Pilot program from power company

Has anybody else been offered to participate in a pilot program that allows the electric company to install a programmable thermostat in your home that allows the power company to remotely control and change the set temperature during high peak demands? Seems like a silly idea to me to let them control the temperature of my house. I received the letter of "congratulations" last week that I had been selected.

 

Not too ridiculous really. I've lived in a number of places where (at peak demand) power was shut down. People were encouraged to do laundry in the evenings and lessen power consumption overall. Never heard of it being implemented on a voluntary basis though.

 

We were selected (and have installed) a power cost monitor. It's a doohicky you strap onto the power meter that relays data to a remote inside your home. You can watch the meter "spin" and see exacly how much the AC is costing you per hour. It came pre-programmed for our rate structure.

 

*drool*... which one do you have? I was looking at a few ($150-$300)

http://www.powercostmonitor.com/p3982/power_cost_monitor.php
http://www.powermeterstore.com/p4724/eml_2020-h.php



but there are also ones that record your usage and data can be fed to your computer for graphing, repoting, etc. There is also a way to "train" the system to tell you which appliances are the major draws using their energy signatures, even though you are monitoring the whole house and not individual circuits. This way you don't have to only monitor in realtime or month-to-date cost.

 

ah, found the Dom link:

http://www.dom.com/customer/efficiency/res/pr0311.jsp

I remember back about 10yrs ago my father in law had a device that controlled time of day usage so that you could use the time-of-day rate structure with dominion and save a good amount of money... ie wash clothes, electric h2o heater, run the AC during off-peak periods, etc.

 

We got an offer to allow them to install a switch on our a/c. I called the number in the offer and asked some questions. From what they said, they are trying two approaches to peak power control, a thermostat and a switch. With the switch they would turn off the a/c for 15 minutes every 30 minutes for a maximum of 4 hours. They will not turn it off after 7 pm. This will probably have no impact on the electric bill; at least that isn't the intent of the program. We have 2 systems in our townhouse, upstairs and the rest of the house. They said they would install switches on both systems and that when they sent out control signals it would cover a large number of houses, so both units would be off at the same time.

I also asked if they had something that would control most heavy loads and perform peak load management with a billing scheme like they used to have (what I think boomerstfx was talking about). They said they didn't do this anymore.


Best regards,
Richard

 

Did it come pre-programmed at 6.3 cents/kwh? Ours did, but there is a two-tier rate structure where the rates are a little above that, then a little lower after a certain usage. So it seems they just plugged in an average.

 

Ours came pre-programeed with 6.3 and hasn't changed. We have been on the budget plan forever. March's bill was the first where we had a $97 credit! Usually the bill is $202.50