Ecobee has eco+ which has "Community Energy Savings" [0]. It was just way too intrusive. It seemed to be a reactive system vs proactive. Technology Connections goes into this more [1], but I believe they should be providing a system that proactively cools when there is less demand _prior_ to an expected increase in demand. Effectively using your house as a "battery".
When I had it enabled, I was _always_ too hot (in the summer) during peak hours. Sorry, not sorry: I'm not willing to sacrifice my comfort for the ~$10/mo incentive.
Nest has an energy saving feature that feels like it is trying to boil the frog. We normally keep the thermostat at 78F (~25.5C), but over the course of a couple of weeks it ticked it up to 79F, then 80, then 81, and now 82F (~28C). I had to go in and manually adjust the schedule to get it back to something reasonable.
Holy, while in Toronto I set the thermostat to 68 and complain if I see it cross into the 70s. Thanks to the wind tunnel I'm in, I'm able to turn off the AC every 2-3 days for 1-2 days. Conventional wisdom tells me this is more costly than just keep the AC running all the time at a stable temperature, but, I don't really care about the cost saving over personal preference.
I'm not OP but I live in Washington DC, where our summers are definitely hot and humid. I keep my apartment around 78F to 80F. I use a dehumidifier to keep relative humidity around 50-55%, which corresponds to a dew point of ~60F which is low enough to still feel comfortable instead of "sticky".
On especially hot days, I will raise the setpoint higher, and use a small fan to circulate air around where I am spending time, which is very effective when humidity is not too high.
He's saying that you have two air conditioners: one that vents heat inside your house and one that vents heat outside your house.
Your dehumidifier and your air conditioner are mechanically identical. The only difference between the two is where the waste heat goes. The exact same device is called a 'dehumidifier' if the waste heat is vented indoors and an 'air conditioner' if the waste heat is vented outside.
There's not really any efficiency gains from running a dehumidifier to reduce air conditioner use. They both use the same power and have the same effect on the absolute humidity, so you might as well just run the air conditioner (unless you want it to be warmer).
There's also dessicant dehumidifiers that don't use a refrigeration cycle. They do also warm the air a bit but may be more efficient per mass of water removed from the air, depending on the temperature and humidity range.
I do have an air conditioner (well, an air-source heat pump), but it doesn't adequately remove enough moisture before the indoors gets too cold. It's possible this is not properly sized, but I cannot change it because I rent.
In my case I did some tests, and the additional power usage of the dehumidifier is way more than offset by the power savings I realize by running the air conditioner less frequently. This only works because the dehumidifier enables me to be comfortable at a higher indoor temperature.
I live in Austin, TX. It has been 105-ish every day this week, but the humidity is 30% during the hot part of the day. My office has a ceiling fan which is on low most of the time. Some people will not believe this, but I have the minisplit set at 80F and when the sun sets I turn off the fan because I start to get cold. When I leave my office (which is attached to the garage) and walk the 40 feet into my house through the 98F evening air I often feel: ah, that warmth feels good.
To summarize: it is one part adaptation to the heat, one part low humidity, and one part air circulation.
I live in a fairly humid area, but the AC helps to drain the moisture out of the air so it's still livable. Ceiling fans on a low setting can also help you feel comfortable, especially if you don't have the sun shining on you.
In Wisconsin we set the AC to 78 in the summer. We tried doing that when we moved to Florida. Couldn't do it. Had to go down to 72, 74 max, because of the humidity. There's just too much moisture in the air and we have to set the thermostat that low to make sure it gets removed from the air.
It doesn’t work. People use electricity at peak hours because working people and families are on similar schedules. We all get home from work or wfh office, start cooking, and doing other things because we have time after work/school. Not to mention 5pm is usually the hottest part of the day so ACs run.
It does work, though. Nest's program pre-cools to get you through the hottest hours without having to kick on the AC, moving some of the region's demand from the 4-6pm slot to the 2-4pm slot.
I find myself going "huh, it's getting a little warm" at about 5:45pm, at which point I check and remember it's a "Rush Hour" session.
Does precooking really work? I’d assume it would have to cool my house down below 65 to keep it below 80 all afternoon. 111+ days are brutal in certain rooms even with both ACs set to 76.
The last 30 years have been a renaissance of insulation and energy efficiency. Pre cooling, fan recirculation, humidity consideration, time of use observance may only delay/reduce a few cycles per house per day, but in aggregate, that's significant.
I can't speak for the specifics of using a Nest, but pre-cooling a house earlier in the day is definitely a more efficient use of power.
Earlier in the year in Australia when day time temperatures were 35°C-40°C (95°F-104°F), waiting until midday to turn on the AC would mean using another 10 kwh more than if the AC was turned on at 9am.
Granted, this is an new Australian house which means it's built to standards about 30 years behind what you would expect for a first world country.
Depends on the shape of the temperature graph for the day, the power of your AC system, your insulation, etc.
If your on a day that doesn't get below 90 and gets above 110 during the hottest part of the day and your AC is barely rated at the minimum recommended for your square footage and you have average insulation, no, and even regular AC use is going to be marginal and your AC is probably going to frequent service.
(And the things that make precooling work better also will make your AC work better and, for the most part, more energy and maintenance cost efficiently when you aren't precooling.)
If you live in a place where you frequently need AC, aside from decent insulation, getting an overrated, high-efficiency unit (which seem to be correlated for residential units, probably because both drive up cost, and there is a correlation between people looking for more capacity and people concerned with efficiency) is a serious quality of life improvement.
Does for me. Around 7 PM, my AC kicks on to drop the house a few degrees; sun's down low and air temperature has been dropping by then.
Later in the evening, it drops lower to be able to sleep, but also cool down the house, and taking advantage of the coolest part of the day for best efficiency of the AC system. It stops holding that temperature around 7-8am and goes to a much higher set point.
The house stays dry enough through the day that it never really gets uncomfortable, especially with a gentle breeze from a small, quiet fan in the room.
I would not expect this sort of solution to be super useful in a place that gets 111 degree days, where AC is literally keeping folks alive. You'd probably get more benefits from a housing code that requires extended roofs for shade, light colored exteriors, etc.
in reality it's hard (and probably expensive) to proactively cool house with AC during summer at hot/sunny regions. I live in a house with rather good insulation (the one mandated by code) in south bay, yet all the walls getting rather warm and even if you try to precool air with AC walls with bring temperature back quickly
My solution was to install whole house fan which runs through the night when temperature drops to 16C-14C. It allows to both replace air with colder one multiple times and due to improved air-flow to cool off the walls.
