Addendum: some people might be curious about how it is with a time of usage rate as described above, so I'll give a short description of what it has been like f

Addendum: some people might be curious about how it is with a time of usage rate as described above, so I'll give a short description of what it has been like for me after one year on it. When invited to the trial I went over my past bills and calculated my potential savings. You can download PSE usage data that covers usage over 15-minute intervals so it was easy to write a program to look at my past bills and tell me (1) what they would have been if I had been under TOU but made no changes to usage, and (2) what they would have done if I could have moved any given percentage of my peak usage to off-peak. That showed I'd save about 1% with no usage changes. If I could shift all my peak to off-peak I'd save about 30%. Here's what I did to reduce peak usage. • Turn off heating during peak. • Turn water heater thermostat to the "vacation" setting during peak. • Move things I use hot water for to non-peak. Most of my hot water use is laundry, dishwashing, and bathing. For laundry I moved laundry day from Friday to Saturday. For dishwashing if I need to use the dishwasher on a weekday I time it for non-peak. I didn't need to change bathing because that is in the morning, and even if it happens to be during morning peak it will be my first hot water use of the day. My water heater is well enough insulated that it can handle that fine. • The move of laundry to Saturday took care of my biggest non-water heating appliance: the electric clothes dryer. • I try to avoid using the oven during peak. Not a big deal because the main thing I use the oven for is bake-at-home pizza and I don't do that often. Here are some things I did not change. • Microwave and George Foreman grill. At first I did, but then put the grill on a Kill-a-Watt and found out that the difference between peak and off-peak in winter over the course of cooking a burger or a grilled cheese sandwich was something like $0.02. • Computers, iPhone/iPad/Watch/Kindle charging, A/V system, lights. In the year before TOU, 17.6% of my usage was during peak hours. In the first year of TOU it was 5.1%. That works out to a savings of $190. That's somewhere in the 15-20% savings range.