Analyzing my electricity consumption
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zdimension.fr
My jurisdiction, Ontario Canada, mass implemented these and found that people didn’t really shift their peak demand use much and it’s debatable if the amount spent was worth it. Costs just as much to implement for light users but they’re diminishing returns for any habit changes.
https://www.auditor.on.ca/en/content/annualreports/arreports...
Also went all-in on submetering small units like condominiums+apartments where there’s not much tenant/occupant ability to control their usage/equipment. If anything, just further encourages owners/builders to install the poorest efficiency stuff since they’re not paying the usage bill.
Not surprising that other tactics are more effective (dirt cheap LEDs, renovation programs, improving appliance efficiency… my TV and computers use a fraction of what they used to, wall warts are all SMPS now).
Still can’t find a “smart fridge” that runs in ultra-chill mode when rates are cheap and backs off when they’re high. Kinda antithetical to use more electricity to save but it’s true.
I really wish they could push the telecoms to focus on CPE efficiency since I’m forced to use their equipment.
It makes sense if you think of the thermal mass as a battery. Technology connections says he does that with his air conditioner, runs it hard overnight so it stays cold longer with less effort during the day
We set our AC to 76 during most of the day, 80 during on-peak pricing, and 72 overnight.
Shouldn't it be the other way around? The days when electricity was cheaper at night are long gone.
That must be a regional thing. In the PNW, my power rate during most of the day is twice what it is at night, and during the evening peak it doubles again.
Heating is still primarily fossil fuel, for now.
Night time loads are generally low with big baseload hydro and nuclear generation in the more populated states/provinces.
In the Winter though, energy is cheaper starting at 8am, when the sun is out. Still more expensive from 4-9/5-8
https://www.sce.com/residential/rates/Time-Of-Use-Residentia...
Are they? Here in California most energy companies offer plans with much cheaper rates overnight for EV charging (i.e. $0.15 vs $0.45-$0.90 peak during the day).
Commercial and industrial customers account for two thirds of power consumption so there's a lot of surplus generation at night. Lots of industrial users have agreements where the power company can signal them to soak up surplus power but that's also less effective at night when wind picks up.
Might want some phase-change materials to optimize the thermal banking.
That’s easier for a freezer (very salty water bottles) than a fridge (need some carefully produced waxes), but fridge contents should be more tolerant of temperature variability.
Would add that refrigeration is more efficient at night when ambient temperatures are generally cooler and/or heating needs are greater, so the “ultra-chill overnight and daytime backoff” might not increase consumption.
But I wonder if it just circulates more air and the thermostat doesn’t adjust its set points.
Shifting loads for hot water, if you have big enough reservoirs on contrary change MUCH the game, being able to shift some loads automatically, like leaving a dishwasher or a washing machines, a pumped irrigation systems and so on might significantly change the overall bill to makes investments in that sense meaningful.
https://www.harvest-thermal.com/product
A recent podcast turned me onto them. The idea is to heat water to higher temps than normal and use that extra heat as an energy store for use during peak times.
For me I simply run the main heat pump at full power during the day on p.v. reducing the grid absorption for some hours in winter and for sanitary water almost zeroing it since 300l @60-65℃ (140-149℉) suffice for a whole day, at least when I have enough p.v. a day after another.
Honestly I doubt it's possible to store enough heat with current tech to compensate the home heating needs, it's possible for sanitary hot water (except for a swimming pool) but no more. However for mild climate for some months might be enough to significantly reduce the grid absorption. The sole issue here is that heat pumps now, without any specific reasons, have skyrocketed in retail price enough to make them far less convenient than just few years ago... So the economy is still not much.
[1] an image should be sufficient, I do not know their common name in English, sorry https://lacentrale-eco.com/images/blog/fonctionnement-vmc-do...
We have some of them in the UK and you can see the price differences quite clearly: https://agileprices.co.uk/
I think the idea of having one (or maybe a crude day/night) tariff is really antiquated now when wholesale prices swing so much because of renewables. We are getting to a place where electricity is going to be free/negative a lot of the time and very much more expensive for other time slots.
However, I don't know how much consumers can do about this apart from buying batteries (which is a good thing). I don't think many people will start eating their dinner 3 hours earlier or later or do washing in the middle of the night to save a few dollars here and there. I suppose AC/heating would use enough that it would be worth turning it down at certain times of day.
Really where all the money to be made here is being able to get cheap industrial processes that consumer a load of electricity that can be switched on and off, so only working 25% of the time. This is hard though because there is a lot of capex (and opex) to having equipment and people sitting around doing nothing when the price is too high. But I think the energy savings will be so great there will be something that comes along for this - potentially hydrogen electrolysis.
That’s what they rolled out with them, but insufficient change to habits.
> I suppose AC/heating would use enough that it would be worth turning it down at certain times of day.
This is generally the big win, and why they’ve had to still create a program to subsidize smart thermostats and payments to enable the back off features.
Mass installing smart meters to incentivize the public at large to buy+install smarter thermostats is a less effective and more expensive strategy than giving the thermostats away and writing users a guaranteed cheque in exchange for remotely controlling it.
(There are other dynamics at play: electricity here is generally cheap and I pay more in fixed charges than consumption and the heating side is almost universally fossil fuel/wood but that’s achangin)
If that's the case, then that means they didn't set the incentives strongly enough, or didn't educate people well enough about how they can save money. While people do grumble about their electricity bill, they might not realize that there are things they can do to reduce it.
Making up numbers here, but let's say the average/"real" cost of electricity is X. To incentivize different behavior, the utility sets the price for peak hours to X+20%, and drops the price during off-peak hours to X-10%.