After I shut windows close at morning most of the houses stays within comfort zone ( < 22C) till 6-7pm even on 40C days
i have walls insulated according to california build code. it's not really possible to add more insulation to them, unless you rip them off and do spray in insulation. insulated attic with radiant barrier and insulated floors.
i just checked with IR camera, most of surfaces in the house are now 22C-24C. After a few days of 40+C walls ill go to 25-26. some walls (south side of house) even higher. There are few little spots where insulation doesn't sit properly - it will be around 28C.
The biggest offender is skylight. Temperature near top of it can get to 60C.
Edit. I think most people simply do not realize what temperature have internal and external walls in houses and how it interacts (or counteracts) AC. If you will go to read greenbuildings/passive houses forums, there are a bunch of discussions about thermal mass of the walls
Do you have any actual numbers for what is up to code insulation in California? California is a very temperate climate. I wouldn't exactly expect their code to have the highest insulation requirements.
Also, building codes should be considered the minimum.
I am keenly aware of how much thermal mass walls hold. My apartment is 3 external walls that are constructed pretty much only of a few inches of concrete, bare. The result is that after a full day of summer sun, even though it drops to 64 degrees outside at night, my air conditioner cannot keep it 76 degrees or lower inside. It's crazy. It's worse in the winter when I can feel the walls sucking heat out of my apartment.
>Do you have any actual numbers for what is up to code insulation in California? California is a very temperate climate. I wouldn't exactly expect their code to have the highest insulation requirements.
R-15 for 2x4 or R-21 for 2x6. Not highest numbers in USA I guess and after you buy house that already "exists", it's expensive to change it.
>I am keenly aware of how much thermal mass walls hold. My apartment is 3 external walls that are constructed pretty much only of a few inches of concrete, bare. The result is that after a full day of summer sun, even though it drops to 64 degrees outside at night, my air conditioner cannot keep it 76 degrees or lower inside. It's crazy. It's worse in the winter when I can feel the walls sucking heat out of my apartment.
Whole house fan is the way to go. If you can't install one, I think a couple of strategically placed window fans over night to create some air flow through the house might work better than AC
I did some research on preventing walls from getting too hot (my room wall on the outside hits 170F i think). Narrowed it to
- Transparent paint with some particles that reflect
sun/reduce heat gain
2x4 walls are allowed at all? That surprises me, up in the north they haven't been legal for decades now. Well it is more you can't meet the rvalue with them, but still even cheap houses don't get them
Nope. It's west facing stucco wall without shadow. It's on sun through most of the day. With IR camera i clocked it in range of 65C-75C multiple times (so it's maybe not 170, but 165. hate C<>F conversions in head) . I had inverter on this wall, and it simply died from overheating.
Same wall on the inside get's to 30C or more if I don't run AC that blows on it. Wall is triple layer stucco over plywood, R13 fiberglass and then drywall.
it's not really possible to add more insulation to them, unless you rip them off and do spray in insulation.
Actually, it's possible to inject foam insulation into walls without ripping them off. It goes in through small holes, or through utility boxes. Plenty of companies do that. I've even seen it advertised on TV in California.
But injectable foam insulation usually going into empty walls. I already have butted fiberglass in there. I don't think it's viable to make laparoscopic wall surgery to remove fiberglass . I did a quick google, and looks like you can do injectable foam over fiberglass. But I am not sure how much R it will add, but I am sure that for cost of of injectable foam + wall repair, I can get another hvac and run it for next 10 years...
I did consider recently to double walls on sunny side of the house with few layers of foil backed foam boards.
It’s cheating, a bit, to live in a place that drops 20-40 F at night … but even if we didn’t, the ability to turn every open window into an air conditioner is a great trick.
Yes. It's really amazing. First thing that I did after bought house last summer was to install whole house fan. Due to it we used hvac to cool house for less than 36 hours in July-October timeframe (only at days when temperatures were above 40 for few days in a row or when night temperatures didn't went down below 20)
Like heating/cooling your house more in advance of demand? It would be neat if they could enable/disable demand on a rolling basis where AC runs for one subpopulation for part of an hour then for another subpopulation the next part.
or you know, dont live in the desert e.g Phoenix Arizona, or if you do decide to live in the desert then realise that's your choice and dont add to pollution and climate change by trying to cool down a desert with AC.
Heating is far worse than cooling for energy consumption. It just doesn't produce the same moral outrage that AC does.
Which is funny, because you can always and universally add an extra layer of clothes to keep warm. You literally don't need heating as long as you forgo internal plumbing. But there is no universal alternative to AC to cool something down and people die all the time from heat exhaustion at home.
I have noticed this too. It is just AC is perceived as decadent and heating as primitive. It takes a fancy machine to cool your house, but you can heat your house by burning a log. The actual energy expenditure to accomplish temperature change doesn't affect how people how energy intensive people view each method.
I live in the desert and there are tons of alternatives to AC that have been used for thousands of years.you can build structures partially underground, you can use the evaporation of water to cool the air, you can use wind catchers like the ancient Persians did, you can wear different colored clothing (Triple digits is not uncomfortable if you’re wearing light colors), you can sleep during the day and work when it’s cooler, and so on.
Just saw both these comments, and I can only reply to this.
To "oceanplexian": Note that I used the word "universal". Evaporative cooling only works in dry climates. And the funny thing about dry climates is that they almost all lack water. I'll never forget the feeling of dread and horror when I saw water fans in Madrid cooling outdoor seating areas.
Your desert cooler is an environmental calamity and they should be banned.
To "celticninja": Yes you can do all those things but not universally in any climate (which was my point) and where it is possible it's probably an environmental disaster to do so (I can't think of any city in a dry climate in the world that doesn't have a water sustainability problem). You see we rely on AC (to your point), because we've thought the problem through and didn't stop at a shallow understanding.
Jeez guys! If your climate is dry enough for swamp coolers to be effective, they're dry enough for solar panels to make sense (if you care about CO2. I don't, I'm on acetaminophen). And it makes a lot more sense than wasting mineral water (i.e. well water).
It's funny that I have seen several anti A/C articles and several pro Heat Pump articles in recent times, do you think they know these are the same things in reverse? At least A/C is often used in sunny locales were solar can be used effectively.
AC is more than 100% efficient in heating the environment. This is unfortunate, but thermodynamics will win in the long run.
Heat pumps are more than 100% efficient at heating the house, which is what we want, and one of the places where we are on the same side as thermodynamics.
