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Comment by evanreichard | Hacker News Reader

Ecobee has eco+ which has "Community Energy Savings" [0]. It was just way too intrusive. It seemed to be a reactive system vs proactive. Technology Connections goes into this more [1], but I believe they should be providing a system that proactively cools when there is less demand _prior_ to an expected increase in demand. Effectively using your house as a "battery".

When I had it enabled, I was _always_ too hot (in the summer) during peak hours. Sorry, not sorry: I'm not willing to sacrifice my comfort for the ~$10/mo incentive.

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[0] https://www.ecobee.com/en-us/eco-plus/community-energy-savin...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f9GpMWdvWI

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Nest has an energy saving feature that feels like it is trying to boil the frog. We normally keep the thermostat at 78F (~25.5C), but over the course of a couple of weeks it ticked it up to 79F, then 80, then 81, and now 82F (~28C). I had to go in and manually adjust the schedule to get it back to something reasonable.

Where do you live? I'm just curious because I can't imagine living at 78F anymore.

78-80 doesn't feel to bad in a dry climate imo

I live in a fairly humid area, but the AC helps to drain the moisture out of the air so it's still livable. Ceiling fans on a low setting can also help you feel comfortable, especially if you don't have the sun shining on you.

Yeah we live in the foothills in Colorado at 7700 feet elevation. Typical summer day is 85 degrees and 20% humidity and we don’t have AC.

It gets warm but fans are enough and I have a portable swamp cooler for when it gets really hot.

I live in Austin, TX. It has been 105-ish every day this week, but the humidity is 30% during the hot part of the day. My office has a ceiling fan which is on low most of the time. Some people will not believe this, but I have the minisplit set at 80F and when the sun sets I turn off the fan because I start to get cold. When I leave my office (which is attached to the garage) and walk the 40 feet into my house through the 98F evening air I often feel: ah, that warmth feels good.

To summarize: it is one part adaptation to the heat, one part low humidity, and one part air circulation.

I'm not OP but I live in Washington DC, where our summers are definitely hot and humid. I keep my apartment around 78F to 80F. I use a dehumidifier to keep relative humidity around 50-55%, which corresponds to a dew point of ~60F which is low enough to still feel comfortable instead of "sticky".

On especially hot days, I will raise the setpoint higher, and use a small fan to circulate air around where I am spending time, which is very effective when humidity is not too high.

A dehumidifier is essentially an air conditioner that dumps heat back into your living space.

What you are doing sounds inefficient.

Yep. They're adding heat to the inside of their home. They need to use an AC unit to remove the moisture and pump the heat outside.

I do have an air conditioner (well, an air-source heat pump), but it doesn't adequately remove enough moisture before the indoors gets too cold. It's possible this is not properly sized, but I cannot change it because I rent.

In my case I did some tests, and the additional power usage of the dehumidifier is way more than offset by the power savings I realize by running the air conditioner less frequently. This only works because the dehumidifier enables me to be comfortable at a higher indoor temperature.

The dehumidifier does use power and produce heat which must be removed from my apartment by the air conditioner.

Because it's less humid, I can maintain a higher indoor temperature and still be comfortable, meaning the air conditioner needs to run less.

Do I use net less energy? In my case, yes, but your mileage may vary depending on your equipment, insulation, etc.

He's saying that you have two air conditioners: one that vents heat inside your house and one that vents heat outside your house.

Your dehumidifier and your air conditioner are mechanically identical. The only difference between the two is where the waste heat goes. The exact same device is called a 'dehumidifier' if the waste heat is vented indoors and an 'air conditioner' if the waste heat is vented outside.

There's not really any efficiency gains from running a dehumidifier to reduce air conditioner use. They both use the same power and have the same effect on the absolute humidity, so you might as well just run the air conditioner (unless you want it to be warmer).

There's also dessicant dehumidifiers that don't use a refrigeration cycle. They do also warm the air a bit but may be more efficient per mass of water removed from the air, depending on the temperature and humidity range.

I ended up buying a dehumidifier to complement my AC, which is ancient and can't seem to keep up with the humidity in the summer.

