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There really aren't many things that can be off for significant periods of time without making them useless.

Indeed I can't think of any that can be off for more than a day.

Can you?

Most EVs have enough battery to cover more than a week of daily commute. If you could charge for significantly cheaper and greener than you do right now, by simply telling it to only charge when the panels on the roof are producing a surplus, isn't that sort of a no-brainer?

Maybe you'd go back to grid mode when anticipating a weekend trip, or when the charge hits some sort of level of concern. And I expect polar places with cloudy winters would probably run a fair bit of conventional generation like we do now, in the winter. But during the sunny season, shut it down!

There are companies that will drive your "smart" thermostat and purport to save you money by strategically controlling it, but in the end if you want to save money on your house's climate control, you're going to end up being warmer/colder than you would like.

In our last house we had a box attached to the AC compressor that let the utility turn it off for 3 hours at a time, a prescribed number of times per month. We got a $10/month discount for this.

We never noticed any effect on comfort.

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