Fair enough, but direct heating of the environment is not of practical concern since it's effect is minuscule compared to GHG's. Point being, solar output is well correlated with A/C usage, which is a nice benefit and all that solar energy would be turned to heat anyway... so might as well have it cool your house :) Heat pump in the winter on the other hand, not so well correlated with renewables.
In the long run ACs are exactly 100% efficient at heating the environment. The extra heat is only temporarily displaced from the building being cooled, and will leak back in eventually.
There is heat generated by the system, and heat generated by the power generation used to power the system. It’s definitely not a neutral system - that’d be thermodynamically impossible ( increasing entropy without external energy)
If you power the AC with 100% solar shouldn’t there be no extra heat generated?
As in you’re merely absorbing some of the heat from the sun to then move existing heat around?
Frankly, even without solar power it wouldn’t generate “extra” heat directly over a long timescale, it would only accelerate the release of existing “heat” currently trapped in oil/gas/nuclear/etc.
There’s a fixed amount of sunlight hitting the earth every day, but not a fixed amount absorbed. A solar panel captures more heat than a white surface that bounces most of the light back into space. So the act of solar-powered a/c would still result in a net increase in global heat, unless you put the solar panel on top of something that was absorbing more heat than a panel does. I have no idea of the actual practical math of this - like does a black roof absorbs more or less than a panel? But solar energy isn’t impact free, even if we set aside panel manufacturing.
Once the heat is captured by the solar panel, I think you’re right using it for a/c is neutral - just moving heat around.
As for burning stored energy, that has to play into the heat dynamics of the globe. Like if you release it all at once it stops processes that would remove it from the atmosphere (animals and plants die), and it creates runaway heating feedback loops. there is some level of burning stored carbon that the planet can buffer and absorb and results in no change in global temperature. So burning stored energy in excess of that is a big problem. Like how you can sit or walk without noticeably sweating, but running causes you to have to actively cool yourself by sweating.
Ecobee integrates with SRP in my area and does exactly what you describe. They know my billing plan (Time of Use - Demand) and, from my understanding, will coordinate with SRP ahead of a conservation event to pre-cool my house by up to 2 degrees before raising it by up to 4 degrees when attempting to “flatten the demand curve” of the grid.
In my experience, it was not nearly sufficient. If your AC is appropriately sized (or undersized) for your house, you can't just drop several degrees in 2 hours during the hottest part of the day. Going from 78 to 72 to 84 in set temp looked more like 78 to 77 to 83 in practice. Granted this was in AZ in an older house, so extremely high outdoor temps combined with marginal insulation didn't help.
If they pre-cooled the night before it might be a different story.
I think a poorly insulated old house in Arizona is probably one of the worst-case scenarios here. Maybe there should be a configurable or learning-based pre-cool length, though.
Our ecobee (Phoenix, so HOT) does the precooling and is buggily aware of the expensive time window for electrical rates. Arizona Power just shrunk the expensive time window, not sure how that made sense, but the ecobee seems to not know, nor is there any way i could find to inform ecobee of the new shorter expensive time window.
I've had two Nests before, and two Ecobees, and they both were fine, in general, but for the next house not sure which I'd prefer.
The plastic straw thing confuses me. I'd like someone to explain to me how anything besides the random runaway straw gets into the ocean. I live 60 miles from the ocean. We're people throwing them into storm drains that flow to the delta that flow to the ocean? We're people in San Francisco traveling to the beach and throwing them into the ocean? Couldn't we focus on not littering instead of legislating things like straws?
we literally ship our trash to china to "recycle" it (now china wont take our trash anymore). Turns out they were often just dumping it in the ocean. Now other countries do the same. It doesn't show in american metrics, because the other countries help us to be blissfully ignorant.
Maybe that should have been the public message we focused on, the actual dumping of trash into the ocean by foreign countries, and us sending it there when we supposedly recycle, instead of "little girl convinces law makers to go to paper straws!"
The bar I frequent uses straws made of biodegradable material derived from sugarcane - they last a lot longer than paper straws, but ultimately are water soluble and will dissolve after a day ish if submerged. They obviously cost a lot more than plastic, but the user experience is just as good without the forever waste.
From an ecological point of view it really depends how much carbon is emitted during manufacturing & transport.
Landfills aren’t actually that bad when it comes to getting rid of waste. If you expend more carbon using the “eco-friendly” straws than using the normal ones then it’s not worth it overall.
Why would you expect someone who isn't willing to sacrifice their comfort for a $10/mo incentive to sacrifice their comfort for a $0/mo incentive? Deciding "I don't like this person's ethics" doesn't mean "this person is suddenly inconsistent": you need to check your knee-jerk responses :/.
Well, for one thing people will often do for free things they wouldn’t do for money. Imagine choosing between “i will pay you $10 to come to my party” and “i’m having a party, will you come?”.
Parties are supposed to be fun, so if someone offers to pay you to come to a party, that sends a signal that the party is not, in fact, going to be fun at all--otherwise, why would they pay you?
On the other hand, paper straws are a shitty product that are unsuitable for use, but if I was offered a significant discount on beverages that were served with them...well, I wouldn't take it, but I could imagine someone who was desperately broke considering taking it.
See, what you said is exactly the problem i have with mainstream climate solutions. The choice shouldn’t be paper straws vs plastic straws. The choice should be no straws vs straws. Similarly, the question shouldn’t be “can I run a/c slightly off peak” rather it should be “how can I run less a/c”. This applies all over the place. Electric cars have lifetime emissions that are lower, but in the same ballpark as ICE cars - if everyone switches to electric and changes nothing else, we still have climate change.
I have an ecobee and keep it in a fairly dumb scheduling mode. My primary use, as of now, is to integrate with home assistant so I can have data at hand to make future decisions on energy and system usage.
I tried something similar with Nest but holy crap is it a pain in the butt to integrate with home assistant, and keep the integration functioning.
> [...] integrate with home assistant so I can have data at hand to make future decisions on energy and system usage
This is actually what I've been doing. I haven't done anything actionable with the data yet, though. Beestat [0] has some great data break downs as well.
On a similar note: My house is only a single zone and I've been manually adjusting the dampers when fall / spring come around. When I find some time, I want to try to build something that will automatically adjust the dampers based on where I am in the house to create a pseudo multi zone setup with Home Assistant.
> but I believe they should be providing a system that proactively cools when there is less demand _prior_ to an expected increase in demand. Effectively using your house as a "battery".
Isn't this exactly what they do? That what the Nest does when there's going to be a spike; it cools the house.