They observe behavior for a few months. No meaningful changes in behavior. That just means people value their ability to not think about when they use electricity more than they value the cost savings.
So, set the incentives harder. Set peak hours to X+60%, and off-peak to X-30%. Observe behavior for a few months. Maybe people will start changing their behavior now.
People aren't stupid and will immediately recognize when the prices aren't connected to reality and resent you more than change their behavior for you. Most workers don't have access to cheap electricity because they're not home during the daytime hours, and setting up an elaborate series of timers is a non-solution.
You'll never get people to vote for the "everyone's electric bill goes up because fuck you for having a job" bill.
In France there is a VERY LIMITED system allow a two wire connection for big appliances were the meter simply tell "cheap or expensive" state and the appliance now that "now the electricity is cheaper, now more expensive". It's way too limited. New homes have since some years a mandatory mitering but without dynamic prices and made to be piloted and throttled loads it's just expensive eye candy stuff.
Personally I have automated via HA as much as I can but such automation is essentially just switches HA can open or close via Shelly integration, there is no real smartness in all appliances even if it's damn cheap adding it from the initial design phase.
The original long/medium/short-term goal of "smart" meters was to eliminate the need to manually check meters and integrate that into the billing systems. It was a direct cost savings to delivery companies. All the fancy variable pricing stuff is an afterthought.
If it costs more than it saves, they don’t mind, actually that’s great (for them).
In rural areas in Ontario, the system used 3G (and for some reason I think only supported 2G in the past) to send readings. So that will be another truck roll (or more likely, cheque to telecoms to keep up some old infra).
I also suspicious of $$$ technical investments to reduce relatively small costs (especially ones where a lot of the dollars leave the area).
The transition period includes "elective half hourly settlement" which basically means that as a supplier you can selectively settle meters on a half hourly basis, which created an interesting (but time limited) arbitrage opportunity where you could do some data science to predict which meters would be beneficial to settle half hourly or not
Refs - https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/energy-policy-and-regulation/policy...
Or do you mean fully dynamic pricing/billing to end users?
Makes sense to settle that up near real time, I guess.
By "smart" I just mean programmable. I had settings for morning, daytime (nobody home), evening, and night. It makes no sense but my total costs went up. This was years ago, so I don't remember exactly what temps I had set for the different times of day. Now I just set the A/C at 76 and leave it there.
Instead, now you leave it keeping 76°F, and the thing can do it working at 10%. You consume more energy at the end of the day, but the consumption is spreaded through the cheapest hours in the middle of the day, and only a small fraction of it is consumed in the expensive hours from 6 to 10 PM. This is how freezers work, cooling intermitently as the thermostate goes off limits.
I would test if it is worthy money wise, not energy wise, to put the A/C at full blast in the cheapest hours. Say from 4 to 6 PM (the cheapest here in Spain), to get the house as cold as possible, and then try to play with A/C at maybe 5% letting it rise until reaching 76°F at 9 PM.
Depending on how big the house is and how well insulated it is, it very well may make for a big thermal battery and this would work well.
If small and/or poorly insulated or drafty then this will not work well.
Not to mention, you can be late, or early, or not arrive for the whole night.
I know when I turn on the A/C in my office, it’s not going to cool the concrete wall/floors/ceiling much in the 8h I’m there before I shut it off for the day. And that’s fine.
Even the eco-friendly bit isn't always clear, depending on your equipment. It might use less energy overall to maintain your desired temperature 24/7, even when you aren't there. Your particular equipment may run less efficiently if it has to go on full blast for an extended period of time to do a large temperature change when you first get home.
For example, where I live the energy produced from 10:00 to 18:00 is almost 100% solar, eolic and nuclear (https://www.esios.ree.es/es/balance?date=04-07-2024&program=... , orange and red bars are solar, light green are wind, dark blue are nuclear). Energy after 19:00 starts to draw gas (yellow bars) to cover the fall in solar production, peaking at 21:00. Incidentally, this also matches prices going from ~5 cents/kWh to ~20 cents/kWh (https://t.me/tarifaluz/3665). So for me it's both ecofriendy and moneyfriendly to shift as much consumption as possible to the 13:00-18:00 hours.
Due to inflation, the expected state is your costs will go up, even in the case of a small improvement in energy use. A number of western countries also seem to be in a state of energy crisis that could explain the price going up beyond inflation.
So that is less informative than it could be. Did you see your real energy use rise?
It does make sense if you were scewing around with the temperature values in excess of 2°C, because the HVAC would work harder to reestablish a new steady state. Most houses have thermal mass and heat inertia and sometimes it takes hours to reach a new temperature set point, the HVAC working at full load to do so. It depends on many factors and it's not easy to optimize without logging the temperatures, the operating cycles of the HVAC and understanding the whole process.
I haven't been able to find even specific case examples showing which consumes less energy: turning down heating/ac when no one's home or just keeping it on constantly.
I'm sure it's pretty complicated because buildings vary, but someone who understands heat transfer should be able to do it at least for a few ideal spherical cows...
> daytime (nobody home)
But that's so last century :) We WFH now.
If one has a water boiler or a heat pump with a buffer, they can run it at full load during cheaper periods. If they have an EV they can also charge that.
The load curve is also changing with renewables.
https://www.enerdynamics.com/Energy-Currents_Blog/The-Electr...
The first stuff was obvious. Our hot water and pool pump were already on timers so those were switched from night to day. Now on sunny days that's a free.
We've moved the dishwasher from night to day. The washing machine was already on day, so no change there.
We gave a small (5kva) battery so a chunk of our evening usage is covered.
