> the organization managing the national French power grid (Enedis) has been in the process of replacing the legacy “dumb” electricity meters by “smart” meters, known under the brand name “Linky”
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.
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.
The real long term idea with smart metering isn't so much demand savings (though I think it was billed as that; and I agree the results are very underwhelming from everything I've seen), it's to start allowing dynamic energy tariffs and getting people incentivized to move load to cheaper times.
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.
I got solar last year, so ots been interesting to see how habits change (or dont).
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.
"apart from buying batteries" - that is imo precisely enough. We are nearing a time, where a battery that would flatten the avg household demand curve costs under $2000 (without installation costs), and that might be quite enough to change how electrical production works.
>> The real long term idea with smart metering isn't so much demand savings (though I think it was billed as that; and I agree the results are very underwhelming from everything I've seen), it's to start allowing dynamic energy tariffs and getting people incentivized to move load to cheaper times.
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.
Eating dinner no, but if your washing machine and dishwasher have an internal timer function (most relatively recent models of both appear to), it's pretty easy to load the appliance and tell it to turn on later that night.
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.
The point is that 99% of the contracts have no "dynamic prices", they have few different tariffs established up front an year for the next. In this case you do not need a smart meter to shift load. You simply look at the "current year tariffs" and that's is. If we have dynamic prices than we need a standard data bus for every home appliance connectable to a personal automation or directly to the meter, without that manual load shifting is extremely limited.
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.
My personal experience with "smart" thermostats is that my electric bill went up.
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.
> it's to start allowing dynamic energy tariffs and getting people incentivized to move load to cheaper times.
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)
> However, I don't know how much consumers can do about this apart from buying batteries
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.
> 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.
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.
This is a great post. Thank you to share. How do you know so much about this Stanford University system?
> 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.
So, it takes at least 44 years to repay? This sounds like a terrible investment. Normally, energy saving projects repay themselves in about 7-10 years. Also, this system sounds incredibly complex. What is the annual maintenance cost? Surely greater than zero.
In Finland people have started since 2022 adapting their electricity use to shift their peak demand. But we started installing smart meters almost 20 years ago. I think the key reason to install them was less about consumer demand response, and more about saving physical visits to read the meters.
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.
> 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.
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
Smart meters achieve lots of goals. The most marketable was time-of-use electricity pricing.
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.
Just buy a bit bigger one, and fill the unused space with water. Every open now exchanges less air and you can turn it off for hours or a day without any impact of the temperature inside - water is good capacitor of temperature.
We fill it up with food that otherwise doesn't need to be refrigerated but they keep better at low temperatures, like fruit jams, unopened cans or olive oil. One could fill it with kimchi, beer or bottled water though.
Changing the temperature of a fridge based on electricity rates just feels like a bad idea. A lot of food can have its texture ruined by slow freezing (a common occurrence at the back of many fridges already) and waiting to get food down to the target temperature will just lead to bacterial growth.
Seems like having an ultra-chill button for that function would help with that.
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.
These functions do not change fridge temperature, choose when to run the defrost functions for no-frost units (a quick wall heating to melt the ice and quickly came back to normal), choose to run or not some ancillary functions (like making ice cubes) etc. They are VERY chatty https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38984609 but not much useful.
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.
Most freezers already do a defrost cycle so could probably play with that. It’s only a few degrees oscillation so idk how much savings you could get there.
> 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 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.
I'm in Ontario. 90% of my electricity usage consists of charging my electric car. The ultra-low overnight rate of 2.8 cents per kWh, introduced during the past year, is a big win for EV owners. This rate is seven times cheaper than the cheapest rate mentioned in the article, and ten times cheaper than the peak rate in Ontario. It is very, very easy to schedule your car to charge during overnight hours if you have a home with a garage. You better believe that smart pricing has shifted when I charge my car! I think this kind of benefit will become more pronounced as more people shift to electric vehicles. People won't shift demand for small appliances, but when 90% of your usage is made up of one single thing that is easy to shift, you'll get some returns.
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.
There aren’t a ton of smart appliances because there aren’t a ton of smart grids. We need smart grids with, like, really significant demand based pricing before people are going to care about smart appliances. And of course there’s no reason to get smart appliances if you don’t have that kind of grid.
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.
We’re close to this. California, which is not the world but is a major market, has pretty transparent grids with variable pricing. I don’t know if they’re “first” but they’re a big enough market to drive change.
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.
I'm in BC, with BC Hydro. The smart meter means that everyone can see their own daily usage and trends. I'm sure most won't look, though I do. What I found more useful is the paired device from Rainforest Automation, e.g. https://www.rainforestautomation.com/rfa-z114-eagle-200-2/.
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.
The savings made on meter readings, the reduction in meter breakdowns, the detection of illegal connections and other factors alone justify the renewal of electricity meters.
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).
> 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.
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.
Don't blame it on the smart meters, blame it on the governments that refuse to structure the plans to take advantage of it. I figured it would be a no brainer to switch to the time of use plan because we have an electric car we charge at night, but no, the standard non time of use plan is cheaper for us.
> 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.
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.
My house moved to smart meters over a year ago. Still get the one total usage amount per month. Even if I log in online there is no way to see what I use even per day.
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.