The nest does this, but it's not very effective. We're getting the 'rush hour' stuff right now (it's 100-105 peak right now) and the Nest does the following:
* Sets the thermostat 2 degrees cooler (74) ~1 hr prior to the rush hour time (3:30-5:30)
* Sets the thermostat to 4 degrees warmer between rush hour timing.
Problem is, with the current heat my house cannot be cooled down to 74 1 hour prior, and even still... it floats up to 80 degrees by ~4:30-5PM anyways and the AC kicks back on. Then it takes until ~10PM or so to get BACK to the 76 set temperature.
This is a relatively modern house (built in 2010s), so it has modern insulation, sealing, etc. It's just ACs aren't really sized for being able to wildly swing temperatures and maintain temp. When it's 100+ degrees outside, they're sized so they run basically constantly when the sun is out, so slipping temperature means you're playing catch up for the rest of the night.
It sounds like your AC might be of the wrong tonnage for your home. The Nest assumes your AC unit is sized correctly, although this is something the Nest should detect and plan accordingly.
> Isn't this exactly what they do? That what the Nest does when there's going to be a spike; it cools the house.
I don't have any experience with Nest, but the Ecobee seemed to just increase the cool set temp when there was demand. I didn't experience any proactive cooling.
Interestingly, in the Ecobee Community Energy Savings FAQ I linked above it says:
> [...] your thermostat may precool your home prior to the event to make sure you’re comfortable.
But I never experienced this. I wonder if its energy provider dependent.
The silly thing is that I can simply adjust my thermostat to a lower temperature, so that the effective temperature is the same as without this program.
As an example, if I set it to 74, then when Energy Savings kicks in, it may set it to 76, which is too warm for me. So I simply set the "standard" temperature to 72, and it will set it to 74.
I use the same energy as without this program, yet I get my $25 energy savings rebate.
That's fine, really. The utility's concern is predictability and burst capacity, not raw usage, so they know when and how many https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_power_plant to turn on, which may take a while.
That's true, assuming I changed the temperature setting prior to the event, and I likely won't time it perfectly (nor would I want to).
The real thing is: These events last for hours. If what you say is true, then wouldn't altering the thermostat for a small period (e.g. 30 minutes) suffice?
It seems like maintaining a higher delta-T from ambient would require more energy, not the same amount. You are still shaving the peak demand with this approach, so the $25 could still be earned.
I'm not following. Peak event is, say, from 3-7pm. All my Ecobee does is set the thermostat to be a few degrees higher in that time period.
So as soon as it hits 3pm, I change my thermostat to a cooler temperature, so that the final temperature is what it would have been without this program.
Pretty much exactly the same usage as without enrolling into the program. Same "spikes", etc. Without the program, it would be set to 74 continuously. With the program, it's set to 74 before 3pm, and then at around 3pm (or just before), I set it to 72 so that it will continue at 74.
I did not read "standard temperature" to mean "a thing that I manually adjust twice per day on a fixed schedule" but rather "I set it 2ºF colder in April and leave it that way until November".
If you are willing to make 60 thermostat adjustments per month at 42¢ each, you earned that $25 in my book.
Energy savings events in my area are rare - only a few days of the year and very predictable (usually on a "hot" day). It's not a burden.
Prior to this program, the local utility company would merely announce the hours of peak events, and recommend minimizing energy usage as much as you can tolerate. They'd calculate how much less energy you used, and give a credit commensurate to that amount. I used to just chill at a nearby library during those hours (no kids in those days).
With this program, all they do is check that I participated often enough to exceed a threshold, and I get a fixed rebate (regardless of how much I exceed the threshold). And I effectively get that rebate by not saving any energy, and with little effort on my part.
Google is currently doing a proactive system called "Nest Renew"[1]. This system is more focused on using clean energy vs. dirty energy - at least for me (where there is no rate difference based on time)
I really don't like the strategy of super cooling in the morning. I prefer fresh air instead. I throw the windows open wide and let all the cool morning air in. By midmorning I'm usually starting to close those windows because the outside air is getting warmer. By mid afternoon I'm closing all those windows and turning on the AC and setting the temperature to 1 degree (Fahrenheit) cooler than the current room temperature. I've found that temperature is in the range of 78-84 degrees depending on humidity. Then the AC kicks on and removes all the humidity and makes things comfortable. In the evening when it starts cooling back down again I turn off the AC and open the windows back up.
I'm paying 50% less in cooling costs than those cooling an equivalent space as mine and I'm getting plenty of fresh air and I'm still working comfortably. Heck, today is one of those days where the highs are going to be in the low 80's and I probably won't even need to turn on my AC. In fact it's already at the high for today, 84, and it's 76 inside my house and I have a nice breeze coming through the window.
Just another way how working from home is saving me money and improving the environment.
I predict in certain areas, "free cooling" systems will become the standard. These are system which do just what you talk about automatically. When there is a need for cooling and exterior air is cool enough, supplement supply air with air from the outside. This way your AC system load is reduced, or if cool enough, the compressor doesn't need to run at all to remove heat from your home by replacing it with cooler air from outside.
Free cooling is already part of many commercial AC systems, usually referred to as an "economizer".
I wish I had a system like that and have thought about it a lot. I live in Calgary and today will be 28C and it will go down to 12C at night. I wish my system could just run a fan at 7am and draw in a ton of cool air to cool the house. Instead my AC runs for 30 minutes or whatever. Seems like a waste.
I'm working towards that with my Home Assistant installation, using inside and outside thermometers. You can trigger the fan based on the appropriate parameters, time of day, temps, etc.
I did a bit of reading after posting my comment and it looks like many HVAC technicians recommend against doing this in a residential setting due to humidity issues. Sounds like most HVAC economizers are for commercial settings.
I've been wondering why my Nest thermostat doesn't already have an option to do this. I can turn on the fan manually, but it's not smart enough to do that automatically when it's cooler outside than it is inside.
Your system only exchanges heat with the outside (via a refrigerant). The fan only circulates air; on its own, it doesn't draw air from the outside (by design; you don't want to be cooling outside air).
The system would need to have a second mode and a fresh air intake, as well as wiring and support from your thermostat. It can be done, but HVAC is a slow-moving industry.
I have a similar lows in the 80s. Except high is 105. I also have a wife that likes it 65 (70 is our great compromise). I don’t think any of this precooling/ventilation hacks would work for me. This time of year, even at night (thermal mass), if my AC turns off the house temp goes up about 1F every 5-10 minutes. It’s just brutal.
