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Honestly I was a bit lost at what was the innovation in the article, but reading your comment I think it's just that the US (?) didn't know about that. What yo

Honestly I was a bit lost at what was the innovation in the article, but reading your comment I think it's just that the US (?) didn't know about that. What you describe is how water heaters work in most households in France and Belgium, and - I assumed until now - mostly everywhere with a well developed electrical infrastructure. Except instead on people manually setting up timers, the utility send a signal over the electrical wires when off-peak hours begin and end, and a device (owned and installed by the utility. It can be integrated into the counter like in France, or a separate Zellweger device like in Belgium) turns that into a third wire that power hungry appliances can use to turn on during off-peak hours. Usually, the utility guarantees a minimum amount of off-peak hours per day, with min/max times that are convenient enough (you will never have two hours of off-peak at 9am, then one hour at 2pm and then five hours from 4pm to 9pm, is going to be between 10pm and 8am in any case). Water heaters will rarely be turned on during the day in this configuration. It doesn't work that well will storage heaters though.

twic 8y ago
> the utility send a signal over the electrical wires when off-peak hours begin and end Is that how they do it? In the UK, it was/is sometimes still done by piggybacking a signal on a BBC radio channel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7#Timing_and_switchover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7#Timing_and_switchove...
- seszett 8y ago
  Yeah. I'm not sure of the technology used in France, but in Belgium we get this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zellweger_off-peak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zellweger_off-peak It actually signals both the strict off-peak times (from 22:00 to 07:00 as well as Saturday and Sunday) and separately, a "night programme" that is variable and used to manage to grid more efficiently. Apparently, there are many different signals that go over the wire, and houses are more or less randomly tuned to one of them. The strict times are used by the counter itself to know how to count usage, and the night programme is used for the appliances.

twic 8y ago

> the utility send a signal over the electrical wires when off-peak hours begin and end Is that how they do it? In the UK, it was/is sometimes still done by piggybacking a signal on a BBC radio channel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7#Timing_and_switchover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7#Timing_and_switchove...

seszett 8y ago
Yeah. I'm not sure of the technology used in France, but in Belgium we get this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zellweger_off-peak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zellweger_off-peak It actually signals both the strict off-peak times (from 22:00 to 07:00 as well as Saturday and Sunday) and separately, a "night programme" that is variable and used to manage to grid more efficiently. Apparently, there are many different signals that go over the wire, and houses are more or less randomly tuned to one of them. The strict times are used by the counter itself to know how to count usage, and the night programme is used for the appliances.