Has anyone saved using smart meters?

[5Dreamers]

We were one of the first to get the smart meter, so we've had it for a while now. At first I tried to stick to doing things at the 'low' times, but with 3 kids and tenants, it wasn't working out. There are 7 of us who need clean clothes, food, and showers/baths, so it became extremely difficult to get most of this done in the 'low' times of the day.
I then had enough of it all and took a month off, doing laundry, cooking, running the dishwasher, etc, all whenever it made sense for us. And our bill was higher that month: by $5. For me, the $5 was worth the savings in stress.
We generally still try to do things at 'low' times, but mostly 'mid' works for our schedules. We save the bedsheets and towel laundry for weekends, but have to do clothes during the week. It is kind of neat to see the pie chart they send that tells us what percentage of our use was in each of the 3 times. Generally we are 20-25% peak, so that is probably the usual stuff (fridge, furnace, hot water heater, etc.) with the 25% seeming to be the times the heat or AC are run more often.

 

[dancin Disney style]

Our first full bill with the smart metre came at the start of September. We had a partial one before that. My bill went up approx $50. Just to see what would happen we were SUPER careful about what we were using and when. I would turn the AC off in the morning and not turn it back on until as close to 7pm as possible. Even with the heat this summer we found it totally bareable doing this...yes, it was a touch warm by dinner time but not uncomfortable. The house would be down to the set temp within about 30 minutes so it's not like it had to run for hours to cool down.

I compared that bill with the same time period from the year before and we actually used less hydro this year than last. I also looked on the bill at the amount we used in each of the 3 periods of the day. We used approx 75% during the off peak.

So the change on Nov. 1 is making me nervous. We will be cooking during peak times and also our furnace will need to run during the day.

 

[Alderbrook]

I set our thermostat to run the furnace at 5:30 am in the morning & heat the house to 23 degrees (It's usually 19) & to shut off at 7:00 so it would take the morning for it to cool down in the winter & not run during on peak time, we'll see how that works out!