#time of use

[servicemag]

UK Heat Pump Data: Gas Use Drops 90%, and the Right Rate Plan Cuts Peak Draw in Half

What actually happens to the energy bill when a house swaps a gas boiler for a heat pump? Four economists measured it with real utility data instead of guessing. NBER Working Paper 33036 (Bernard, Hackett, Metcalfe, and Schein, 2024) tracked UK households through the conversion using data from Octopus Energy.

The results: gas consumption down roughly 90%. Electricity up 61%. Total household energy consumption down about 40%. Emissions fell 36% in the first year, with lifetime savings around 68% as the grid gets cleaner.

The part worth stealing for your own house: the rate plan experiment. Octopus runs a time-of-use tariff built for heat pump homes, with cheap windows outside the evening peak. Households on it cut peak-hour electricity draw roughly in half by preheating during the cheap windows and coasting through the expensive ones. A smart thermostat handles the scheduling. And the shifting held up on the coldest days of winter, which is when grid operators worry most.

Translation: what a heat pump costs to run depends on your electricity rate almost as much as the hardware. Pair the install with the right tariff and a scheduled thermostat, and you're playing a different game than your neighbor on a flat rate. Most California households are already on time-of-use rates whether they've noticed or not.

Bonus finding: the UK's heat pump subsidy returned about £1.24 in value per pound spent, useful ammunition in the rebate-funding fights happening on this side of the Atlantic too.

The usual caveats: UK homes run hydronic radiators off boilers, the housing stock is older and leakier, and a British cold snap is a mild week in Minneapolis. Exact percentages won't map one-to-one onto a US furnace-and-AC changeout. The direction holds, though, and the rate-plan lesson travels just fine.

The paper: NBER Working Paper 33036.

The installer's take, including how to bring rate plans into the sales conversation: ServiceMag

[ncdweller]

Residential Service Rate (RS) vs Residential Time of Use Rate (RT).

Supposedly we are now on the RT schedule, but I can’t confirm that until tomorrow, as Duke Energy’s customer service center is only open on weekdays, and logging into their web site does not tell you which plan you are on.

[enviro-pete]

Time of Use

If I live to be 100 I will have spent 35 years as a senior. If I am inactive or in my house all the time those years will be painful and poor quality. This is where Time of Use Pricing benefits seniors because it encourages people to get out of their house and active longer if off peak and on peak are priced further apart this should improve the quality of life for future seniors. Overall electric bills will be reduced or at the very least increase at a slower pace because fewer power plants will need to be built to meet peak demand. The issue is that seniors are hurting today and I have heard plans to address this with out touching Time Of Use.

[switchhop]

Program Your Thermostat Around Time of Use Rates

Written by Elly

Recently, my husband and I moved from a house with natural gas heating to an apartment with baseboard heaters. This will be our first winter with electrical heat and we were a bit worried about how this would affect our electricity bill.

Luckily, our landlord was willing to install programmable thermostats for us. While we were trying to figure out what combination of settings worked best for us, my brother-in-law suggested we set the heat to come on for an hour before each on-peak period started (which is a great idea and seemed so ridiculously obvious to me once he said it).

It took us a couple days of trial and error - and monitoring our usage peaks on SwitchHop – to get all our thermostats optimally programmed for our lifestyle.

Programming Your Thermostat For Time-of-Use

Right now, we have our thermostats set to 19 degrees Celsius from 6 to 7 am, to heat the apartment while we are awake and moving around in the morning.

At 7 am, which is the beginning of the first on-peak period of the day, the thermostats all drop to 15 degrees Celsius until 4 pm.

At 4 pm, the temperature is set to rise again to 19 degrees, to warm our home for us before we get there and before we hit the second on-peak period of the day at 5 pm.

From 5 pm to 6 am the next morning, we have set the temperature to drop to 15 degrees again, to get us through that on-peak period and the whole night.

Usually, that hour of heating lasts all night, but, as we are in the apartment at this time, we can change the temperature if we need to – we just have to remember to reset the programs before we go to sleep or all our hard work would be for nothing.

So, programmable thermostats have been quite useful for my husband and I. Even when we had gas heating, we still used them – mostly because we were (and continue to be) lazy and forgetful.

And, seriously, who wants to get up in a cold house and run downstairs to turn on the heat? No one, that’s who. I like to wake up to a pre-warmed house, thanks, and to go to sleep in a pre-chilled one.

Tuning & Calibrating Your Thermostat

If you can’t or don’t want to switch from a mechanical to a digital thermostat for whatever reason, there is one thing you can do to make sure they're running as efficiently and effectively as possible.

This is called tuning your thermostat, and there are many how-to articles available online.

Basically, by tuning, you are making sure your thermostat’s temperature sensor(s) are calibrated and reading the ambient temperature correctly, and you are adjusting a sensor called the “heat anticipator”, which gives your heating/cooling system some wiggle room so it's not constantly trying to maintain an exact, specific perfect 20 degree temperature.

Heat Anticipators Explained

This article actually explains heat anticipators (and all the other components in electro mechanical thermostats) quite well.

Mercury Switch Mechanical Thermostat Tune Up

This one describes a pretty quick and easy tune up for mercury switch mechanical thermostats, with a couple good photos.

Calibration Screw vs Mercury Switch Thermostats

This last article is just plain hilarious. It’s from 1988, it’s a scan of an article from a small city’s local paper, and it’s attributed to Reader’s Digest. Setting all that aside, it is actually helpful – it explains the difference between calibration screw and mercury switch thermostats. (I’m not entirely sure of the prevalence of calibration screw models in homes these days but it’s still good to know, I guess.) 

I hope this helps some of you better manage your heating this winter. Please be careful when you’re tuning, if you decide to do it! Good luck!

[energyresources4election]

"Truthiness is a 'truth' that a person claims to know intuitively "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts." Stephen Colbert

Cut through the disinformation and read the truth about Power Pricing:

- The difference between legacy hydro and built nuclear (minus the debt retirement charge) versus the cost of new generation

- The impact of green energy FIT contracts

- The real impact of Time of Use Pricing