (run on a delay, ideally around 4:30am for the washing machine so your clothes don't spend too much time sitting wet in there).
It's not really practical to run your fridge or freezer only at night. The rest of your usage is either cooking (not much you can do about that) or just a bunch of small draws that don't add up to much unless you're using incandescent bulbs or doing something weird. Space heating/cooling, hot water and your EV are going to be the vast majority of your usage if you use electricity for them.
posted by ssg at 7:33 PM on July 25, 2022
There are plug-in dryer timers (240 V) that can start your dryer in the middle of the night
posted by scruss at 7:36 PM on July 25, 2022
posted by scruss at 7:36 PM on July 25, 2022
It's not really practical to run your fridge or freezer only at night.
Eh, just for fun though, it could, and this is a big could, be feasible to only draw power for those appliances at night; if you had the equivalent of a UPS or battery pack that was dedicated to the fridge, that would only charge at night. This would be pretty easy to rig up, if you had the cabinet space. With the chain going from the outlet > timer plug > battery > fridge. The timer plug or smart plug or whatever could easily be set up to only charge the battery at night, and then disconnect prior to the rate going up, and then feed off the battery. Since portability isn't as huge of a concern, you can opt for some of the heavier, cheaper Lithium iron phosphate batteries. The biggest trick may be finding batteries that can do 'pass through' charging, so they can power the fridge while charging the battery.
This would be pretty sweet, if your area is prone to power outages (which like, where isn't that becoming more common on some level?), and it was important to you, you could just go overkill on the battery to keep it up and running for a day or two.
I'd spend a couple weeks monitoring the big appliances with a Kill-a-watt just to see what battery sizes would be economical, and I'd probably rig this kind of battery up for anything that had a steady, predictable output (of course if the price justified it with an ROI of like a year or whatever is feasible for you).
posted by furnace.heart at 8:40 PM on July 25, 2022
Eh, just for fun though, it could, and this is a big could, be feasible to only draw power for those appliances at night; if you had the equivalent of a UPS or battery pack that was dedicated to the fridge, that would only charge at night. This would be pretty easy to rig up, if you had the cabinet space. With the chain going from the outlet > timer plug > battery > fridge. The timer plug or smart plug or whatever could easily be set up to only charge the battery at night, and then disconnect prior to the rate going up, and then feed off the battery. Since portability isn't as huge of a concern, you can opt for some of the heavier, cheaper Lithium iron phosphate batteries. The biggest trick may be finding batteries that can do 'pass through' charging, so they can power the fridge while charging the battery.
This would be pretty sweet, if your area is prone to power outages (which like, where isn't that becoming more common on some level?), and it was important to you, you could just go overkill on the battery to keep it up and running for a day or two.
I'd spend a couple weeks monitoring the big appliances with a Kill-a-watt just to see what battery sizes would be economical, and I'd probably rig this kind of battery up for anything that had a steady, predictable output (of course if the price justified it with an ROI of like a year or whatever is feasible for you).
posted by furnace.heart at 8:40 PM on July 25, 2022
The local service that wants you to turn things off at 7pm for glorified lottery tickets would very much like you to turn off your fridge and freezer for that hour. (They make some sort of money out of dynamically managing demand at peak times.) If you're not actively using it it will sit for an hour or two without additional cooling and not warm up to a dangerous level, which you could set for just before 11pm, and then it will cool in anger for a couple of hours afterward until it finds its set point.
I gave it thought. Then I thought about how much I trust IoT outlets to do their thing right, and gave up on the idea. But if you think you can swing it, and if you have a max-min thermometer that can live in the fridge to be confident it's safe, then this is definitely a thing.
All I would say is remember your orders of magnitude. A phone charger is 10W, a fridge is maybe 200W (varies a bit depending on what it's up to), and an oven, aircon or dryer is 2000W and up. Sort out the big stuff; the little stuff is probably not enough money to care about.
If it bothers you enough, there are a number of ways of getting 15s-accurate whole house power consumption, either from your radio equipped meter or using current clamps on your wiring.