I don't want to pay for them but I do wish I had automatic windows. It would be so nice if my windows automatically opened if the temperature outside was a few degree's cooler than my house and I was in "cool" mode. If it took the wind into consideration, even better. My house cools off so nicely when I open windows on opposite sides, but I have to remember to open and close them at the appropriate times and I have to be around to do it.
Automatic windows seem hard, but you can accomplish this "easier"(not super easy, but doable if you are a home DIYer) by having a "whole house fan" + a make up air unit(basically a vent that opens up when the fan turns on, supplying outside air to replace the air the house fan takes away).
Fairly common to see here in Boulder and the front range in older homes(before ubiquitous AC units), because it tends to be cool at night + hot in the day during summers, so around 5AM you can have the house fan turn on, cool your house, and then you ride that throughout the day until the evening when the temperature starts to drop again. Works quite well IMHO - my first rental had a system like this as well as AC, but I actually never touched the AC.
They also had a bunch of other adaptations for better Summer airflow. Large, open attics with multiple windows or vents, open to the lower floors (no doors in the way), to help hot air go up and out; high ceilings (an aid, not a hindrance, to cooling, if you're not using AC); floor plans and house placement that took prevailing winds into account; larger windows for better airflow when they're open, and usually on all sides of a house, roughly symmetrically (look at modern houses, lots of them have at least one side with no windows); big, straight, end-to-end hallways to let air blow through; and so on.
AC cooling efficiency requires abandoning several of these, and others are simply not given much thought because they don't matter if you're using AC all the time anyway. Which is unfortunate, because it shrinks the parts of the year in which going AC-free with windows open is viable.
Adaptive vents, too. Why cool the whole house when I'm going to be in two rooms for the majority of the (hot) afternoon before opening the window to the bedroom in the evening?
I want floor vents that are wireless networked, coupled with occupancy, CO2, and temperature detectors. They should have the smarts to figure out when to open and close, such that rooms are never stuffy, and never too hot or cold.
If you setup water heater / cooled systems using the in-floor (sometimes in-wall) pipes, they get that almost for "free" - you can turn on and off zones very easily.
That's a fine idea when building a new house, but untenable for a house that is not being thoroughly renovated. My forced-air HVAC system is built-in, and replacing the register vents would run me under $2K at $100 a pop. Ripping up my flooring and installing in-floor heating would cost me tens upon tens of thousands of dollars.
That's essentially what zoning is, most commonly used to heat/cool different floors of a house separately without having to have multiple furnaces and AC units. If I understand correctly, you want the shut-off flaps or gates as close to the blower as possible for maximum efficiency—just shutting off the vents at the ends of the lines would mess with pressure and airflow in the rest of the system in undesirable ways.
We've had real-time pricing in our area (ComEd/PJM) for over a decade now, and we even have celluar+Zigbee-enabled smart meters attached to all the homes. I even bought a gateway where I can read my usage with pretty good resolution every 10 seconds.
But, still, none of the large thermostat makers offer any type of integration to the local utility. Or even the local weather! ComEd actually offers a box with a 3G modem that sits outside next to the A/C compressor and will cycle it off when demand is too high. But even that has no connection to the inside system.
Ecobee. Nest. Honeywell. Johnson. What's up with everyone?
This is reactive; a better scheme is proactive: on a day when the A/C demand is likely to be high, precool the house during off hours to 60 F and then turn off the A/C.
Simply exposing homeowners to real time pricing would be useful, even if nothing is done automatically with that information.
> Once your thermostat knows the Rush Hour is coming, it may pre-adjust the temperature in your home before it starts. This is so less energy is needed to heat or cool your home during the Rush Hour event.
Ecobee has time of use (limit use during higher rate time) and community savings (allow utility to adjust you up to 78)
On the basic levels it allows extra sensors to choose central fan use instead of ac, and proximity sensors to not turn on when your away (also a cell phone integration) in addition to scheduling.
It also has humidity based comfort (where it will adjust the set point higher if the system has been able to get to a low humidity). More advanced you can configure how much the ac will overcool for the humidity, or overcool before the time of use.
Even more advanced, you can configure your staging, responsiveness, and desired runtimes (though keeping this on auto is better)
There is even a project, beestat.io that compares your settings versus houses similar to yours in terms of runtime and insulation factor. (And recommends against an extremely responsive system)
As one of the authors of both the Zigbee Smart Energy Profile v1 [0] and the pre-IEEE seed that became P2030.5 Smart Energy Profile 2.0 [1], we did anticipate this and included a randomized modifier to any demand response or price signals coming from the grid to provide the “jitter” discussed in other comments.
The problem here is that these thermostats have NTP-synched clocks and come with default schedules out of the box and failed to consider the importance of staggering over a 5-min time period. It’s understandable from a consumer acceptance standpoint (“I set it to start at 6a, why did it turn on at 6.03a?!”), but that could be solved with some messaging.
Better still would be for future thermostats to be required to connect to the Internet and to the grid’s price signals or utility’s servers in order to receive rebates. This would see them base behavior on pricing signals, which would include a device-specific random offset to the price taking effect.
Resideo (formerly Honeywell Home) acquired some very cool tech that would solve this issue, too. Developed by Whisker Labs (formerly WeatherBug) It combines a weather feed with a custom thermodynamic model of each home to adjust the start time of each setpoint. This provides both energy savings and more comfort. For example, if it’s an abnormally cold Feb day, it would start the heater earlier to reach the desired setpoint rather than a normal thermostat starting at a precise time and hitting the setpoint later in the morning.[2]
Final fun fact: ~40% of smart thermostats never get connected to the Internet. Many people are price insensitive enough to buy a communicating thermostat and just slap it on the wall without bothering to program the Wi-Fi settings. There are sneaky ways some manufacturers and ISPs are trying to overcome this, though it’s a borderline dark pattern. [source: I used to work for a large ISP’s connected home ecosystem team]
Isn't this the same if you have a 'dumb' thermostat set on a schedule, which is presumably what most people have anyways? Even if you have a 'really dumb' thermostat, presumably people are waking up at similar times and turning on their heaters...
I sometimes wonder if the smartest thermostat isn't actually a 'really dumb' thermostat on a timer. As in, you want it to be warm? You have to get up and set the heater to 21C/70F, this turns off after 4 hours (or when you lower it). This way if someone hit snooze, their 'smart' thermostat isn't turning on the heater at 6AM. If they usually are home at 7PM but have dinner at a neighbors house, it doesn't think they are commuting home and start turning on the AC...
