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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

I'm so on board for this. It would be kind of fun to wire all my appliances in to home assistant to have the dishwasher / dryer / etc all run during the free hours.

I imagine eventually we might end up with some thermal storage where during peak renewable production you heat/freeze a large tank of water and then utilize it to heat/cool your house for the rest of the day. A large tank of water is much cheaper than battery storage.

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I don't have smart washers, but I did build a smart ESP32-based [0] zigbee numerical display. Then I use Home Assistant to send the current electricity price to that display when the price changes, and send a notification to all users' phones when electricity is cheap (< 0.05€/kWh) or expensive (> 0.15€/kWh). This helps me plan my laundry and dish washing, which are the only energy intensive appliances I have. I also try to avoid cooking complex meals in the stove+oven.

[0] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005010546076391.html

Storing energy in hot water is common is sunny regions, for example Turkey.

Some large cold storage facilities in Germany are trying to optimize electric demand to use cheap peak day electricity. But they have to observe limitations in range of temperatures and capacity of cooling devices.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/cold-storage-facilities...

" Compared to conventional cold storage systems, renewable energy-driven cold storage demonstrates a 10–35 % reduction in energy losses"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23521...

Many of us with solar already do this manually, we run the appliances once the sun is up. Even the hotwater heater is programmed to only heat during the middle of the game.

I've been daydreaming about the tank of water idea as well, but the amount of panels you would need on the roof would be crazy.

Or plug them into a UPS that charges when it's free but you can run them whenever.

Batteries are massively more expensive. Thats why the utility companies are just giving consumers free power over building their own grid scale batteries.

A tank of water is cheap, it’s just not possible to distribute hot water over the grid. But it’s very realistic to store it locally and use for heating and cooling. Which is the bulk of power usage anyway.

There are never designs coming into the market that support only, say, the fridge, and have the software to be time of day use metering aware, that won't totally break the bank.

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