Time of Day Electic Rates

[gadgetgary]

Does anyone subscribe to 'Time of Day' rates for their electic usage? If so, are there any significact savings?

My current rate is [email protected] per KWH.

Time of day rates are as follows:

Peak .13770 per KWH from 12 pm to 8 pm.

Off Peak .10270 includes weekends.

I have an electric water heater and a heat pump.

 

[pturo]

Sounds good, alomost 30% cheaper in off hours, which are easy to accomidate. Our utility company up here does not have it, but I am going to ask our mayor to insist on it.

 

[gadgetgary]

Requirement

They ask that you stay on the 'time of day' program for one year. There is no charge to the customer to change the electric meter.

 

[passatdoc]

Not offered in my area, but sounds good. Since I have gas water heater, gas furnace, and gas range, and since the fridge runs around the clock, the largest energy-consuming variable I can change is the laundry. My Frigidaire 2140 has a delay timer switch. It would be an easy matter to load it and set it to wash at 4 am during off peak electric time. The wash would be ready for the dryer when I get up at say 5:30 am.

The 2140 has only a simple eight hour delay switch. The 2940 and higher models offer a variable 4-12 hour delay feature which would allow just about anyone to program the wash to start at about 4 am, no matter what time they load the machine. The shortcoming of the eight hour only delay is that I have to be home at 8 pm to load the machine. If I come home at 10 pm, the earliest I can wash with the delay feature is 6 am, which may be too late for people who start work rather early.

 

[polkanut]

Here is a link the Time of Use programs offered by our utility. We are enrolled in option 1.

http://www.wisconsinpublicservice.com/home/tou.aspx

 

[polkanut]

We are also enrolled in the "HELP" program, option 1, which gives a credit of $8 per month. Here is the link.

http://www.wisconsinpublicservice.com/home/help.aspx

 

[toggleswitch2]

Strange tha summer and winter appears to be the same rate.

I had TOD rates in NYC. Winter was FAR less expense (Peak and Off-peak) than regular rates. The summer peak rate was VERY high.

The difference between your P and OP appears to be minimal.

In my case the two hours of A/C from 6:00pm to 8:00pm
M-F (P) and all of Saturday and Sunday (OP) turned out to be a very small net savings.

In an all-electric house such as yours a timer on the hot water heater and your (mythical) swimming pool, laundry and dishes off-peak and climate-control off-peak will be what the utlity desires. Whether you see a difference in your charges, however.........

As we know the heat-pump needs to run when it needs to run. A set-back in winter room temps (of 2*F, 1*C or more) results in using electic coil resistance heaters which are a huge drain of $. Even when theses are manually switched-off, the heat pump struggles to raise the indoor temp. subtantially, especially below 20*F outside.

 

[jamiel]

I don't think we've got the option now, but Detroit Edison offers separately metered air conditioning (unfortunately you've got to get a separate meter and a connection charge per month. I don't use enough juice to make it worthwhile...last year my highest electric bill was $87, as i recall.

 

[panthera]

TOD

This was introduced in Europe back when atomic energy was being pushed hard. Unfortunately, the technology was never updated, so in order to benefit from it in new construction, you have to spend tens of thousands of Euros to get it set up.
Making payback impossible short of several decades.
Pity, really-a friend of mine has it and by running the storage water heater, the storage electric heaters, dishwasher and washer at night, he has cut his electric bill by 40%.
I asked about it for my place, installation would have been 27,000Euros and a commitment to the city utilities for 20 years, at their prices (we have a deregulated utilities market in Germany, another example of our 'socialist' economy).

 

[gizmo]

This is "normal" in AU. there are two systems in my state, Victoria:
1. Hard wired peak and off-peak loads. All lights and power points (wall outlets) are wired to day rate supply, no discount for night time use. You get a big discount for having water heaters and storage room heaters ("heat banks") running off night rate power supply. You have two meters, one for day rate and one for night rate. Day rate about 16c/kwh. Night rate about 6c/kwh. Night rate is 11pm to 7am.The heaters are wired direct to the night rate meter, you can NOT use them on day rate. Some newer installations have a day rate manual booster button in case you run out of hot water during the day. The booster element is towards the top of the tank so it only heats a small proportion of the water.

2. "Winner tariff" - full time of day metering for all use. All power used including lights and power points is charged at fractionally higher than standard for peak time use and at off peak rate for of peak use. Currently about 17c/kwh day rate and 7c/kwh off peak. Peak is mon-fri 7am-11pm. Off peak is 11pm-7am mon-fri and ALL WEEKEND. Our old house is on the winner tariff, it allows a great savings. The water heater is normally only connected at off-peak times, but there is a manual boost button on the meter, which gives max one hour boost at day rate if you run out of hot water.

The idea behind it is to even out the load at the power stations. The base load supply in Vic is nearly all from coal fired turbines, they are very slow to react to changes in load and it is more economical for the power companies to encourage consumers to shift their loads to off peak times and get something for surplus power, than it is to try to turn off one or two generators at night fire them up again in the morning.

As more wind and solar comes on line, the economics of this may change. One power retailer here is already not allowing any new off-peak installations in my district.

Chris.

 

[petek]

It's optional here. All new construction though must have the new smart meters for TOD. For us on the old meters it's 5 cents for the first so many kwh's then goes up after so much use, can't remember without going to look up the bill.

 

[toggleswitch2]

Texas oil-man as president?

Interesting how much less expensive energy in Canada appears to be from "where I stand".

 

[dalangdon]

We don't have the smart meter technology at our utility yet, but they are (slowly) moving to it. In the meantime, we have a nominally conservation-based web structure where the first 10kwh (in the summertime) or 16kwh (in the winter time) are cheaper than the rest of the day's kwh's.

Of course, we have to average that out, since we have no way of knowing what the actual per day consumption is. They say that when the new metering is in, customers will be able to log in to their account and see what their real time consumption is, which sounds like a lot of fun to a geek like me.

Also, smart metering will allow us to be a lot more on top of outage issues, as we will be able to tell what meters are off line, which will help accurately identify where feeders and lats are out.

 

[polkanut]

Steve,

The only major appliances that we have that are electric are 2 refrigerators, 1 upright freezer, clothes dryer. During the summer the dryer gets used very little, line drying whenever possible. We been on TOU for over 8 years and find it very easy to live with. We are also on the budget billing plan, makes bill paying less painful.

 

[sudsmaster]

Most of my electricity use is constant: two fridges, one chest freezer, and pond reciculation pump/filter that runs 24 hours/day. The pond pump uses about the same as an energy efficient fridge.

I could adjust the sprinkler system (it uses on-site well pump) to water only between noon and 8 pm. I think it mostly does it that way already. Don't know if I would cut back on AC use until 8pm, but then I only have to run the AC units about two weeks every year.

The local utility company recently sent out letters saying that our gas and electric meters will be upgraded soon, so that they can be read remotely. I suppose time of day usage could be enabled by the upgrade as well.

 

[polkanut]

I can't believe how behind some of these utility companies are using outdated meter technologies. We've had a remotely read meter for close to 3yrs. now.

 

[dalangdon]

Well, in our case, it was just good, old-fashioned cheapness - combined with the huge hit we took from the notorious Enron debacle. While we own quite a bit of our own generation, and get a lot from Bonneville, we still have to enter into long-term contracts to purchase power, and they had the entire west coast over a barrel. Since the city council sets the power rates, we couldn't raise them much to help pay the debt off.

However, our procrastination has been to our advantage. The private utility in the area (let's call it "Brand X") automated quite some time ago, but now can't upgrade to all the new bells and whistles without basically scrapping what they have and starting over.