Before the dehumidifier I could get the room cool, but it still felt sticky. With both I'm able to keep the humidity at bay and cool the room as well.

Is it too high or low? I am interesting about condition settings of foreign!

78 at my thermostat means some rooms in the upper floor might be 84+!

Same. I keep mine at 74 during the day and cool it to 71 closer to bedtime.

That, plus blocking the vent closest to the thermostat in summer, tends to get the upstairs to within 3-4 degrees of the thermostat setting.

Seems pretty normal to me. Maybe not as refreshing if you come in out of working in the heat, but fine for being a desk jockey.

Temperature Comfort is largely a learned behavior in my humble opinion

In Wisconsin we set the AC to 78 in the summer. We tried doing that when we moved to Florida. Couldn't do it. Had to go down to 72, 74 max, because of the humidity. There's just too much moisture in the air and we have to set the thermostat that low to make sure it gets removed from the air.

An interestingly more literal use of the analogy. I like it.

Holy, while in Toronto I set the thermostat to 68 and complain if I see it cross into the 70s. Thanks to the wind tunnel I'm in, I'm able to turn off the AC every 2-3 days for 1-2 days. Conventional wisdom tells me this is more costly than just keep the AC running all the time at a stable temperature, but, I don't really care about the cost saving over personal preference.

It doesn’t work. People use electricity at peak hours because working people and families are on similar schedules. We all get home from work or wfh office, start cooking, and doing other things because we have time after work/school. Not to mention 5pm is usually the hottest part of the day so ACs run.

It does work, though. Nest's program pre-cools to get you through the hottest hours without having to kick on the AC, moving some of the region's demand from the 4-6pm slot to the 2-4pm slot.

I find myself going "huh, it's getting a little warm" at about 5:45pm, at which point I check and remember it's a "Rush Hour" session.

Does precooking really work? I’d assume it would have to cool my house down below 65 to keep it below 80 all afternoon. 111+ days are brutal in certain rooms even with both ACs set to 76.

Does precooking really work?... 111+ days are brutal

Not every solution works in every situation. That doesn't mean it doesn't work, it just might not work for you.

(Posted from a location that was 108° last week.)

> Does precoo[l]ing really work?

Depends on the shape of the temperature graph for the day, the power of your AC system, your insulation, etc.

If your on a day that doesn't get below 90 and gets above 110 during the hottest part of the day and your AC is barely rated at the minimum recommended for your square footage and you have average insulation, no, and even regular AC use is going to be marginal and your AC is probably going to frequent service.

(And the things that make precooling work better also will make your AC work better and, for the most part, more energy and maintenance cost efficiently when you aren't precooling.)

If you live in a place where you frequently need AC, aside from decent insulation, getting an overrated, high-efficiency unit (which seem to be correlated for residential units, probably because both drive up cost, and there is a correlation between people looking for more capacity and people concerned with efficiency) is a serious quality of life improvement.

Does for me. Around 7 PM, my AC kicks on to drop the house a few degrees; sun's down low and air temperature has been dropping by then.

Later in the evening, it drops lower to be able to sleep, but also cool down the house, and taking advantage of the coolest part of the day for best efficiency of the AC system. It stops holding that temperature around 7-8am and goes to a much higher set point.

The house stays dry enough through the day that it never really gets uncomfortable, especially with a gentle breeze from a small, quiet fan in the room.

I would not expect this sort of solution to be super useful in a place that gets 111 degree days, where AC is literally keeping folks alive. You'd probably get more benefits from a housing code that requires extended roofs for shade, light colored exteriors, etc.

The last 30 years have been a renaissance of insulation and energy efficiency. Pre cooling, fan recirculation, humidity consideration, time of use observance may only delay/reduce a few cycles per house per day, but in aggregate, that's significant.

I can't speak for the specifics of using a Nest, but pre-cooling a house earlier in the day is definitely a more efficient use of power.

Earlier in the year in Australia when day time temperatures were 35°C-40°C (95°F-104°F), waiting until midday to turn on the AC would mean using another 10 kwh more than if the AC was turned on at 9am.

