The physics is very simple here: not heating/cooling your house takes less energy than doing so constantly, and many heating/cooling systems will work more efficiently somewhere near their maximum output.

If you let temperature drift too far from the set-point that you want then your system may struggle to get back there in time, but it is possible to work back from the set point and time and have the system work out when to come on to get you there ("optimum on" in trade jargon), and also thus the furthest the temperature can be allowed to drift.

Partly that depends on outside temperatures ("weather compensation") and largely it depends on the capacity of your heating/cooling system and how well insulated your house is.

(I try to do some of this very crudely in our OpenTRV device and I'm sure that I do not have it right yet, and I am allowing 3C setback if the system is fairly confident that you are not likely to be around.)

BTW, wholesale electricity prices can go *negative* in extreme cases and up 100x normal at the other end, so though only maybe 50% of your retail bill is the energy cost, there is still plenty of scope for passing on big savings if the user wants to accept time-of-day pricing.

Rgds

Damon

And as I say, it has very mixed results. Not all good, not all bad. But also a lot of RF pollution.

Rgds

Damon

Crude net metering is very crude economically for all sides as it does not allow microgenerators to charge a premium when their power is most valuable and it forces the 'grid' to buy it at retail rates all the time even when it is not valuable. You're solving the wrong problem. There are examples of how to fix the politics and the economics.

Rgds

Damon

TMP112

Rgds

Damon

Do you think that energy prices are NOT going up anyway?

Managing the grid well should help keep those price rises in check.

I could point you to the figures that the GB grid spends on balancing, and cutting that would be nice. A smarter grid with smarter appliances does that.

But wholesale fuel (eg natural gas) prices have had a far bigger effect over recent years.

So, was that a straw man argument?

Rgds

Damon

BTW, what we're working should give extra savings on top of district heating (where it makes sense, which is not everywhere). An early installation was in a flat on a district heating system in Denmark...

Rgds

Damon

Your utility rate still implicitly contains a cost for providing peaking power and frequency support amongst other things.

If your appliances do some of the work silently then some of those costs go away for your supplier / ISO.

Rgds

Damon

Storage is still expensive, but is competing against demand response in that market.

I have been pricing up MW-scale batteries for an electricity company for precisely that role.

Rgds

Damon

1) It is already being done.

2) A better engineered device is capable of doing a better job. It costs me pennies to get a low-power sensor with precision of 1/16 C. That's bags of headroom.

3) I don't necessarily accept the narrowness of the band you claim, but that's by-the-by.

4) Don't forget the freezer.

Rgds

Damon

As I'm pointing out in the (real) situation that I am describing there is NO network connection nor data flow to or from the appliance. There's a multi-million mount market out there already working on that basis. Possibly multi-billion.

Rgds

Damon

Sorry, but that's just straw-man paranoia.

Almost all of these schemes (a) adjust within a preference (b) allow you to override and (c) don't allow anything to be broken remotely. And you can stay out of them entirely. In fact these schemes don't need everyone to participate nor in the same way. But if you play passive-aggressive you're going to get some oversized bills for no gain in effective control or comfort.

Conversely there are plenty of dumb pure-commercial solutions out there. Including the one with fixed user name and password "admin" and "1234" exposed to the Internet. No "government" nor "utility" involvement in that one.

In our case you set a desired base temperature and any adjustments are relative to that, so you can be as warm or cool as you like relative to the next person.

We also take security seriously and will not allow any remote access however much the bling might sell it until we've had enough scrutiny to get it right.

A well engineered system should actually improve comfort and control while being deft enough to slip in savings.

Rgds

Damon

As it does currently for most of the UK retail market, but that is hardly universal and is not true already for many non-domestic customers.

Time-of-use charging will become increasingly important and widespread, and people who roll with it will save serious cash (and help the grid).

Rgds

Damon

So, think of the converse; when the grid has capacity to spare and/or power is cheap pull the set-point *down* a little and let your fridge's thermal mass ("coolth") help it stay off a little longer without worry during the next peak. There is a market in being able to respond within a couple of seconds of grid wobbled and for reducing demand for as little as 30s; all well within the normal operations of your fridge compressor (ie delaying running it 30s from usual may be necessary for other reasons anyway).

Rgds

Damon

Over which attempts to transfer data have not been an unalloyed success (ask radio amateurs, for example)...

Rgds

Damon

PS. There are clues available to appliances just listening to grid frequency on that hardwired connection, I agree, but that is not the entire story.

Doesn't even have to be about lowering 'total' usage at peak times, it may simply be about moving usage away from times of grid distress. That's worth very roughly £100k/MW in the GB market, for a few hours per year of displaced (not reduced) consumption.

Rgds

Damon