There are a few other more subtle habits, harder to spot, and perhaps with more limited gains. Some random oven usage (for not-meal things) is more likely to happen during a sunny day,that sort of thing.
So yes habits have changed, and obviously our grid usage is massively reduced (by about 70%). But equally were not anal about it - things still run when they need to run.
Disclaimer: this is anecdote, not data and ymmv. But saving money is a powerful motivator.
Curious: aside from running a cleaning cycle or seasoning a cast iron pan (both of which are at least meal-adjacent), what other non-meal things happen in an oven?
Also heating up engine casings to get bearings in/out.
With dynamic tarrifs around here you sometimes make money by doing it during the day, especially on sunny windy days as you get money back for using electricity at that time. My bill is about two thirds of what it would be otherwise (since I cannot install solar panels or batteries it's the only way to have any advantage).
I've automated it so it picks up if the prices goes below a certain set amount, though that's not for everyone.
Btw my parents have been doing off hour washing since the nineties (we've had double meters for a long time). It's nothing new.
Yeah... That requires a standard way to communicate the energy price to the fridge. You won't get that with municipal regulation.
And without devices auto-adjusting their behavior, you won't get a lot of savings.
Not too common to have totally dynamic pricing. And even if you did, they have general trends.
I don't believe there would be many if any cost savings from doing this. The engineering thought behind it would cost more than the actual savings. It would make a lot more sense to buy a chest fridge which I imagine uses half or less the energy of a typical standing fridge.
Not sure how you come to 10%
*However, you have to unpack when you want something from the bottom. This is why we have an upright freezer. We store cheese curds from our dairy in it, and we want to access them quickly and easily and regularly. Also we use ice packs for shipping, and the shelves make it easy to freeze ice packs flat.
In a chest freezer:
- You access everything from the top. This would require something like a section of cabinetry which opens to the top, or a chest freezer occupying kitchen or other living space. Since the freezer is low and wide, this has a larger floor footprint than an upright fridge.
- Contents are stacked vertically, which means you have to dig through the pile to get to items on the bottom. There might be designs which make this easier (e.g., fold-up shelving), but that would have to accommodate another aspect which is that ...
- Chest freezers tend to frost over fairly heavily. Cold air doesn't spill out, but warm air tends to settle down into the fridge, and as it chills, loses its humidity as frost. Many or most chest freezers don't have an automatic defrost cycle,[1] and frost will build up on inside walls, contents, and any moving parts such as the fold-up shelving I'd described. Defrosting is typically done manually with chest freezers.
- Chest freezers are, well, freezers. I suspect some might be able to operate as refrigerators, but AFAIU they tend to cool somewhat unevenly as refrigerators rely on active air circulation to cool contents and avoid hot or cold spots.
If you're aware of these limitations and/or can work around them, e.g., by having a trundle-shelf or top-access countertop to address floorspace / footprint issues, and can find a way to easily access contents, chest-type designs can be a good choice.
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Notes:
1. Refrigerator defrost cycles involve halting the cooling cycle and activating heating elements in the refrigerator (and freezer-space) walls to melt any accumulated frost. This itself is both a considerable energy expenditure, and tends to accelerate freezer burn and other ageing of food often giving unpleasant taste or texture.
On the other hand, when you open a freezer that has a door on the front, a substantial portion of the cold air spills out of it.
When freezers are coupled with refrigerators, the way that many of them work is by having the freezer air descend into the refrigerator through baffles (which again, makes the freezer work to cool the air that was exchanged with the refrigerator).
That wonderful feeling of the cool gas leaking out leads people to overestimate how much cold falls out.
Some more modern fridges/freezers halt the compressor/blower when the door is open which probably accomplishes more savings.
Does a chest freezer have less of a problem with icing? And are they easier to deice?
Modern freezers have automatic defrosting systems so maybe moot...
It is pretty easy to scrape off, too.
Add to it small humans who may do the same and the $30/year in electricity differences can be dwarfed by the benefits of having a freezer contain meal prep, etc.
Combining a small standup freezer with something like a Foodsaver is an easy win to reduce waste / thrown away groceries, as well as helping with off-season wishes.
Buying less from the inflation fuelling large grocery stores is something that is well within reach.
I do think we need to have a price that changes during the day but I suspect most people wont tolerate it and the politicians wont allow it.
There's also a chart showing the prices: https://andelenergi.dk/el/timepris/
and apps and so on.
It takes some time to adapt (and also some quite extreme price fluctuation to motivate). Also good tools to automate demand response based on market prices were needed. Heat-pumps and EV chargers can now be configured to run on the cheapest hours etc.
Basically consumers in these countries have access to the raw eletricity market, and can buy power in one hour increments at the market rate.
This can be very beneficial for the consumer if you can adjust your consumption profile
Why can't users read the meters themselves and send to the electric company once a month?
They send someone to physically read the meter every 3-6 months so you can't cheat, but other than that they will bill you what you declared if you send it in.
There are some special case like building where I live. Where I pay to the building, with very reasonable rate as there is no extra standing charges...
What I wonder is, who can read this consumption data besides the "connection provider"? How easy is it to drive around with a laptop and see who hasn't been home the past few days?
So basically it is uploaded to cloud and some people will obviously have access to data. Like customer support.
I think technically it is possible to listen to air interface, but either it is some mobile or some power line communication so cracking that is complex enough.
you put a backup battery system in between your house and the power grid, switch power hungry appliances to battery during peak times.
over a long enough period this should achieve what you're looking for and is the most likely solution to "force" people off the grid at peak times.
it's just that right now where like you said - why bother when all you're saving is a couple hundred bucks? spending that mental energy on things that will earn you money is better.