Granted, this is an new Australian house which means it's built to standards about 30 years behind what you would expect for a first world country.

in reality it's hard (and probably expensive) to proactively cool house with AC during summer at hot/sunny regions. I live in a house with rather good insulation (the one mandated by code) in south bay, yet all the walls getting rather warm and even if you try to precool air with AC walls with bring temperature back quickly

My solution was to install whole house fan which runs through the night when temperature drops to 16C-14C. It allows to both replace air with colder one multiple times and due to improved air-flow to cool off the walls.

After I shut windows close at morning most of the houses stays within comfort zone ( < 22C) till 6-7pm even on 40C days

If you can feel that your walls are warm I don't think that's good enough insulation.

The whole house fan solution is great though.

i have walls insulated according to california build code. it's not really possible to add more insulation to them, unless you rip them off and do spray in insulation. insulated attic with radiant barrier and insulated floors. i just checked with IR camera, most of surfaces in the house are now 22C-24C. After a few days of 40+C walls ill go to 25-26. some walls (south side of house) even higher. There are few little spots where insulation doesn't sit properly - it will be around 28C. The biggest offender is skylight. Temperature near top of it can get to 60C.

Edit. I think most people simply do not realize what temperature have internal and external walls in houses and how it interacts (or counteracts) AC. If you will go to read greenbuildings/passive houses forums, there are a bunch of discussions about thermal mass of the walls

it's not really possible to add more insulation to them, unless you rip them off and do spray in insulation.

Actually, it's possible to inject foam insulation into walls without ripping them off. It goes in through small holes, or through utility boxes. Plenty of companies do that. I've even seen it advertised on TV in California.

I know.

But injectable foam insulation usually going into empty walls. I already have butted fiberglass in there. I don't think it's viable to make laparoscopic wall surgery to remove fiberglass . I did a quick google, and looks like you can do injectable foam over fiberglass. But I am not sure how much R it will add, but I am sure that for cost of of injectable foam + wall repair, I can get another hvac and run it for next 10 years...

I did consider recently to double walls on sunny side of the house with few layers of foil backed foam boards.

Do you have any actual numbers for what is up to code insulation in California? California is a very temperate climate. I wouldn't exactly expect their code to have the highest insulation requirements.

Also, building codes should be considered the minimum.

I am keenly aware of how much thermal mass walls hold. My apartment is 3 external walls that are constructed pretty much only of a few inches of concrete, bare. The result is that after a full day of summer sun, even though it drops to 64 degrees outside at night, my air conditioner cannot keep it 76 degrees or lower inside. It's crazy. It's worse in the winter when I can feel the walls sucking heat out of my apartment.

>Do you have any actual numbers for what is up to code insulation in California? California is a very temperate climate. I wouldn't exactly expect their code to have the highest insulation requirements.

R-15 for 2x4 or R-21 for 2x6. Not highest numbers in USA I guess and after you buy house that already "exists", it's expensive to change it.

>I am keenly aware of how much thermal mass walls hold. My apartment is 3 external walls that are constructed pretty much only of a few inches of concrete, bare. The result is that after a full day of summer sun, even though it drops to 64 degrees outside at night, my air conditioner cannot keep it 76 degrees or lower inside. It's crazy. It's worse in the winter when I can feel the walls sucking heat out of my apartment.

Whole house fan is the way to go. If you can't install one, I think a couple of strategically placed window fans over night to create some air flow through the house might work better than AC

I did some research on preventing walls from getting too hot (my room wall on the outside hits 170F i think). Narrowed it to

- Transparent paint with some particles that reflect sun/reduce heat gain

- Awning

- Shade sail

- Trellis and grow some vine to cover the wall.

> my room wall on the outside hits 170F i think

That seems unbelievable! Is that a typo?

Nope. It's west facing stucco wall without shadow. It's on sun through most of the day. With IR camera i clocked it in range of 65C-75C multiple times (so it's maybe not 170, but 165. hate C<>F conversions in head) . I had inverter on this wall, and it simply died from overheating. Same wall on the inside get's to 30C or more if I don't run AC that blows on it. Wall is triple layer stucco over plywood, R13 fiberglass and then drywall.

