Analyzing my electricity consumption

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

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.