Save Money on Electric Bill Demands — Switch to the Cheap Hours
Electricity doesn’t cost the same no matter what time of the day use it. Depending on your utility provider, electricity prices can go up and down depending on how much demand there is at any given time. If it’s hot muggy weather the way it’s been this summer, and if everyone’s using their air conditioner, the prices go up. If it’s a nice cool October afternoon, power is practically free. In some areas of the country, you can sign up to be notified every day about the prices the following day. You get a text message, and you can plan what you’ll to the following day – save money in electric bill demands for that day by moving your chores or other energy-intensive stuff to specific parts of the day when you know that power will be cheaper.
Adjusting your needs to specific parts of the day when prices are cheap – this is something cell phone subscribers know to do. They know that weekend and nighttime calls are free (or at least cheaper) because the cell phone companies happen to have quite a bit of spare capacity at those times. People know that taking a redeye flight is cheaper (or at least it used to be) because no one likes to fly at that time and demand tends to be lean. With people always worried about how to save money on electric bill demands all over country, if they could be notified the way they are with airplane tickets or cell phone calls, that moving their demand to particular part of the day, they could save big bucks, families across the country could save billions. And they wouldn’t even need to move all of their demand to a less expensive time. Merely doing so with 10% of their energy consumption would achieve this.
Homes usually have meters that get read once a month. So the utility company has no way of telling what times of the day exactly, each family uses its power. Factories though, usually use special smart electricity meters. These keep getting read every hour. So the utility companies they get their power from, know how much power they use and when; they and they can bill them accordingly. Unfortunately, not many homes have this kind of smart meter.
Installing such a meter can be great for the environment as well. Right now, everyone tends to use all their power over the peak hours. The rest of the time, they don’t use much power at all. The utility companies still have to build all those expensive power stations to supply power during those peak hours; and then, they lie idle for the rest of the day. If people could normalize their power use, not only would it allow them to save money on electric bill demands, it could allow the utility companies to retire their most inefficient plants and just make do with the most efficient ones.
People win all over this way. If only you could call your congressmen to get this through.