My distribution company in Ontario makes it very clear when those times are and what the electricity prices are. On-peak is approx CAD 0.18 / kwh and off-peak is CAD 0.11 /kWh. That's over 50% difference.
The problem in Ontario, QC, MB and BC is that electricity is cheap, relative to our standard of living. The incentive to be more efficient is weak because the savings are not worth the effort.
The other reasons smart meters were installed is to speed up the meter reading process and to gather data on when exactly people are using electricity.
The electricity distribution system is passive and the grid operator has little to no visibility on what is happening at various places and times. Smart meters are the foundational tech to enable a bunch of other initiatives and planning.
Hydro-Québec, for example, allow you to see your live power draw. My meter (2011 model) can do this but my electricity distributor will not share the decryption key.
Those meters may not do much to change electricity consumption habits but they are far from a loss. The investment is absolutely worth it.
I'm in Ontario where the situation is different. We have a quasi-deregulated market with local electricity distribution companies aka LDCs.
https://home.howstuffworks.com/green-living/ice-block-ac.htm
A company called Ice Energy manufactures the Ice Bear, a unit designed to work alongside a traditional air conditioner. Like the large system used by Credit Suisse, the Ice Bear is designed to run indoors and at night, when temperatures and energy costs are lower. Ice Bear creates a block of ice at night that cools the refrigerant during the day, rather than running the refrigerant through a condenser (at peak hours) that requires a lot of energy.
Underneath the Jordan Quad Parking Lot at Stanford University, 360 miles of piping run through a four-million-gallon tank of water. At night, subzero ammonia -- a common refrigerant -- runs through the pipes, freezing the water into giant blocks of ice. The system, which is one of the largest of its kind in the United States, sends cold water from the melting ice throughout Stanford's campus, cooling buildings from noon to 6 p.m. When the facility was first built in the mid-1970s, it skipped the ice stage, instead directly cooling water that was piped through campus. A $22 million renovation -- completed in 1999 -- converted it to its present form, which saves the university a reported $500,000 a year on energy bills.
The traditionally hot areas also have other cooling solutions that we forgot about - qanats, wind towers...
I'm imagining a giant modern qanat running underneath a city or a large dense neighborhood and each structure reaching down into it to feed a ground-source heatpump in the cooler water like roots. Everything fed by solar panels on the roofs.
Used to manufacture: they declared ch 7 bankruptcy in 2020
> A $22 million renovation -- completed in 1999 -- converted it to its present form, which saves the university a reported $500,000 a year on energy bills.
Many years ago there was a green building series on KQED that featured such approaches.
Shifting when you are using energy is part of conservation.
As to how it works... it's a cubic rather than planar ice skating rink. You freeze a block of water at night, and then during the day, slowly melt it as you transfer waste heat from the building into it (rather than rejecting the waste heat with a compressor during peak energy use hours).
https://www.energy.gov/eere/buildings/articles/air-condition...
Stanford is a research institution - and some money that it receives will be going to research rather than trying to reduce enrollment costs.
Alternatively, "hey, they spent $22M on that project... maybe we should shut down the Stanford Liner Accelerator ( https://www-ssrl.slac.stanford.edu/lcls/budget.html ) which had a project cost of $315M."
There are many good institutions of higher learning out there that do not have research as part of their goal. There are 116 different community colleges within California that do not have research as part of their program and the California State University system (as opposed to University of California system) deemphasizes research. Stanford itself is a private school and not part of either of those systems.
On the other hand, people who go to Stanford often want to study under and participate in the research that is being done in a given field - and that implies that research is being done (and money is being spent on it).
As for the School of Sustainability - https://sustainability.stanford.edu/giving/research
So the payback period is 44 years. The buildings they renovated are quite likely not to exist that long.
Or you could invest it, make way more then 22 million over that timeframe and do even more.
Cost is a proxy for resource consumption, and in this case it seems like this was incredibly inefficient.
Edit: at current prices you build a 22 MW solar plant instead, for example.
The purpose isn't to add to the solar capacity but rather offset the power needed to cool the campus.
https://stanfordmag.org/contents/what-you-don-t-know-about-t...
> By creating ice when electrical rates are low and then “burning” it during the hottest part of the day, the Ice Plant saves Stanford roughly $500,000 per year and decreases Stanford’s peak electrical demand by 8 megawatts.
That's the goal and it is to reduce the impact of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000–2001_California_electrici...
That's 8 MW ... you say 22 MW today, but in 1999 that 8 MW offset looks more like Solar Two ( https://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/fy97/22835.pdf ) which produced 10 MW and cost 58 million on 126 acres of space.
---
And yes, it has changed since then.
https://sesi.stanford.edu/be-empowered/our-story
> In 2015, as part of the Stanford Energy Systems Innovations (SESI) program, a new Central Energy Facility (CEF) was built, and the cogeneration plant and ice plant were retired. SESI transformed the university energy supply from a 100% fossil-fuel-based combined heat and power plant to grid-sourced electricity and a more efficient electric heat recovery system, helping Stanford achieve 100% renewable electricity.
Somebody has to go first. In the bright side it really is unambiguous whose job it is. Utility providers are often government subsidized or at least heavily regulated government-provided monopolies. They have the responsibility to act in the public good, and provide strong enough incentives to get people to come along with them.
Electric Cars use a ton of electricity and have these sorts of features for a while now. Apple even built grid pricing info into their latest “Home” app for California users.
I think there aren’t smart appliances because there is no demand for people to change their behavior. No one is going to put off cooking dinner for cheaper oven use. We see it with cars and smart thermostats because it’s largely set-and-forget with people.