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 10:16 PM on July 25, 2022 [1 favorite]
I gave it thought. Then I thought about how much I trust IoT outlets to do their thing right, and gave up on the idea. But if you think you can swing it, and if you have a max-min thermometer that can live in the fridge to be confident it's safe, then this is definitely a thing.
All I would say is remember your orders of magnitude. A phone charger is 10W, a fridge is maybe 200W (varies a bit depending on what it's up to), and an oven, aircon or dryer is 2000W and up. Sort out the big stuff; the little stuff is probably not enough money to care about.
If it bothers you enough, there are a number of ways of getting 15s-accurate whole house power consumption, either from your radio equipped meter or using current clamps on your wiring.
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 10:16 PM on July 25, 2022 [1 favorite]
I don't think it would work to put a delay on your washer, as your clothes will just sit wet until you wake up. But definitely put a delay on your dishwasher and have it run after 11pm.
posted by Toddles at 10:30 PM on July 25, 2022
posted by Toddles at 10:30 PM on July 25, 2022
We have this and put timer delays on all the appliances where that makes sense. Washer and dishwasher only run when electricity is cheap. We just put the clothes out later and hang dry during the day. It doesn’t hurt them to sit wet for a couple of hours.
posted by ohio at 11:23 PM on July 25, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by ohio at 11:23 PM on July 25, 2022 [1 favorite]
Yep, my washer comes with the feature that you can set a number of hours from now that the wash will finish. If you know how long your load takes, you can simulate this with a timer.
I use it because I generally need to take full advantage of the sunnier part of the day (morning) to dry my clothes, so I load in the evening, go to bed, and they magically wash themselves in the night and I hang them out on the line when I get up. It's like having little laundry elves!
All of which is to say that timers are your friend and you might be able to shift things that don't seem shiftable.
posted by inexorably_forward at 4:19 AM on July 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
I use it because I generally need to take full advantage of the sunnier part of the day (morning) to dry my clothes, so I load in the evening, go to bed, and they magically wash themselves in the night and I hang them out on the line when I get up. It's like having little laundry elves!
All of which is to say that timers are your friend and you might be able to shift things that don't seem shiftable.
posted by inexorably_forward at 4:19 AM on July 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
Some other big power users you might have and had not have thought about: pool pumps and well pumps. Clean the pool at night, run the irrigation at night.
The fancy version of what you're trying to do is called "load shifting" and is done in tandem with a whole-house battery and probably solar panels. In most US cities you can't save enough money to be worth the price of installing a battery. Your rate schedule is aggressively lopsided but I still suspect the EV is going to be 90% of any advantage you can capture.
posted by Nelson at 7:45 AM on July 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
The fancy version of what you're trying to do is called "load shifting" and is done in tandem with a whole-house battery and probably solar panels. In most US cities you can't save enough money to be worth the price of installing a battery. Your rate schedule is aggressively lopsided but I still suspect the EV is going to be 90% of any advantage you can capture.
posted by Nelson at 7:45 AM on July 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
Best answer: Per this running a dishwasher 5 hours a week would cost $1.17. At that rate, it's barely worth it to press the extra buttons to delay the start time. I agree with charging a car and running a pool pump - if you don't have those, these types plans are not worth it.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:49 AM on July 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:49 AM on July 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
Be careful about setting up major appliances on timers. As mentioned here last week, this isn't a good idea for ACs, and I'd imagine similar reasons apply to fridges.
(Unless you do what Mitheral describes in that Ask)
posted by Dashy at 8:34 AM on July 26, 2022
(Unless you do what Mitheral describes in that Ask)
posted by Dashy at 8:34 AM on July 26, 2022
Please note that fire safety experts usually advise people not to run dishwashers or dryers overnight because they are one of the most common sources of domestic fires. How quickly a fire would spread from the place in your house where you have these appliances to your sleeping spaces and escape routes is something you will have to judge for yourself.
posted by atrazine at 9:53 AM on July 26, 2022
posted by atrazine at 9:53 AM on July 26, 2022
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