My fridge (some LG models supposedly does this. I say “supposedly” because this requires connecting to Wi-Fi, which I don’t want to do, but in their the energy company sends it signals about how the grid is doing and the fridge goes into energy saver when appropriate.
A nice little vlan with only internet access would let you connect your fridge to your WiFi without worry. Most WiFi + router combos come with a Guest vlan which already does this out of the box.
In my mind, the smart grid would be most useful for distributed storage. Like if your car charger has a battery pack in it to quick charge your car. Or just a battery that could charge on off-hours to lessen peak load.
>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.
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.
Your fridge doesn't need to know energy prices. Fridges are for cooling, not computing your bills, and giving them access to too much data only encourages the usual IoT vendor abuse patterns. It should be enough for it to get a proxy signal. "Cheap tariff" / "expensive tariff". Or maybe continuous 0-1 control signal. Optimizing energy use for household or building already requires an external decision-making center anyway.
It could just be telling it what your time-of-use rates and hours are. I think most places with variable rates at this point are on a schedule that does not often change, only a few places have completely dynamic pricing that would need real time information from the grid operator.
Generally Time of Day electricity billing is just an average costing at fixed windows of time. 2-way (or really, just 1-way is actually necessary) comms not required.
Not too common to have totally dynamic pricing. And even if you did, they have general trends.
I did a project with a french Linky a few years ago that used an ESP8266 to grab the serial data stream from that exposed port on the bottom and log the interesting line items it prints out to a InfluxDB timeseries database running on a local server and use Grafana to get a dashboard of various metrics.
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.
Indeed, and to be fair most people I know who were reticent to the new Linky were not "fearing that the new meters would fry their brain using Bill Gates’ evil 5G Wi-Fi waves", but were concerned about their privacy.
In Finland (and I guess at least other Nordics as well) we are starting to get neters with so called P1-port, which is open for the user to get their data. All I needed was a wire with RJ26 and an ESP8622 with some esphome definitions and now I get all kinds of data from the meter every 4 seconds. Total consumption, consumption, amperage and voltages per phase etc.
In Germany we have an infrared one-way connection (SML protocol). I hooked a Raspberry Pi Zero WH (consumes only 0.7 Watt) with Ethernet Hat and USB-Infrared-Reader-Cable to the Smart Meter. The PI reads and transmits all readings over MQTT to my InfluxDB 2.0, which is running virtualized on Proxmox. At the same time, I also read my solar inverter through Modbus TCP (via OSS called "Solaranzeige"), to the same Influx DB. Both is visualized in Grafana. It is a nice stack that did not produce any problems in 7+ years.
All of this helped me to better understand my electricity consumption.
This is a great post! Did you blog about it? I am sure HN would love a post like that. I would generate lots of interesting convos around similar setups in different countries.
The port/protocol originates in Netherlands and is getting widely implemented across the EU. It is really nice that the port provides power (esp. in recent versions) for an ESP, so you don't need to worry about bringing power to where your meter is (which may be outdoors.)
Yeah, P1 has been around for a decade or so in the Netherlands. If don’t feel like setting up an MCU yourself, Homewizard Energy is pretty good. I don’t use their services, but you can enable a simple API on the local network that gives you a JSON representation of the ‘telegrams’ that come out of the P1 serial port.
I thought the old meters were all bidirectional (ie: the spinning wheel could go backwards if you back-fed). Dunno what older gen “smart”meters would do. But I guess the newer meters are capable of paying you some reduced/enhanced rate for backfeeding?
I have my dumb electricity meter sending my electric usage to google sheets every one minute
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
The UK has smart energy meters for a lot of customers. Octopus are an energy supplier which is using them to great effect for data nerds and people who want to save money.
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].
Octopus is currently trying to set up in France. They've got a pretty amazing advertising campaign where you don't know what they're selling except for a pink mascot.
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.
The founder of Octopus was from a software background and has claimed that Octopus (the energy company) was initially just to demo the potential of the software.
Ironic that their software is so terrible then - it took over two years for their support to do 'something' to my account so I could actually pay my bills.
I would love a way to turn off my electric hot water heater between the hours of about 10pm and 7am.
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.
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.
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.
Per @quickthrowman recommendation I can add that this is the way to go for an electric hot water heater having installed many of these Intermatic time clocks. The old ones were analog and one can hear a clicking but they do make them digital now, YMMV.
I use a $8 programmable plug timer switch off Aliexpress to do exactly that. But it's only useful when I live alone. When a girlfriend is living in, messing with hot water supply is an absolute no-no!
Depends… if you like to take your showers at peak times, the tankless might cost you more in opex (in addition to the capex).
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).
A few years back I had a Sense power meter installed and its been great. It took some time to configure and get used to, and for it to detect various devices, but now I can reliably predict my upcoming power bill. And make adjustments as needed.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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...
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.
Used to manufacture: they declared ch 7 bankruptcy in 2020
So the payback period is 44 years. The buildings they renovated are quite likely not to exist that long.
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?
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.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
TIL about switched-mode power supplies... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-mode_power_supply
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.
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 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).
All of this helped me to better understand my electricity consumption.
https://www.homewizard.com/p1-meter/
This is far from any metro area, so it might be a countrywide rollout.
> installing (without charge)
Who’s paying for it?
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/
[5] https://octopus.energy/smart/intelligent-octopus-flux/
[6] https://kraken.tech
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.