That's amazing. Really shows the value of overhangs, breezeways, and trees.

2x4 walls are allowed at all? That surprises me, up in the north they haven't been legal for decades now. Well it is more you can't meet the rvalue with them, but still even cheap houses don't get them

no idea. Insulation levels are part of the code. It will be used at least for cases "deep remodels" when house is stripped down to skeleton

Whole house fans are really great.

It’s cheating, a bit, to live in a place that drops 20-40 F at night … but even if we didn’t, the ability to turn every open window into an air conditioner is a great trick.

Yes. It's really amazing. First thing that I did after bought house last summer was to install whole house fan. Due to it we used hvac to cool house for less than 36 hours in July-October timeframe (only at days when temperatures were above 40 for few days in a row or when night temperatures didn't went down below 20)

I'm going to tear mine out. It helps a little, but it leaks so much conditioned air when not in use i'm convinced it is a negative overall.

tear it out and put a new one. There are models from airscape that come with motorized dumper doors with insulation. When fan is off, it's sealed.

Thanks for that. I wasn't even aware that I had an option to get one that wasn't sending all my winter heat out.

Like heating/cooling your house more in advance of demand? It would be neat if they could enable/disable demand on a rolling basis where AC runs for one subpopulation for part of an hour then for another subpopulation the next part.

or you know, dont live in the desert e.g Phoenix Arizona, or if you do decide to live in the desert then realise that's your choice and dont add to pollution and climate change by trying to cool down a desert with AC.

Do you also recommend that people don’t live anywhere it snows? I mean, heating up in winter uses even more energy than cooling down in summer.

It's funny that I have seen several anti A/C articles and several pro Heat Pump articles in recent times, do you think they know these are the same things in reverse? At least A/C is often used in sunny locales were solar can be used effectively.

Same thing in reverse but where I live, in the summer I'm cooling from 30C down to 20C and in winter I'm going from -18 to 18.

AC is more than 100% efficient in heating the environment. This is unfortunate, but thermodynamics will win in the long run.

Heat pumps are more than 100% efficient at heating the house, which is what we want, and one of the places where we are on the same side as thermodynamics.

In the long run ACs are exactly 100% efficient at heating the environment. The extra heat is only temporarily displaced from the building being cooled, and will leak back in eventually.

There is heat generated by the system, and heat generated by the power generation used to power the system. It’s definitely not a neutral system - that’d be thermodynamically impossible ( increasing entropy without external energy)

If you power the AC with 100% solar shouldn’t there be no extra heat generated?

As in you’re merely absorbing some of the heat from the sun to then move existing heat around?

Frankly, even without solar power it wouldn’t generate “extra” heat directly over a long timescale, it would only accelerate the release of existing “heat” currently trapped in oil/gas/nuclear/etc.

There’s a fixed amount of sunlight hitting the earth every day, but not a fixed amount absorbed. A solar panel captures more heat than a white surface that bounces most of the light back into space. So the act of solar-powered a/c would still result in a net increase in global heat, unless you put the solar panel on top of something that was absorbing more heat than a panel does. I have no idea of the actual practical math of this - like does a black roof absorbs more or less than a panel? But solar energy isn’t impact free, even if we set aside panel manufacturing.

Once the heat is captured by the solar panel, I think you’re right using it for a/c is neutral - just moving heat around.

As for burning stored energy, that has to play into the heat dynamics of the globe. Like if you release it all at once it stops processes that would remove it from the atmosphere (animals and plants die), and it creates runaway heating feedback loops. there is some level of burning stored carbon that the planet can buffer and absorb and results in no change in global temperature. So burning stored energy in excess of that is a big problem. Like how you can sit or walk without noticeably sweating, but running causes you to have to actively cool yourself by sweating.

Fair enough, but direct heating of the environment is not of practical concern since it's effect is minuscule compared to GHG's. Point being, solar output is well correlated with A/C usage, which is a nice benefit and all that solar energy would be turned to heat anyway... so might as well have it cool your house :) Heat pump in the winter on the other hand, not so well correlated with renewables.