Ovens and stoves are, I think, an unusually bad case. Although, slow cooking should be shiftable, right? Maybe we’ll have to eat slow cooked ribs instead of hamburgers. You know, to save the planet or whatever.
The most effective method to reduce/shift consumption is just to make it the easier way.
Adding cognitive load to shopping decisions and their daily lives is predictably ineffective for the general public (and almost universally hated).
That majority will be a bit poorer because of it, and many will cheer that aspect but it also means the target goal has failed.
Maybe just use a freezer and put it on an old school outlet timer? Run it at night and treat it like an ice box during the day.
This depends on whether the goal was to reduce the amount of peak usage, or increase the amount of revenue that comes from peak usage.
Putting smart meters in probably paid for itself via higher income.
TIL about switched-mode power supplies... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-mode_power_supply
that you own a garage, that your electric bill is in your name, that your driving distance makes this worth it, that your other electric consumption is small and so on. It works for you, that's great but something you didn't mention is the higher on-peak rate.
If you have electric heating or need to charge your EV during the day, the increased rate there can easily offset your overnight rate savings.
I drive about 15000 km per year, almost exactly the Canadian average. There are a lot of potential households fitting this profile.
(If you're needing to charge your EV during the day, then the higher daytime home electricity rate is irrelevant. My EV has a 300 mile range, which is typical. I cannot think of any scenario where I simultaneously 1) drive 300 miles in a single day, and 2) somehow also remain close enough to home to charge at home, so that the daytime home electricity rate matters, and 3) can't wait until the night to charge.)
The linky meter can also be remotely controlled to reduce the maximum power delivery for bad debtors (it's very rare in France for electricity to be completely cut off).
If you are a bit technical, you could convert your fridge into a smart fridge that does exactly that.
Throw a temp sensor into the fridge, set the fridge temp to as cold as it will go, then plug your fridge into a smart plug. From there, you can monitor the interior temp and turn on the fridge based on when you want to super chill. Dead simple to do something like this with home assistant.
I had to buy this, but it's paired to my specific meter. Basically it gives me a means to see my overall usage in real time, so that I know how whatever we are doing, affects the usage.
BC Hydro has had programs such as a voluntary one, where you get an email about a 3-hour period the next day. They'd like you to drop your usage for that period by 20%, and you get a few dollars per successful drop at the end of the season. With our heat pump for heat, we just switch it off for that time, and skip using the clothes dryer then. At the end of the season, we got maybe $50 off our bill in credits.
They have proposed a time-based plan, with discounts for night-time. I have not elected to try that out, because it also came with penalties for daytime usage.
I remember having to do some sleuthing with the serial port as it wasn't something standard - it was like 7 bits, no parity, 1 stop bit, or something like that. And a small circuit to do level shifting for the ESP8266.
The result was data on wattage draw approx every 1 second. This allowed for some very, very fine analysis in the data.
I tell people about this when I talk about various sidechannel attacks on things that use data like this- for instance, after observing the data for a while, I could tell which floor of the house someone was on by watching transients of the wattage and the quantized changes of various devices turned on and off - e.g. the kitchen has a kettle that uses 1220 +/- 5 watts, every time, and nothing else in the house results in a step change of that value. The top floor bedroom has lights that use exactly 42 watts. The laundry machine starts up with a very specific ramp and then oscillates between two levels of power with a period of 30 seconds, etc.
You can figure a lot out about the movements of people and what they are doing by simply having fine enough time resolution on a single number - the total power consumption of the entire house.
This is more difficult with a linky (but not impossible, by installing a bypass).
If you have a subscription to their service, they can be programmed to eg turn on when there's excess solar power etc. And integrates with HomeAssistant.
This is far from any metro area, so it might be a countrywide rollout.
> installing (without charge)
Who’s paying for it?
All of this helped me to better understand my electricity consumption.
[1]: https://himself.alexanderdunkel.com/@alex/112443427011946461
[2]: https://du.nkel.dev/
I used an ESP32 with a very basic light sensor, the sensor was blue tacked over the 1000th/Kwatt LED (this blinks 1000 times per unit of electricity used) the info is sent it over my wifi to google sheets
it also records the sum per hour indefinately, or until google sheets complains
I've not researched if any other meter has this function
To get the data out, you can just call their API to get daily consuption figures, split into half hourly blocks[0]. They also allow you to just download a CVS file directly from the energy use section of their website.
The data in the API is only update daily, but they can give you a tiny addon device[1] for free which will allow you to access live usage in realtime (updates ever 10 seconds I think).
I use a Home Assistant integration to collect all this data live there.
To make use of the smart meter, they also have a series of tarrifs which change price dynamically. The simplist is Tracker[2] which charges you a different price per unit every day based on the wholesale price. There's also Agile[3] which is the same concept but the price changes every 30 minutes with higher highs and lower lows. That one is great if you can shift your energy usage outside of peak times.
They also have "intelligent" tarrifs where you allow them to control your car charger[4] or home battery[5] so it charges when it's cheapest.
Octopus are doing really great things in the UK and part of their business is that they sell the backend as a service to other energy companies who were previously stuck in the stone age as Kraken[6].
[0] https://developer.octopus.energy/docs/api/
[1] https://octopus.energy/blog/octopus-home-mini/
[2] https://octopus.energy/smart/tracker/
[3] https://octopus.energy/smart/agile/
[4] https://octopus.energy/smart/intelligent-octopus-go/
Alternative suppliers to EDF have a very bad reputation in France. Their contracts are often unclear and subject to major price variations (+100% after the start of the war in Ukraine). Some use unscrupulous prospectors who take advantage of elderly people to get them to change their contract (Total Energy, I'm thinking of you).