That's essentially the system I use. I have it set to turn the furnace on for an hour in the morning right before I wake up. Other than that, I manually set the temperature when I'm at home over the course of the day. It automatically resets at noon, 4pm, and 11pm back to 63 degrees, so if I don't turn it off before leaving, it'll still reset pretty soon.
If your goal is to frustrate the user and confound planning in the name of saving some energy, my understanding is that that's the core feature set of Nest once you pair it to your utility.
It does seem like there are a few details that are different, because the thermostats will put sustained load on the grid, whereas the TV pickup will not. That means that a couple of nice technical solutions like adding jitter to the startup times would solve the pickup problem, but not the increased load at 6:00 AM.
There's going to be jitter based on your building "resist" insulation in addition to clock jitter. (Esp for non Internet connected)
And your hvac sizing and plumbing efficiency determines the jitter too, where there is typically a minimum compressor on and off time of 300s, but the runtime is determined by how quickly it can get to the setpoint.
Ecobees whave automatic "staging" configuration, but can be set manually to have have more or less setpoint responsiveness and over cool Max by .5 degree increments
> adding jitter to the startup times would solve the pickup problem
There's minimal jitter in people's behavior when they are explicitly synchronized by a television broadcast, and none can be added within the constraints of broadcast television.
Australia has split flush buttons, with a half-size flush possible. Haven't seen many here in the States; might be good to require in new construction.
I've found a toilet requiring 4 or 5 flushes before things move. Otherwise they just go merilly around in circles. It has 2 buttons, and a message to push the right button and save the planet.
If there exists a hell for toilets, that one belongs down there.
that is so patronizing. you can't "educate" when people find something disgusting and saying that's "educating" is arrogant. like if that's objectively people's preferences you can't say your preference is right and therefore you're "educating" them. and there's good reason, it still smells. so no imma keep flushing it.
Obviously if it smells, you should flush. But in my experience, my urine in the toilet bowl never smells outside of when I eat asparagus. Perhaps it is a sign to drink more water?
The education is also about water not being an unlimited resource. I have no idea how educating or reminding people of that is patronizing or arrogant, but to each their own.
Sidenote, if I understand correctly, the environmental/resource impact of water usage (outside of droughts) is that treating/filtering water uses electricity, not so much that the water itself is being wasted. Am I on the right track here?
Syncing the time over the internet would make them a lot more consistent.
Our non-smart thermostat has trouble keeping accurate time and drifts a minute per month or so. That would spread the load out more because “6am” is a ten minute window.
This doesn't make any sense, though, as nobody turns on a heater for 10 minutes. Even if there is drift of 10-15 mins, there would still be a peak usage at 6:15 when all of the 6AM 'starters' are sucking power from the grid.
Imagine a grid supplied by a single coal-fired power plant. When demand rises the voltage drops and the frequency reduces, and the power plant has to start adding coal to the fire faster to get the voltage and frequency back to normal.
If the demand rises over the course of 10 minutes, you get a small drop in voltage and the plant ramps up gradually.
If the demand rises by the same amount over the course of 3 seconds, you'll get a much bigger voltage drop and the power plant has much less time to speed things up.
There's further complexity because real power grids are the size of nations and have many power plants. If several power plants notice the voltage dropping and increase their production, a few seconds later you might have too much power. Then they might respond by cutting their production, and a few seconds later you have too little power and so on.
> If the demand rises by the same amount over the course of 3 seconds, you'll get a much bigger voltage drop and the power plant has much less time to speed things up.
More than that, if the voltage drops too low, like from a sudden large power draw, you could get a brownout or even a blackout in severe cases. Voltage level is monitored and wild swings indicate instability which trips various safety systems.
I believe the smart thermostats are all synchronized with NTP servers and are able to much more precisely coordinate their activities as a side-effect.
Non-smart thermostats (even digital ones) usually drift on the clock settings substantially over time.
The article suggests the difference is that smart thermostats have the timer feature enabled and configured the same by default, and most users do not change the defaults.
Even if most other thermostats have a timer feature, I guess they are not all turned on and set to the same time by default.
every apartment i've rented in the last 20 years has had a thermostat with some kind of clock and program capability. never used any of it, but I don't think they are rare
Until recently, most of the thermostats I've seen in newish buildings (in US northeast) since I've been aware of thermostats (1995?) have been digital with clocks and timers.
Older buildings have had the electromechanical thermostats you describe.
The power grid is a very complex thing, and I strongly believe that demand management is an important component for stability. There are ways we could better organize our HVAC fleets to provide near-equivalent levels of comfort. The current proposals really suck though.
Storage is a big deal that seems to be the focal point of most of the renewable/non-renewable debate, but there are other concerns that are discussed less frequently.
Having sufficient inertia in the grid is important as well. It's like a low-pass filter for the desired grid frequency. The less equivalent spinning mass you have, the easier it is for these spikes to cause serious problems - Even if you have a gigantic reservoir of water ready to spin up some turbines, you still need to be able to handle all of the instantaneous events up to that point, during, and following.
I wouldn't be surprised if "power plants" that just provide inertia pop up. Basically flywheel storage, but with the intent to keep the flywheel at a fixed saturation level to stabilize the grid frequency.
But we are at an interesting point in time where "smarter" devices make the addition of demand management easier than ever, and at the same time less predictable power generation makes demand management financially more attractive. We just have to settle on the right mechanism: do electricity prices stay simple, but the provider can control your devices, or are electricity prices reflective of actual supply and devices regulate themselves based off that.
I guess I don't know what's out there, but it feels like there must be a bunch of industrial-type loads that could be pretty flexible, and would absolutely benefit from a model where they get electricity for a fraction of the price with the promise that the utility can throttle them back by 80-90% at a second's notice.
Think stuff that's naturally storage-oriented, like charging forklift/AGV batteries, pumping something into a tank, boiling a large kettle, etc. These are all potentially loads where the convenience cost might be well worth a discount from the utility, where the discount is maybe proportional to how long the throttling can be— some loads you'd only want to lose a few minutes (so, basically buying the utility time to spin up another turbine), whereas others you could lose for hours at a time (actual load shifting).
I think this already exists. I've read that aluminum smelters (very very energy intensive) get a discount rate that you describe. I think all very large scale industrial projects interact pretty extensively with the power provider to make sure that both parties know how the impact to the grid can be managed.