AC is also more than 100% efficient at cooling the interior too.

And the Delta(T) that an AC has to work with are far more favorable in AZ summers than a heating heatpump in MI's upper peninsula in the winter.

Were they from the same people?

Heating is far worse than cooling for energy consumption. It just doesn't produce the same moral outrage that AC does.

Which is funny, because you can always and universally add an extra layer of clothes to keep warm. You literally don't need heating as long as you forgo internal plumbing. But there is no universal alternative to AC to cool something down and people die all the time from heat exhaustion at home.

I have noticed this too. It is just AC is perceived as decadent and heating as primitive. It takes a fancy machine to cool your house, but you can heat your house by burning a log. The actual energy expenditure to accomplish temperature change doesn't affect how people how energy intensive people view each method.

I live in the desert and there are tons of alternatives to AC that have been used for thousands of years.you can build structures partially underground, you can use the evaporation of water to cool the air, you can use wind catchers like the ancient Persians did, you can wear different colored clothing (Triple digits is not uncomfortable if you’re wearing light colors), you can sleep during the day and work when it’s cooler, and so on.

yes you can do all those things, but they only work if you actually do them. Which they dont. They rely on AC instead.

Just saw both these comments, and I can only reply to this.

To "oceanplexian": Note that I used the word "universal". Evaporative cooling only works in dry climates. And the funny thing about dry climates is that they almost all lack water. I'll never forget the feeling of dread and horror when I saw water fans in Madrid cooling outdoor seating areas.

Your desert cooler is an environmental calamity and they should be banned.

To "celticninja": Yes you can do all those things but not universally in any climate (which was my point) and where it is possible it's probably an environmental disaster to do so (I can't think of any city in a dry climate in the world that doesn't have a water sustainability problem). You see we rely on AC (to your point), because we've thought the problem through and didn't stop at a shallow understanding.

Jeez guys! If your climate is dry enough for swamp coolers to be effective, they're dry enough for solar panels to make sense (if you care about CO2. I don't, I'm on acetaminophen). And it makes a lot more sense than wasting mineral water (i.e. well water).

You don’t need to do that with any kind of precision. Random starting and stopping has the same effect over a large number of households.

Ecobee integrates with SRP in my area and does exactly what you describe. They know my billing plan (Time of Use - Demand) and, from my understanding, will coordinate with SRP ahead of a conservation event to pre-cool my house by up to 2 degrees before raising it by up to 4 degrees when attempting to “flatten the demand curve” of the grid.

Nest's does this; it cools below your set temperature in advance of the "Rush Hour" for a few hours.

https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9244031

In my experience, it was not nearly sufficient. If your AC is appropriately sized (or undersized) for your house, you can't just drop several degrees in 2 hours during the hottest part of the day. Going from 78 to 72 to 84 in set temp looked more like 78 to 77 to 83 in practice. Granted this was in AZ in an older house, so extremely high outdoor temps combined with marginal insulation didn't help.

If they pre-cooled the night before it might be a different story.

I think a poorly insulated old house in Arizona is probably one of the worst-case scenarios here. Maybe there should be a configurable or learning-based pre-cool length, though.

This feature actually makes my house uncomfortably cold.

Our ecobee (Phoenix, so HOT) does the precooling and is buggily aware of the expensive time window for electrical rates. Arizona Power just shrunk the expensive time window, not sure how that made sense, but the ecobee seems to not know, nor is there any way i could find to inform ecobee of the new shorter expensive time window.

I've had two Nests before, and two Ecobees, and they both were fine, in general, but for the next house not sure which I'd prefer.

>Sorry, not sorry: I'm not willing to sacrifice my comfort for the ~$10/mo incentive.

Hey, but at least you don't use plastic straws, right?

Why would you expect someone who isn't willing to sacrifice their comfort for a $10/mo incentive to sacrifice their comfort for a $0/mo incentive? Deciding "I don't like this person's ethics" doesn't mean "this person is suddenly inconsistent": you need to check your knee-jerk responses :/.

