The cost of producing electricity may vary considerably throughout the day, depending on demand. For instance, you can be paying a higher rate for electricity when you get home from work or school and demand goes up as customers near and far turn down the thermostat to cool off. Demand increases production costs, and those are likely passed on to you, the customer, during peak hours of use in a practice known as time-variant pricing.
Fortunately, you can make this practice work to your advantage. Here’s how.
Making the Most of Time-Variant Pricing
Your utility may or may not provide you information about when peak hours for electricity use occur. Perhaps your utility charges you the same price all day long. If they do practice time-variant pricing, however, and if they provide you with that information in your bill or on their website, you can see how you will save money by waiting till nighttime to wash a load of clothes, or run the dishwasher or clothes dryer.
You might also turn your thermostat up a couple of degrees during those peak hours, and then run the air conditioner a little cooler at night to get your house cooled off. If your home is well insulated, it may very well retain the coolness all day long, throughout the heat of the day.
Installing efficient electrical appliances and lighting, or adding a zoning system, can further augment these savings.
What’s more, by delaying your use of electricity until off-peak hours, you’re helping to diminish the production of carbon emissions, as utilities must often resort to energy production from older, seldom-used but dirtier energy-producing plants.
Critical Peak Pricing
As more utilities begin to practice time-variant pricing, some are providing notices in the form of emails or text messages to let customers know when the price of power goes dramatically up or down. This is known as critical peak pricing (CPP) and where pilot programs have been launched, electricity use has gone down by as much as 50 percent.
For more on time-variant pricing, contact Energy 1 Heating and Air Conditioning of Lorain.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Lorain, Ohio about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Guide or call us at 440-201-2959.
Energy 1 Heating & Air Conditioning
1 (440) 246-5440
Serving the Lorain, OH Area