The majority just buy Mw/h from EDF to resell and speculate on future production contracts. They don't invest a single euro in production facilities.
I see no reason to keep the water hot during the time absolutely nobody needs it, and we know it will take less energy to heat it back up again rather than keep it at temperature.
Also, yes, I have turned the temperature down as low as it will go.
If you are heating a house, or a water tank, or anything, it requires much more energy to keep it at a constant temp 24x7 than it does to let it cool down when you don't need it hot, and then just heat it back up again later.
That is why "smart" thermostats like the Nest became so popular. No need to heat your house while you are away during the day. So let it cool down a bit, then just warm it back up again soon before you come home. Much less energy used.
My Quooker is so well insulated, that you should only turn it off if you aren’t home for a week. Otherwise is exactly counter to what you say: more energy efficient to keep it at temperature instead of letting it cool and heating it again [0].
> That fully depends on the level of insulation. Newly build houses here in The Netherlands rarely cool down when heating is off, and the temperature stays generally stable, even when you are out (and the heating is off).
Even if it's a few days, and it does drop a few degrees, you still spend less energy bringing it back up to whatever temperature than you would have to keep it there the entire time.
Do you think there is no relation between the thickness of the insulation and the time it takes before reheating is more energy efficient?
As an approximate example, suppose if takes one hour for the tank/building to reduce to a thermostat set-point 10% lower than the 'high' set point. Further assume you could use that lower set point for 11 hours, so the tank/building temperature is 10% lower for a full 10 hours. Finally, assume increasing the temperature of the tank/building by 10% takes one unit of energy.
In order to maintain the low set point, the first hour is free since we are losing temperature. The middle 9 hours need (190%) = 0.9 units per hour for a total of 8.1 units. In the 10th hour the low-set point scenario needs to warm up to the high set point and overcome heat loss so that individual hour requires more energy than the high set-point scenario: (1110%) = 1.1 units for that single hour to return to the high set point.
In total the low-set point needs 0 + 8.1 + 1.1 = 9.2 units of energy over the 11 hours.
For the full 11 hours the energy required to maintain the high set point is 11 units (1 unit per hour to make up for 10% loss).
Generally you want your water heater to keep the water hot enough to kill any bacteria and prevent their growth.
The old (pre-electronics) ones are easy to understand — the heating/water comes on (in this case) at 10:00 and goes off at 16:30, then goes on again at 21:00 and off at 07:00: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-timer-control-for-hot-wate...
More and more “tank” water heaters are moving to heat pumps which should use less electricity overall than a tankless (if you can handle the possibility of running out of hot water).
Which full circle going back to the original discussion of turning off the heater. You probably end up close to no/low savings. I can see an argument of a smart heater being able to slightly adjust load at peak times but I engineering a heater to turn off when you are sleeping and then heating back up before use is probably going to not have much savings. Those heaters are increasingly made to edge out at maintaining the heat and take quite a few hours to heat up.
They are crap. 8kW is typical, and the pressure for a reasonable water temperature is low.
I haven't knowingly used a more powerful one. I suspect that would negate the cheap installation cost, as it would need a three phase circuit.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Rheem-Performance-36-kw-Self-Mod...
If it’s larger than 40A @ 240V, you could buy a 120v astronomical time clock switch and use the output of that as the input to a 120v control coil for a contactor sized for your water heater.
The contents of the box are
1. A programable timer light switch: https://leviton.com/products/vpt24-1pz
2. A 120 volt controlled contactor. I'm not entirely sure which one it is, but I think it is https://ca.rs-online.com/product/eaton-cutler-hammer/c25bnb2...
The box has a 240 volt circuit and a 120 volt circuit into it. The 120 volt circuit is connected to the programable timer light switch, which is then connected to the control inputs of the contactor.
The 240 volt line connects to the contactor and then on the other side of the contactor it connects goes out of the box and to the water heater.
For me I've programmed my hot water heater to turn off from 4pm to 11pm on weekdays, which avoids heating the water during peak time of day rates at my location. (I typically shower sometime during that period.)
I can open the box and press the switch on the timer if I ever want to temporarily override the program.
That all said, I don't have any measurements to tell me if it is worth the expense. Although it is quite clear from my hourly power usage when the hot water tank switches on at 11 pm.
I wonder if it would be worth keeping it off until sometime in the am the following day - do you need piping hot water from 11pm until about 5am?
Also I usually run the dishwasher and laundry sometime after 11pm, so it is usually helpful to have hot water available overnight.
Edit: I should mention that I have a ventless combo washer/dryer, so my clothes come out clean and dry in the morning. Unfortunately they are not folded.
I think it comes down to heater size and voltage - mine is only 60 liters and 220V so can use regular wiring and amperage.
https://github.com/jasonacox/Powerwall-Dashboard
Together with temperatures in the rooms and AC activity:
https://github.com/cdzombak/ecobee_influx_connector
I plan to add a vehicle charging date to it (via Chargepoint Home).
I think Graphhana+Influx is a way to go for this type of projects.
Whats helpful is it shows the top power consumers. And by paying close attention to that I've cut my bill by at least 1/3.