Well, for one thing people will often do for free things they wouldn’t do for money. Imagine choosing between “i will pay you $10 to come to my party” and “i’m having a party, will you come?”.

Parties are supposed to be fun, so if someone offers to pay you to come to a party, that sends a signal that the party is not, in fact, going to be fun at all--otherwise, why would they pay you?

On the other hand, paper straws are a shitty product that are unsuitable for use, but if I was offered a significant discount on beverages that were served with them...well, I wouldn't take it, but I could imagine someone who was desperately broke considering taking it.

See, what you said is exactly the problem i have with mainstream climate solutions. The choice shouldn’t be paper straws vs plastic straws. The choice should be no straws vs straws. Similarly, the question shouldn’t be “can I run a/c slightly off peak” rather it should be “how can I run less a/c”. This applies all over the place. Electric cars have lifetime emissions that are lower, but in the same ballpark as ICE cars - if everyone switches to electric and changes nothing else, we still have climate change.

No, the question should be “how do we produce significant amounts more carbon-neutral energy instead of reducing the standard of living”.

It was a sarcastic remark to his/her selfish attitude towards sustainability.

"Sorry, not sorry" multiplied by 1,000,000x and through the decades is what got us (all) in a climate emergency.

It certainly helped change my mind on the matter.

Someone who works at a bar told me recently that they “discovered” long tubular pasta (forgot the exact name) to be the best organic straws.

PS: You’re welcome.

The bar I frequent uses straws made of biodegradable material derived from sugarcane - they last a lot longer than paper straws, but ultimately are water soluble and will dissolve after a day ish if submerged. They obviously cost a lot more than plastic, but the user experience is just as good without the forever waste.

From an ecological point of view it really depends how much carbon is emitted during manufacturing & transport.

Landfills aren’t actually that bad when it comes to getting rid of waste. If you expend more carbon using the “eco-friendly” straws than using the normal ones then it’s not worth it overall.

Bucatini?

https://www.grubstreet.com/2020/12/2020-bucatini-shortage-in...

The plastic straw thing confuses me. I'd like someone to explain to me how anything besides the random runaway straw gets into the ocean. I live 60 miles from the ocean. We're people throwing them into storm drains that flow to the delta that flow to the ocean? We're people in San Francisco traveling to the beach and throwing them into the ocean? Couldn't we focus on not littering instead of legislating things like straws?

Plastic trash is mostly from a few sources in Asia. China and Indonesia iirc.

we literally ship our trash to china to "recycle" it (now china wont take our trash anymore). Turns out they were often just dumping it in the ocean. Now other countries do the same. It doesn't show in american metrics, because the other countries help us to be blissfully ignorant.

Maybe that should have been the public message we focused on, the actual dumping of trash into the ocean by foreign countries, and us sending it there when we supposedly recycle, instead of "little girl convinces law makers to go to paper straws!"

I have an ecobee and keep it in a fairly dumb scheduling mode. My primary use, as of now, is to integrate with home assistant so I can have data at hand to make future decisions on energy and system usage.

I tried something similar with Nest but holy crap is it a pain in the butt to integrate with home assistant, and keep the integration functioning.

> [...] integrate with home assistant so I can have data at hand to make future decisions on energy and system usage

This is actually what I've been doing. I haven't done anything actionable with the data yet, though. Beestat [0] has some great data break downs as well.

On a similar note: My house is only a single zone and I've been manually adjusting the dampers when fall / spring come around. When I find some time, I want to try to build something that will automatically adjust the dampers based on where I am in the house to create a pseudo multi zone setup with Home Assistant.

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[0] https://beestat.io/

> but I believe they should be providing a system that proactively cools when there is less demand _prior_ to an expected increase in demand. Effectively using your house as a "battery".

Isn't this exactly what they do? That what the Nest does when there's going to be a spike; it cools the house.

> Isn't this exactly what they do? That what the Nest does when there's going to be a spike; it cools the house.

