I saw someone post yesterday about Octopus energy in the UK offering money for people to not use electricity during a specific time window. Said person then went on to talk about hunting down standby devices.
There was a time when devices consumed obscene quantities of power in standby. But as of 2013, new devices sold in the EU must consume no more than 0.5W when in standby mode. So an idling device pulling the max 0.5w would need to be on for over 83 days to use a single kilowatt hour. 1/n
@quixoticgeek@social.v.st Yep, disregarding significant computing loads or advanced-level mucking about with batteries, demand flexibility is mostly about delaying the cooking and laundry a bit, telling the fridge to wait and avoiding running the heating.
@kim and the fridge time is not something most of us can easily control.
@quixoticgeek@social.v.st Well, you can just switch it off; It's a fridge, it'll cope.
I programmed mine to take grid demand (and local voltage, because our substation is overloaded) into account while I was falling down a @TechConnectify@mas.to style thermostat rabbit hole, but a normal smart plug or timer would work fine to automate being off for an hour or two at a specific time.
Doing this sort of thing en-mass automatically is one of the more compelling arguments for 'smart' appliances. But it's not worth tying your fridge or washing machine to some proprietary cloud service that'll disappear in 5 years for.
@kim @quixoticgeek @TechConnectify Also I'd not want to risk randoms turning their fridge off in case of high risk they forget to turn it back on for too-long with all the associated risks that brings.
Dunno how you solve the "networked could be cool" and evil capitalist proprietary shite. We probably don't.
@NatalyaD @kim @TechConnectify easy. Open standards.
Documented open standards anyone can use.
@quixoticgeek @kim @TechConnectify I suspect we'd need to mandate open standards and as Kim regularly suggests, any proprietary cloudy wossname has to put their code/stuff into escrow so if they go bust, that goes into the public domain to be take-onnable.
@NatalyaD @kim @TechConnectify with open standards no need for the escrow thing. Now if only there was some sort of union, maybe one of European countries, who had a power to mandate such things...
@quixoticgeek @kim @TechConnectify Not sure Rainy Fascist Plague Island would go along with it, but we might have no choice if it's the majority... Get dragged along..
(But Sovereignty they scream!)
@NatalyaD @kim @TechConnectify the great thing here is it's contagious. If the EU mandate something, say USB-C charging. Companies aren't going to make on version fit the EU and one for the rest of the world. Same with an open standard. If they have to make a version that's compliant with an open standard to sell it in Europe. They aren't gonna make a different one for the UK that isn't compliant. That costs too much.
> You could choose to use your electric oven at a cheaper time
Yes, that's how Savings Sessions work. Flattening the demand spike to spread the load.
In general most of the low hanging fruit for household electricity energy efficiency has already been picked clean. Short of being colder (turning down heating), eating less hot food, or having much shorter showers, there isn't much room left to squeeze the demand size of a typical household's electricity usage.
You could choose to use your electric oven at a cheaper time, but making it more efficient is very hard.
And standby usage for devices is largely inconsequential now. Thanks EU!
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