I can't imagine that a 50MW industrial operation just pays their power bill the way you and I do.
what I am reading here is that the first use-case for "smart" remote is .. remote service disconnect. Profit goes Up. Second use-case is better dossier building. "smart"
One of my existential worries before IoT devices were at least a little security-aware, was if there was a large coordinated attack where someone would constantly power on/off tens or hundreds of thousands of AC units in a region causing a blackout like the 2003 Northeast blackout.
If a smart thermostat is turning on at a factory set "default time", I wouldn't consider it to be doing its job of adjusting the timings based on your usage habits.
I don't know how the smart thermostat is supposed to know your behaviour unless you tell it, which means taking it off the default. I had to tell my thermostat explicitly when I wake up.
With room occupancy detection, it should start modeling likely HVAC needs - able to predict accordingly, and adjust power use & timing jitter accordingly.
Smart thermometer manufacturers could solve this fairly easily by randomizing the start time. Instead of them all turning on the heater in the winter at 6am, they could i.e pick a random start time between 5:30-6:30 by default.
Cron has a bunch of this kind of thing built in for stuff that's known to touch the network, like automatically running apt-update in the background. You don't want millions of Ubuntu machines in each timezone all hitting the CDN within seconds of each other.
I think Google Maps does it too with routing— it adds a bit of fuzz so that it doesn't send literally every car down path A when there's a path B that's nearly as goo.
Even if they're all on by 6:30, that gives the power plant time to ramp up production to meet demand from 5:30-6:30.
If everything is synchronized and everyone in a region starts drawing lots of power at the exact same time, the line voltage on the grid will suddenly drop below safety thresholds and could trigger a brownout for that whole region. The point being, randomizing power draw over a period of time allows the grid more time to match demand.
> that gives the power plant time to ramp up production to meet demand
But the capacity isn't there, at least not if the article's primary claim is correct:
"the peak demands are concentrated primarily when renewable energy is unavailable"
It doesn't seem like the availability of renewable energy will be much better at 6:30 vs. 5:30 or 6:00. So once all the demand is ramped up, there would still be a capacity shortfall.
This might be a regional variation for how people are imagining this - I agree with you, living in a cold environment my furnace takes 2-3 hours to get the house up to temp, even longer in extreme (-30) cold, and will still have prolonged on/off cycles after the house heats up so that it's pretty much guaranteed to still be running in case of a staggered start. Warmer climates might be able to get things heated up in less than that hour.
Don't smart thermostats take into account how long it takes to change temperature? Mine certainly does. Since each building will have different properties, they effectively have jitter already. I therefore don't see this as an issue.
Energy companies like to complain about demand spikes instead of doing their job and managing the grid properly. Like if bakeries were complaining that they have to get up at 5 to bake bread because people want it in the morning or something.
There will certainly be some jitter, but it'll be like rush-hour traffic. Sure, some people get in a little earlier or later and they leave from different points, but the result is that we still have traffic that peaks. I don't think the issue is that everyone is turning it on at the same time.
For example, let's say that people have dumb thermostats and they turn them down 2 degrees overnight - because you don't want to turn it down too aggressively since it won't warm the place before you wake. They wake up and turn them up 2 degrees. There's jitter so it's not all at once. The home heats up over the next 20 minutes and the heating turns off. Let's assume that everyone wakes up evenly distributed between 6am and 7am. The grid is handling 1/3rd of customers (or less) at any given time. By minute 20, 1/3rd have turned on their heat, but by minute 21 the first 1/60th of customers have their systems turn off.
By contrast, let's say that people have smart thermostats and they turn them down 6 degrees overnight. The thermostats likewise introduce jitter and we'll say they evenly distribute over a 1 hour period. Given the greater amount that they need to warm the place, they'll each be on longer - let's say for an hour even though degrees aren't linear. Half of them start in the first half of the hour so by minute 30, you're dealing with half of the customers running their heat - but because there's longer to go to heat up a place 6 degrees, none of them are shutting off. At minute 31, now 31/60ths of customers are running their heat. Then it's 32/60ths. This continues until we're at all customers with the heat on simultaneously. We'll be at 50/60ths usage for 20 minutes which is 2.5x more load than the other example.
This principle holds regardless of different building properties or increased jitter. A greater percentage of people will have their heating systems on at any given time in the morning due to this.
This is important because it means that it increases the likelihood that utilities need to run so-called "peaker plants" that are more costly to operate and pollute more to handle the load.
Sometimes utility companies offer incentives around avoiding this problem. I believe some California utilities have incentives for charging your electric car overnight when the load on the grid is minimal - because it's cheaper for the electric company to supply electricity then. Likewise, it would be cheaper for the electric company to supply electricity for heating then. Some electric companies have off-peak rates. Some electric companies have incentive programs where you can enroll your smart thermostat with them and they can shut off your AC for an hour when they're trying to shed load (you can override it, but it can help them shed load from lots of people who don't notice a degree or two change).
No, everyone won't be turning on their heating at the same time. However, if everyones smart thermostats run the heating system for 2 hours in the morning rather than 20 minutes in the morning because they more aggressively manage the overnight temperature, there's going to be a lot more overlapping running. This usage will overlap with other peak-hour usage like hot water heaters, toasters, microwaves, stoves, and businesses opening up - compared with overnight heat usage when businesses are closed, people aren't showering or making food, etc.
The answer is probably smarter smart thermostats. They turn themselves down overnight, but then the electric company manages the overnight temperature so that they don't face a morning rush to heat and have to use peaker plants. This would be done with consent of the users and within ranges specified by the users and to the user's benefit in terms of saving money - ie. the person wouldn't have to pay more just because their heat was kept a bit higher overnight and it wouldn't be kept above their comfort level. Likewise, users could opt into a program where they might be able to save money (say $5-10/mo) with the note that during peak times their home might heat up more slowly than it otherwise would - if it would normally take an hour to go from 60F to 68F, maybe it takes 1.5 or 1.75 hours. Again, that would allow the utility company to shed load while not inconveniencing consumers too much and providing adequate compensation for what is an inconvenience.
Electrifying our heating can mean that our heat starts coming from sources like wind and solar rather than gas and oil. However, it'll also provide some challenges around peak-time usage. These aren't insurmountable problems, but they do exist.
Smart thermostats could really be a lot smarter, in particular if you had a little bit of local battery storage, but even without that it's possible to imagine a thermostat that could be set to lower electric bills based on real-time monitoring of electrical prices.
> "With few exceptions, when the load peaks, the price also peaks. So, if you can move some of your electricity consumption away from the peak times, real-time pricing will enable you to save money by buying more of your energy at lower prices."