I don't have any experience with Nest, but the Ecobee seemed to just increase the cool set temp when there was demand. I didn't experience any proactive cooling.

Interestingly, in the Ecobee Community Energy Savings FAQ I linked above it says:

> [...] your thermostat may precool your home prior to the event to make sure you’re comfortable.

But I never experienced this. I wonder if its energy provider dependent.

The nest does this, but it's not very effective. We're getting the 'rush hour' stuff right now (it's 100-105 peak right now) and the Nest does the following:

* Sets the thermostat 2 degrees cooler (74) ~1 hr prior to the rush hour time (3:30-5:30)

* Sets the thermostat to 4 degrees warmer between rush hour timing.

Problem is, with the current heat my house cannot be cooled down to 74 1 hour prior, and even still... it floats up to 80 degrees by ~4:30-5PM anyways and the AC kicks back on. Then it takes until ~10PM or so to get BACK to the 76 set temperature. This is a relatively modern house (built in 2010s), so it has modern insulation, sealing, etc. It's just ACs aren't really sized for being able to wildly swing temperatures and maintain temp. When it's 100+ degrees outside, they're sized so they run basically constantly when the sun is out, so slipping temperature means you're playing catch up for the rest of the night.

It sounds like your AC might be of the wrong tonnage for your home. The Nest assumes your AC unit is sized correctly, although this is something the Nest should detect and plan accordingly.

The silly thing is that I can simply adjust my thermostat to a lower temperature, so that the effective temperature is the same as without this program.

As an example, if I set it to 74, then when Energy Savings kicks in, it may set it to 76, which is too warm for me. So I simply set the "standard" temperature to 72, and it will set it to 74.

I use the same energy as without this program, yet I get my $25 energy savings rebate.

Silly.

That's fine, really. The utility's concern is predictability and burst capacity, not raw usage, so they know when and how many https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_power_plant to turn on, which may take a while.

Not sure I follow. If they just want to know in advance, then they don't need to modify the temperature at all, correct?

Lowering the load helps avoid needing the more expensive short term plants from coming online.

Whether you go from 76 to 78 or from 66 to 68, you’re helping avoid the burst in demand they’d get.

That's true, assuming I changed the temperature setting prior to the event, and I likely won't time it perfectly (nor would I want to).

The real thing is: These events last for hours. If what you say is true, then wouldn't altering the thermostat for a small period (e.g. 30 minutes) suffice?

It seems like maintaining a higher delta-T from ambient would require more energy, not the same amount. You are still shaving the peak demand with this approach, so the $25 could still be earned.

I'm not following. Peak event is, say, from 3-7pm. All my Ecobee does is set the thermostat to be a few degrees higher in that time period.

So as soon as it hits 3pm, I change my thermostat to a cooler temperature, so that the final temperature is what it would have been without this program.

Pretty much exactly the same usage as without enrolling into the program. Same "spikes", etc. Without the program, it would be set to 74 continuously. With the program, it's set to 74 before 3pm, and then at around 3pm (or just before), I set it to 72 so that it will continue at 74.

I did not read "standard temperature" to mean "a thing that I manually adjust twice per day on a fixed schedule" but rather "I set it 2ºF colder in April and leave it that way until November".

If you are willing to make 60 thermostat adjustments per month at 42¢ each, you earned that $25 in my book.

Energy savings events in my area are rare - only a few days of the year and very predictable (usually on a "hot" day). It's not a burden.

Prior to this program, the local utility company would merely announce the hours of peak events, and recommend minimizing energy usage as much as you can tolerate. They'd calculate how much less energy you used, and give a credit commensurate to that amount. I used to just chill at a nearby library during those hours (no kids in those days).

With this program, all they do is check that I participated often enough to exceed a threshold, and I get a fixed rebate (regardless of how much I exceed the threshold). And I effectively get that rebate by not saving any energy, and with little effort on my part.

It's silly.

Google is currently doing a proactive system called "Nest Renew"[1]. This system is more focused on using clean energy vs. dirty energy - at least for me (where there is no rate difference based on time)

[1]: https://nestrenew.google.com/

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