- fear and polemics about connected meters was not about "surveillance" by some giant but more about ability to disconnect or throttle a customer from remote and third party monitoring to elicit family habits for instance to organize a burglary;
- reading the meter without the need to get inside the home was already a solved problem with "telereport", a small local dedicated bus with wires going in some public places (like the hall of a condo, a small box near the portal of a home etc) who allow local reading, this could be used to send data remotely WITHOUT adding extra abilities like throttling or disconnecting;
- polemics exists for similar reasons for IVRE norms (BEV domestic charging) where the norms demand a kind of "remote control" to allow disconnecting the load from the grid when needed by the grid, without considering the few but not so few with domestic p.v. in self consumption that might get disconnected as well because there is no analysis of the grid absorption load just a "run this if the grid is strained";
- `Enedis website is nice` is well... debatable...
Beside this small notes NOT intended to diminish the author creation, IMVHO monitoring is useful only if you can act, for instance with p.v. and controllable appliances it's a good thing, and unfortunately there is next to none appliance really designed to run on p.v. when available, even 99% of those who claim the contrary. The first are domestic water heaters who actually could be piloted to shift load with HA/Shelly/* sometimes just abruptly cutting the power and giving it back when there is enough p.v. but not much more, secondary running dishwashers and washing machines left loaded and ready in a "run before 'given date and time' preferably on p.v. power" and so on. Technically such automation are damn simple and cheap if designed as part of every appliance but so far next to no one seems to be doing so, while mandatory monitoring and published monitoring solutions are more and more pushed. Personally having p.v. I do my best to shift loads and it's damn hard, mostly limited to smart switches connected to HA, because there is not much more to do. I can "hack" my dishwasher or washing machines, are dumb and basic enough to be easy just seeing their small controls and replicate them with a some GPIO on a raspizero and alike but that's a long uncomfy process since every machines have it's own controls and you have to redo when you change it. There is no standard.
It stopped working when Google bought Nest and then changed their API authentication method. I had a newborn and just couldn't find the time to support the new API. Maybe I'll revive it this summer.
One thing that would be more useful and that I really want to get is one of those amp meter for the distribution panel to see my power consumption in realtime: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007038134809.html but I didn't get around to it yet.
For bulbs and sensors, the power usage isn't useful for automation either, you can use other data they provide (turn off lights when no one is around, do stuff when doors open/close).
For whole-home though, it can be useful to see if the power is higher than you'd expect; if it's not dinner time and we're using 2kW+ for more than a few minutes, send a notification in case someone left an electric heater or an iron or something on.
I really love that they give whole home power usage, as well as up to 16 individual circuit usage details. And with espHome into HA, all local control with no cloud dependency.
(1) https://shop.emporiaenergy.com/collections/in-panel-energy-m...
The problem with ZigBee is network scale and interference, but also you're wasting energy by having electronics in every socket, always on, always reporting. You're also then driving your server harder and storing more data, costing more.
I've aimed to strike a balance of only making smart the things I actually care about power usage for; my server rack, my 3D printers, my desk, and then whole-home as a single unit.
I don't need to know how much my washing machine or oven uses, if I need to use them, I need to use them; there's little room for optimising.
When it comes to optimising which settings I use, if I care enough, I can use a temporary ZigBee power meter that plugs in like a normal device; record data for days/weeks/months and adjust based on the result of that.
Excluding EVs, heating and cooling is the largest factor for energy consumption followed by other large appliances. Small appliances and electronics don’t use much electricity or aren’t on long enough to matter.
If you’re interested in some product recommendations, the Sense Energy Monitor used to be a popular choice. Basically it is a set of clamps that you can attach at your breakers to monitor specific circuits. It’s good for monitoring large appliances with their own dedicated circuit. For individual appliances, a Kilowatt Meter works fine. If you want something for continuous monitoring long term, I’d look at the Eve Smart Outlet.
Anyways, some pretty clear trends emerge when tracking your energy usage. Climate control (heating, cooling, fans, dehumidifier) dominates my energy usage, then EV charging, the kitchen stuff (refrigerator, cooking, dishwasher), then electronics (and I have a ridiculous amount of them), clothes dryer and lighting. I would like more insights into my electronics for personal curiosity (which Sense can't seem to do), but in the scheme of things it probably doesn't matter. No individual electronic device is going to make much of a difference.
Here’s a commercial grade submeter cutsheet with a diagram to illustrate: https://leviton.com/content/dam/leviton/lighting-controls/co...
It does take a bit of reading to figure out eg what to do with 240v circuits (you can usually double it if you don’t care about absolute precision, usually one leg has the control electronics on it and is a bit higher). Also, it doesn’t have quite as many channels as most panels’ max # of circuits, so you might have to choose, or try to run multiple wires through one CT.
If you’re uncomfortable with going into the panel (reasonable), you can probably find an electrician that’s willing to put it in/make it pretty.
I think I saw some YouTube videos of people installing them diy before I tried, that might help get you more comfortable with the process.
All you really need is snapshot understanding of what a device really consumes, and only then if it's non-negligible and some alternative might make sense.
For outlets and receptacles, you can achieve that by just inserting a meter where you want. Per-circuit metering in the distribution/circuit breaker panel would be nice though.
Aside from that I am curious about the discontinuity at 22h. How many and what kinds of loads automatically respond to these price signals? Just heaters and water heaters?
My water heater turns on during off-peak hours (so, at 22h). I have no other equipment that responds to the off-peak signal, so the discontinuity is entirely attributable to the water heater.
> The color scale on the hour/day grid initially seemed backwards to me.
I think it was one of the default color scales in Plotly. Maybe I got used to it, it doesn't strike me as reversed, but I think I see how it would feel that way for you.
> The daily total takes up so much space
That is true, though it didn't disturb me enough to bother changing its size.
