I was able to put together an offer for new participants with ComED for readers of my site. If you become a program participant, you will receive a $20 e-gift card. To participate click here to sign up.
Slowly we are attempting to move to a net zero home. Over the years major strides have been made. Attic foil installed, all exterior and some interior walls air sealed and insulated, high efficiency washer, dryer, refrigerator, pumps, servers, 100% migration to LED, attic insulation R-60, etc. Meaning almost anything plugged in is super efficient. We even had a electricity study conducted in which EVERYTHING plugged in was monitored for its usage, then listed in a spreadsheet showing its highest usage, lowest usage, and its daily KWh usage. We also live in a smart home, with a strong back-end which processes loads of data including turning off devices during peak hours or when the power rate hits a certain level.
The home automation platform also monitors the current homes demand in real time as well as the demand of every circuit in the home. Most appliances also report to the system its power demand.
To give you and ideas of the amount of data:
•(Main) I can see the home is drawing X amount of watts from ComED.
•(Sub) I can see the amount that circuit breaker 1 is drawing from ComED
•(Device) I can see the exact usage my Vornado desktop fan is drawing.
•(Home Intelligence platform) I can see the exact usage my sump pump is drawing during this past rain storm which dropped 1 inch of rain and its cost based off of price I pay factored real time.
I can attest as a Real Time (hourly) pricing customer as well as a peak time savings customer (where you earn rewards). MOST IMPORTANT THING, do you have an expensive bill due to high load appliances which run on demand. Also make sure on your electricity bill your “supply” charge is higher then the “delivery” section.
There are a bunch of factors to decide before making the switch. The most important is figuring out WHY your bill is high to begin with. You will only save when you are able to shift your usage to a “off peak time”. For example we have a server closet which runs 24/7 drawing energy. This is something we can’t shift usage off peak, servers have to keep humming, closet needs to be cooled etc. The other good example is our irrigation. Our irrigation system uses two pumps. This can be shifted to an off peak time since we can decide when to irrigate.
The idea is to reduce your overall demand during the times when the cost of SUPPLY is high. Note the real time price is for SUPPLY, you also pay for delivery and other fees outlined below.
If you become a program participant, you will receive a $20 e-gift card. To participate in the Refer a Friend program, click here to sign up.
Woah all caps for supply?
You next must make sure your family or occupants understand the difference between the cost of SUPPLY and the RATE you pay, if you don’t you might regret your decision. You pay for the delivery of electricity to your home as well as a bunch of other fees and programs charged by ComED. Below, I list out an example of what one of our bills showed. Note the highlighted “Electricity Supply Charge” is the ONLY cost which you can control. Also notice “capacity charge” this one is complicated, but our first year it was almost $80 a month, 2nd year it was $50 a month, and finally $14.68 a month.
Capacity charge is ComEDs attempt to ensure enough electricity is generated when you need it most. They calculate it by taking the top 5 highest use days as well as the top 5 highest demand days and you essentially live with that FIXED charge until it resets in June. So the capacity charge times 12 months. Did I mention we had a SUPER high bill before I got into attempting to be net zero. Don’t have a mouthful of coffee, drink it down now because you will spit it out. Essentially our yearly cost for JUST the capacity charge our first year was $960! The second year $588, and now $176.16. Savings of $783.84, but again this was because we took the program seriously the second and third year. Once the capacity charge is calculated you will have to pay it no matter how much you reduce your energy, its fixed and stuck on your bill until the next June bill.
When I mention shifting usage patterns I am referring to attempt to use as little electricity during the 12P-7P hours and the most from 9PM to 4AM. This is easier for some than others. Back to SUPPLY at first we would notice that the supply rate would go to negative numbers early in the mornings (like 3-4AM), at which point we would run everything since we are getting paid to use electricity, right? NOOOOO, WRONG, FAIL. See the above chart you pay for delivery which is billed off of usage. The only negative number is the supply. What we found the second year in the program, is this was a mistake, I will admit I messed up on that one. Once I communicated it to the other occupants in the home, they started watching the rate. Shifting almost all usage to the evening hours
There are appliances which are banned from running dayside. These are items which draw crazy energy. Examples: washing machine, irrigation, any type of space heater or electric heat, charging an electric car etc. When we started running devices which listed high wattage, in the late hours of the night we discovered our bills were going down.
Everyone’s smartphone has widgets on the homepage showing the current price of electricity. Alexa could also tell you if you asked her. It was not uncommon to hear “what’s the electricity cost” or “I’ll wait till later to use XYX”. The news “Tomorrow is going to be a very hot and humid day” equaling NO air conditioning tomorrow. We really started to shift our lifestyle around the cost of electricity. We almost took it as a game or a challenge, how low can we get it. My dad was really into this challenge, he would always do loads of laundry late at night. In fact as I am writing this article he came up to wash laundry, it is 1AM in the morning and the current 5 minute price is 1.7c per KWh. Of course this monitoring everything grew old on us.
This is where the home intelligence platform kicks in. This is not a off the shelf kit like Insteon, Wink, ETC, this is a powerful platform which processes loads of data and has lots of integration of systems. Our home automation system monitors a lot, as I mentioned at the beginning. But it also reacts a lot. The system will monitor the current 5 minute supply price and it will turn off high demanding items. It will also forecast the weather for the following day as well as the predicted hourly price and then pre cool the home during the off peak hours. Using historic interior temperatures it will also anticipate how quick the house will reheat up and ensure it properly precools so that it maintains the “set point” until the next non peak period. The system does all of this without any user interaction. If the system knows that it wont be able to get the house cool, it wont bother and instead bank the energy usage it would have spend for another promising day.
Our fountains and water features will turn off the pumps or slow the flow when the rate hits a set point. Our interior lights dim down to a comfortable level gradually over a course of several minutes, almost like a sunset. The occupant of the room will not really notice the lights diming down to reduce usage. Every room is monitored for occupancy and temperature, if a room goes unoccupied it turns off. Lights, appliances, entertainment systems etc all turn off. When the house alarm is set the entire house turns off, if we forget to arm the alarm when we left in a hurry the system will notify us and automatically arm itself based off of sensors as well as geo location data. The home automation system plays a huge role because it acts like an orchestrator keeping everything in tune.
Now don’t run out and invest in a several thousand dollar automation system to save you $20 bucks a month on your electric bill. We were lucky enough to be able to utilize what we currently have to help make things easier.
Essentially if you have power hungry devices and can shift those usages towards the lower rate times you will notice a nice savings. If you find out that you cant shift usage because you enjoy freedom to do laundry whenever, or like your house being a cool 68 degrees on a hot sunny day during the day, this program is NOT FOR YOU.
ComED does offer several awesome tools. You can sign up for AC cycling in which your AC unit will turn off in high demand periods. You can sign into a web based portal and view your usage. Most modern appliances have a delay start mode so you can manually schedule it to start later in the day.
Participating in this program has been beneficial to me. I hope the information I provided will be of use to you. I tried to make it as clear and to the point, but sometimes I miss something important, feel free to request clarification on my contact me page.