Here are few of my tweaks to move my consumption (mostly heating and water heating) out of peak events.
Control variable
First thing, I created a global boolean variable PeriodePointe to indicate if a peak event is currently active. I could have use a virtual switch as well. I currently flip that variable ON/OFF manually when I receive a peak notification. Note that to simplify things I always handle things like there's two events in the day: 6:00 to 9:00 and 16:00 to 20:00.
My variable is displayed and can be edited in a dashboard:
Schedulers
I drive all my thermostats with thermostat schedulers, following on my hub modes. During peak hours, I simply turn the schedulers Eco mode ON. This allows me to easily define different peak offsets in some parts of the house and edit these settings without changing my rules.
I want to place a lamp in a common area that will turn ON during periods to notify the family that a peak event is on the way.
I'd like to automate the peak detection but currently Hydro-Quebec doesn't have a webservice or something. I have seen few posts from people scanning their mailbox for HQ notifications with NodeRed or Javascript...
Ask people in Texas that were on Griddy in February 2021 how this worked out for them. Some people were getting $17k power bills for a week of service. Generally this can be a good idea, but all of takes is one snowmaggedon to show the really ugly part of this idea.
Texas has an unregulated energy market place. Griddy was one provider that did a monthly fee of i belive it was $20 gave consumers acces to energy at whole sale rates, sometimes as low as $0.02/kwh. But when the grid was over taxed, that quickly rose to over $9000.00/kwh (yes, you read that correctly).
Ps. Griddy filed bankruptcy and went out of business about 3 months later.
Interesting! $9000/kwh OMG! The rates here are like this...
Base rate (Rate D):
a daily base consumption at 6,319 Âą/kWh
remainder daily 9,749 Âą/kWh
When subscribed to rate Flex D:
From December 1st to march 31s you pay all your electricity to a lower price than rate D
Except during peak events (max 100h during the winter) the rate is 51,967 Âą/kWh
I've seen in some forum people saving 100$ to 200$ by controlling all their stuff manually. As for me, it's my first time. I hope my automations will help a bit.
$9,000 per megawatt-hour, which is $9/kWh. Still a lot, but not the same thing.
And Quebecâs energy market is regulated more tightly than Texasâ, even if there is a program that encourages customers to sign up for lower off-peak rates in exchange for higher peak rates.
They are quite similar to yours. As for the water heater, I calculated that the saving would be negligeable and did not worth the investment. I only not use it prior and during a peek hour.
With this I got close to 500$ credit last year.
Also, I had set a preheating period the previous year and found it did not make a difference confort wize so I got rid of it.
Thanks @ymerj, that's another simple solution. I prefer not using delays and rather use different trigger to make it simpler to debug. I also expect that the logic would better turn back to normal in case of hub reboot. But I must admit that I never ran into scheduling problem at bootup and my hub is on UPS.
I see you go down by 5°C, what's you normal temperature. I keep the house to 20° I feel going down to 15° would cause some complaints from the family
My hub is on UPS also and can last 5 days without power so no worries on that side. Normal temp is 20°C but I cheet a bit because I leave 2 rooms on the second floor at normal temperature (with doors close) to relax, watch TV or whatever when I feel the temp goes too low for confort.
@Cramezul I patched together a Gmail apps script from sample code to automate enabling a peak event state on the HE when I get an email from Hydro. Uses MakerAPI to turn a virtual switch on. If there's any interest I can share it.
Here's the script in question. It's pretty dumb as it doesn't check the event date (in RM I assume the event occurs the next day) and doesn't parse the contents e.g. to figure out if it's a morning peak event, afternoon peak event or both (my RM rules assume both).
The thing ran yesterday for this morning's event and I didn't have to lift a finger. I did have to manually cancel the afternoon peak period though.
Now I need to figure out code to change the Ecobee's schedule so that it will start heating earlier to a slightly higher setpoint (I have a hydronic system... perfect for this program ).
OMG! It is easier than i though! I was thinking of how to run an app in HE to poll my inbox, etc... This solution is really simple. Thanks for sharing.
(offtopic) Yeah I find it really elegant that you can essentially map any hub / device / app on the same route. Allows you to think of all your hubs (or all Hubitat units if you're its cloud platform operator ) as one system. MakerAPI provides crude API management (authz) and I could imagine going even further, allowing writing apps that are hub-agnostic, for example by detecting when an endpoint is local and skipping the cloud hop, providing observability / throttling, etc. I've not looked at Hub Mesh/Connect yet but this sort of functionality makes those features obvious.
Nice thread. I wanted to implement some automatic fetching, but to be honest, it is very simple the way I implemented it: simply with 2 virtual switches. One for a morning and one for the afternoon peak events. I flip the corresponding switch manually when it is announced, and then it triggers rules in Rule Machine at specific times
The VSS: things are all Virtual Switch for Scenes. Each switch triggers what I call a scene, which is just another rule in Rule Machine. The rule sets thermostats, shuts off (or turns on) switches, etc.