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Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

Or just smarter appliances. Plenty of opportunities for thermal banking/battery banking.

Most of my loads, on average, don't need to run that exact second.

I don't mind if my hot water tank super-heats water in the middle of the day for the rest of the day. If electricity is really cheap, my freezer can jump into overdrive.

I don't need my clothes to dry in the next hour, just over the next 8.

I don't care if my fridge/freezer takes a break while I run the microwave or pre-heat the oven.

I don't care if my car charges ASAP as soon as I park, as long as it's charged by 8AM. And let it run as a grid-power bank for a fee.

Then you could have A/C systems that make ice or compress refrigerant in a tank.

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I think the point is that in any case, price isn't a finish line for solar to replace everything. This process will be much longer and require lots of infrastructure changes in multiple places.

> I don't need my clothes to dry in the next hour, just over the next 8.

Then why not just hang them up for drying? Zero power consumption and they will dry in eight hours, maybe not under all conditions but under many.

I'm usually with you on that.

I'd even go a step ahead: dryers ruin clothes.

A bit diff in a humid area, or where the A/C would need to condense the added humidity (if dried indoors), or the furnace would have to counter-act the cooling from evaporation, but HVAC is usually more efficient than the dryer.

>I don't mind if my hot water tank super-heats water in the middle of the day for the rest of the day.

Water does not have the capability to store much energy.

>If electricity is really cheap, my freezer can jump into overdrive.

Your freezer can't if it's not a ammonia refrigerant. You will actually be wasting energy.

>I don't care if my fridge/freezer takes a break

Your fridge actually does not use electricity constantly. It detects the temperature and run the motor, stops it when it reaches the desired temp. It's already having a break.

It's common here to have 150L+ water tanks. Can take it from 50C to 75C and then let the anti-scald valve temper the output when drawing.

OK on the freezer. Could still take the fridge down to 2C.

The concept of the fridge taking a break while running other loads is to reduce peak draw current. If everyone did that, it would make the grid more stable.

The general point made here is really interesting though - a large number of our appliances (domestic and small business) can easily be time-agnostic if built for it. It may take a decade or two to replace the fleet but boy, just think of the opportunities replacing every appliance globally presents - this is on the order of a new Tesla (the disruptive company) for each appliance.

Scheduling exchanges, where your local grid sub-station can get your bids for usage and put it into a grid wide exchange, scheduling your car to charge itself at 3:34 am using 24Wh or whatever.

We become ever more interconnected - this is the real rental economy - renting not a lawn mower for an hour but renting power. You think privacy is bad on your phone - wait till your washing machine sends "soiled underpants on at 3pm - any bids" to half the planets solar providers

- Washing machines (Replace the concrete with water balloon, choose latest time to complete)

- Lights (mostly I think these will be LEDs drawing off a panel on our roof. We don't need that much light.

- too tired to do this but a study on this must exist somewhere?

Actually lights consumes more than fridges in terms of residential electricity.

Modern lights barely consume anything. Are you thinking of old-fashioned incandescent lighting?

Improved efficiency is one of the things that allows us to have continued economic production despite reducing usage.

Nope, it’s from the statistics.

Let’s talk real. Compared to fluorescent lamp, LED comsumes half of energy. It’s not like they comsume nothing. Over 68% of sockets in American households already use LED in 2018 and 13% of energy was used in residential lighting in 2018. If 32% changes to LED it will lower the percentage to 11% which is still more than what we use to refrigerate.

LEDs mostly aren’t replacing fluorescent; CFLs never caught on all that well for domestic use. They’re replacing incandescent or halogen, so more like 10x.

LED lighting has taken the world by storm and we never hear a peep about it.

Your stats are just totally made up aren't they?

In 2017, 1% of households had all sockets using LED and 71% had not a single socket using LED. 11% still had all sockets using incandescent. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=31112

No it won't. Actually, the grid doesn't give a f about your fridge. Residential electricity usage is only 37% and fridges use about 9% of that.

> Water does not have the capability to store much energy.

Systems that make ice at night and use it for A/C during the day date back to the 1950s.

The general class of these facilities is phase-change materials. Water is pretty amazing, both for ice and for steam.

You may want to look into phase change materials for home heat and ac.

The block of ice or refrigerant liquified in a tank serve as PCMs unless we want to get really fancy :)

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