Analyzing my electricity consumption
Smart electricity meters and time‑of‑use tariffs are reshaping how households can monitor and shift their energy consumption, but real-world behavior change has been limited outside of big, schedulable loads like EV charging, water heating, and air conditioning. Commenters compare implementations across regions (Europe, UK, North America), describe tools for extracting and visualizing fine‑grained usage data, and highlight both the potential for dynamic pricing and automation and the downsides, including privacy concerns, complex tariffs, and equity issues if wealthier users defect to self-generation. Many conclude that meaningful demand shifting will depend less on granular data and more on automated control of major appliances, better incentives, and clearer integration between smart meters, home devices, and grid needs.
Smart meters: purposes and mixed results
- Rollouts in places like France, Ontario, Finland, UK, and US utilities mainly justified by:
- Eliminating manual meter reads.
- Enabling finer-grained settlement and tariff experiments.
- Detecting theft, faults, and managing remote disconnect/throttling.
- Reported demand-shifting impacts are often small; auditors in Ontario questioned cost‑effectiveness.
- Some utilities (e.g., BC, Denmark, ConEd, UK) expose daily or sub‑hourly data to customers; others still show only monthly totals.
Dynamic pricing and user behavior
- Time‑of‑use and real‑time tariffs exist in many regions (Ontario, PNW, California, Nordics, UK):
- Off‑peak can be dramatically cheaper (night EV rates, spot pricing with negative hours, UK Agile/Tracker).
- Thread splits on whether incentives are strong enough:
- Some say people barely change habits unless price gaps are large or automated (EV charging, smart thermostats, heat pumps).
- Others argue utilities under-use pricing levers or design tariffs that mainly raise peak revenue.
- EVs are repeatedly cited as the killer app for load shifting because charging is easy to schedule and dominates household usage.
Smart / controllable appliances and thermal storage
- Desire for “smart fridges” and other loads that pre‑cool, pre‑heat, or pre‑charge when power is cheap.
- Existing examples: ice‑storage AC, smart fridges linked to utilities, water heaters and heat‑pump systems used as thermal batteries.
- Debate over feasibility and payoff:
- Some see modest savings for fridges/freezers; others argue focus should be on water heating, HVAC, and EVs.
- Disagreement on whether turning heating/AC or water heaters off for hours and then reheating saves net energy vs. maintaining setpoint; consensus that economics depend heavily on insulation and tariff shape.
Data access, DIY monitoring, and standards
- Many meters expose pulses, infrared or serial/HAN ports (P1, SML, Linky LED), enabling DIY logging via ESP8266/ESP32, Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant, InfluxDB/Grafana, etc.
- Commercial/consumer devices mentioned: Sense, Emporia Vue, iotawatt, Rainforest, HomeWizard, Glowmarkt, UK in‑home displays, Tesla/Powerwall dashboards.
- Frustration with:
- Utilities blocking new HAN devices or encrypting data.
- APIs restricted to legal entities or third‑party intermediaries; comparisons made to “open banking.”
Equity, privacy, and grid economics
- Concern that as self‑generation + batteries get cheaper, remaining grid costs will be pushed onto renters and low‑income users.
- Privacy worries around fine‑grained consumption revealing occupancy and behavior patterns.
- Some see smart metering and dynamic tariffs as essential to integrating renewables; others see them as primarily utility cost‑shifting and surveillance with limited consumer benefit so far.