(Not sponsored, I just use it)
If present trends hold it won't be long before a few years worth of energy bills even in Europe finance a full off grid deployment. There doesn't seem to be much room to cut on the energy companies pricing which remains variable and pointlessly complicated vs "I bought this off grid system and now I never think about energy anymore".
Just people in high density housing, people in a lease, and those who can't afford the up front cost will constitute the majority of residential grid energy usage and purchasing?
Not sure of the cost (need to do the research) but all of the above are getting cheaper. A small wind turbine can’t be that costly, surely.
I'd love to be proven wrong about this though, if anybody has links to affordable wind turbines / generators, I'd be interested.
You can run a generator to charge batteries or provide additional capacity when needed.
It would be ideal to have full coverage with "renewables" (isn't oil and gas a renewable just on a longer timeline?) but don't let perfect be the enemy of good if you want to move off-grid.
The variable per Kwh costs are historically generally pretty low relative to the fixed capex and opex (eg. maintenance, idle runtime) costs.
Mostly this has been made palatable for residential use by hiding these fixed costs in a higher per-Kwh rate. This works great as long as consumption is high and growing. If consumption trends reverse, then self-generation becomes a real possibility for the heavy consumers leaving fewer total Kwh to spread the fixed costs over.
Left unimpeded this leaves the poorest with very high energy bills when everybody else has shifted to a private, cheaper, micro-grid.
But operating completely disconnected from the grid, especially in winter, is extremely difficult. Luminosity is much weaker, the sky more overcast and the number of hours of sunlight reduced.
I actually used that to build a Windows release: https://github.com/zdimension/elecanalysis/releases/tag/v0.1
It uses the system WebView to display the page. The packaging itself is made using a regular solution like PyInstaller.
Although implementing the realtime API in the Opower integration has not yet been completed. That said, I don't think it would be too hard to implement. See: https://github.com/tronikos/opower/issues/24
This realtime data is also available and graphed on your account page on the Con Ed website and mobile app.
I wrote my own code that uses Con Ed's realtime API and writes the data to Prometheus so that I can view it in Grafana. My code was heavily influenced by Home Assistant's Opower integration code. Here's my code: https://github.com/dasl-/pitools/blob/main/sensors/measure_e...
Build glow [1,2]for $10. Hook it up to homeassistant for the price of an old laptop. Measure any and all interesting plugs using an athom [3] smart plug.
Zero cloud. Good data & charts.
Good fun.
Around about 2006, after being in my newly built home for a few years, I began to ask the questions that many more are just starting to ask now about their utilities. Having had an extensive background in residential and commercial electrical work I knew the options then were limited to measure home consumption digitally but I stumbled upon TED, The Energy Detective. In 2007 I installed TED in my panels and it has been running ever since. I initially only used it as a curiosity item, much akin to many Tesla Solar+PW users today in checking the app for production and consumption data, never before available in such a simple near real-time form of access. TED did however earn it keep in helping me deduce electrical draw issues when systems within the house were changed alongside just other general consumption curiosity.
In 2016 I got serious and started logging all of my utilities at the first of every month directly from my meters and I also cross collected utility bill data into a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet is now large but the information is invaluable in providing me an aggregate collection specifics to me and my family only over that time. Another side story in itself are the errors I have discovered and reported, some of those errors have benefited me greatly, once again you can only know such things through measuring and monitoring. All of this effort was my LONG GAME preparation for going near fossil fuel free and energy independent at my home when I found the correct solution for my needs.
In 2018 we went fully electric with our personal road vehicles. I installed the largest wall charger at the time which supported 220V up to 70A. This of course spiked our home usage at times however free supercharging was a great bonus and still is. Yes, we were early adopters of a fully electric vehicle family now for over 6 years and have driven hundreds of thousands of miles combined across the U.S. and Canada. I am still amazed at how ignorant people are about charging infrastructure since the fossil fuel industry has brainwashed people's expectations with gas stations on every corner. I have referred many an EV owner and while the program no longer exists I still refer people to electric, just referred a CT a few weeks back.
As time passed so too did my roof age and those here aware of asphalt shingle degradation know builder selections rarely last. In 2020 I started down the solar roof planning journey which had me upgrading all aging appliances to EnergyStar and in August of 2021 the solar roof was installed with two PWs. This led me to refactor my spreadsheet to now include my personal generation and consumption which the new system was providing me. Here I mention the TED again because this old still functioning device had provided me with years of historical data and now I would use it to compare the numbers from the new system. Yes, I found discrepancies that no one had found before and those issues had to be resolved within the new system; a new more accurate CT device was required as well as firmware changes. You may be able to hear me still smiling from this near energy independent choice.
My choices have guided my curiosity which has guided my choices and this is still so extremely relevant today in that I have a unique energy loss problem of which I intend to solve through my own energy storage device I am building. Everything provable in life boils down to either science or math so if the science and math check out then it is only the implementation that matters to reach one's goal. I am applying my software, hardware, electronics, and electrical experience as a unique subject matter expert to build something that solves my problem through the dog-food method. Once I have hashed out all the basic issues with this simple "complex system" I am building I will then apply my entrepreneurial talents once again, that whole ‘serial’ thing. You likely know what happens next given the world's growing awareness of a pursuit that I have long had devoted interest in represented by the choices I have made solely from monitoring and measuring. Thanks Kelvin!
Stay Healthy!
> "Depuis le passage à l'OAuth2.0, il vous faut obligatoirement avoir une entité juridique afin de signer un contrat avec Enedis. Pour avoir une entité juridique, il faut obligatoirement être une société ou une association."
> "Since the transition to OAuth2.0, you must have a legal entity in order to sign a contract with Enedis. To have a legal entity, you must be a company or association"