re: #970 turn

If it’s any consolation, $500 to $600 a month for utility bills is pretty pathetic imo. Must have a very large house, that is one hell of a bill. SMUD has a similar program in Sac, if I had air conditioning I would be on it like you. You are right, they are just balancing the load and it has no serious change in temps but saes you money. I cool and warm my house using radiant floor tubing, very efficient.

Here, we have a similar plan, too. It comes with all sorts of caveats.

First, you pay a cheaper rate for interruptible service - on the compressor only. To make this work, the compressor is placed on a separate meter. The utility company provides the meter, but you have to pay an electrician to install the separate line - which costs a few hundred bucks. Not too horrible if you’re installing a new AC unit, but significant if you’re retrofitting. And the savings is only on the electricity used to run the compressor - everything else, your lights, stove, fans, television and on and on, gets billed at the same rate it always did.

Once that’s in place, the utility “guarantees” that it will never interrupt your compressor service for more than, say, 20 minutes at a time. When we had this “service,” it was interrupted for 20 minutes, came on for five minutes, went off for another 15 minutes, came on for three minutes, went off for 20 minutes…you get the idea. It was never on long enough to cool the house. The following year, the whole 20 minute thing got tossed out the window, and we were without a compressor for hours at a time during the times when we needed it most - the hottest, most humid days of the summer. So what we wound up with was no air conditioning at all, in return for a “savings” of about 3% of our total electric bill , despite losing our AC for about 80% of the time it was most sorely needed.

Swell.