There are many ways to implement this but it might result in a fairly pricey thermostat requiring an internet connection and the ability to automatically switch from grid power to local battery power as prices fluctuate. It would likely reduce demand variation however.
Some people have also rolled out notions like allowing utilities to control thermostats remotely but I think that'd be very unpopular for most people, it has too many dystopian Big Brother connotations.
Every house is already a battery, with significant thermal mass. Unfortunately, this means that the is not real-time but forward-looking: The thermostat needs to predict when load and price will peak a few hours early, and turn the AC on before that happens. If you cool the house down lower than necessary in the morning, it will warm up through a high-load afternoon, but stay comfortable, spreading the load and reducing usage during that price peak.
Of course, if everyone does this on every morning when the national weather service predicts high temperatures, you've just moved the demand forward a few hours and not actually spread it out.
Other things (besides time & current inside temp) that a thermostat could (should?) use: sunrise/sunset time, hourly weather forecast, current & projected house power usage, current & projected grid power usage
Note that almost all of those inputs are going to be identical for people in the same area, so as others mentioned building in some jitter is necessary.
Sounds like they need to program them with something like exponential backoff and retry with jitter. Do the smart thermostats have any information on grid demand? IF not, then they could just be programmed to apply some random time shift +/- a few minutes (or however long) to spread out the demand and lower the spikes.
I work on a project where we design devices that offload certain power intensive devices from the local grid when the current is getting too close to the power limit of the transformer's limit so they don't have to send someone in the field every time.
We have a minimum 15 minutes delay before powering back on a device that was powered off.
I've raised the issue where there could be a problem where there might be a ressonance effect with our devices and similar smart grid devices from other sources due to the 15 and n x 5 minutes delay being ubiquitous.
For now we came to the conclusion that this not an issue, but I still think this is an easily avoidable catastrophe that can be easily mitigated by adding a random offset to the delay.
I had a Smart thermostat for a while, but removed it because it was costing me extra energy.
My boiler is more efficient if it runs at low. But with the thermostat allowing the house too cool off, the boiler had to run at high to warm up the house in time. (I don't remember the exact number it's something like 98% vs 80% efficient.)
This ended up using more energy, than leaving it to run at the lowest possible output temperature the entire day.
When I googled this I found that Energy Star does not consider smart thermostats to be energy saving.
I suspect the same will be true of A/C - letting the heat pump run at very low all day will save more energy than high speed to quickly cool the house.
In my region (PG&E), the cheapest power rates start at 12am. So that’s when I schedule my EV to start charging (at about triple the draw of my AC system).
I wonder if others do this as well, causing a massive spike in demand at midnight.
A similar concern is why I set mine to start at about 45 minutes after the off-peak start time, when I was using the timed-start option (I'm using the timed-finish option now instead, so it starts at whatever time is necessary to have it charged by the time off-peak rates end in the morning - this seems to have a fair bit of built-in slop so if everyone used it, there wouldn't be the opposite problem of all the load disappearing right on the stroke of 6am).
Considering how widely the price of electricity varies throughout the day, we urgently need to translate this into end consumer pricing in order to better shape demand.
This doesn't mean that end consumers should pay spot prices - we have seen where that leads in Texas. But having four distinct prices for night, morning, day and evening might already achieve a lot.
Inadvertent mass synchronization is a known pattern and it has a solution: jitter everything, even things triggered by events which you don't think about as synchronized.
Your widget needs to fetch data periodically and the network connectivity died. You'd be tempted to start fetching data right away after it goes back, right? Okay, but if a huge network provider gets back from an outage, you will have a problem - all widgets in that region will start fetching data at the same moment.
Keep morning clothes on an electric blanket with a smart plug timed to turn on before you wake up. Get out of bed and put on piping-hot pants. Timer on your coffee maker makes either coffee or tea (put tea bags in the coffee pot) as you wake up. Make a hot breakfast in the microwave (oatmeal for me). No need for a thermostat change for hours.
Seems like less of a problem for smart thermostats (which will likely adjust to an odd-number start time based on your actual patterns and the heating speed of your house) versus the clock-based thermostats where everyone just had set it to 6am because that was the default and it was a pain in the ass to change it.
Commercial properties almost all have white roofs. Homes almost all have dark roofs. I wish someone would do the math on how much heat we're capturing into our houses because we want them to look nice.
If the grid can't deal with thes thermostats turning on heating in many homes at the same time, how will it function when we add millions of electric cars to it?
This story has been posted here a few times, and it seems like every time the story has led to people knowing less about this topic than they did before the article.
That can't be a good thing. I'd assumed the dodgy source I read it through had twisted it, but it seems like Cornell is endorsing this contradictory take, which it basically repudiates at the end of the story. Why would they do that? Just for extra clicks?
First line
> may be falling into a dumb trap.
Why does he say 'may' here? Are they or aren't they? Isn't it his job to tell us?
> this so-called load synchronization will become a problem in the near future.”
Seems like they meant to say "might, in the near future, fall into a dumb trap".
I looked up their 40% figure and that seems wrong too:
> Parks Associates' smart thermostat research finds 29% of US internet households plan to buy one of these devices in the next six months. Smart Thermostat Market Assessment finds that adoption of smart thermostats has been flat for several years, at 13% of US internet households, despite owners reporting savings that meet or exceed their expectations.
So are they even talking about smart thermostats? It's not clear.
> Evidence showed that residents remain confused about how to operate their thermostats and are often unable to program it, the authors said.
That says 'thermostats' and basically described the problem that smart thermostats were designed to solve, since they don't need "programming".
Hmm, the related story at the bottom is another bullshit take by the same author. Does Cornell have a fake sustainability centre that just published FUD about renewables?
No, the academic involved seems to actually believe that networked heat pumps working in concert is actually a good thing, but must somehow feel that warning about the danger if we don't do <his research area> is more newsworthy than saying, hey we can save money if we do <his research area>.
> They explore the potential for aggregating a large number of controllable heat pumps for providing high-quality power-system services to manage peak load and integrate renewable energy, while maintaining thermal comfort.
I'm not sure I like Cornell spreading what amounts to misinformation. There's a dubious quote from the person who funds their sustainability school which suggests the main aim was to find things that were bad for the planet, but that weren't agriculture (since the funding came from rich farmers).
When I had it enabled, I was _always_ too hot (in the summer) during peak hours. Sorry, not sorry: I'm not willing to sacrifice my comfort for the ~$10/mo incentive.
___
[0] https://www.ecobee.com/en-us/eco-plus/community-energy-savin...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f9GpMWdvWI