Last summer, I finally caved and bought an air conditioning (AC) unit for my apartment living room. With my job fully remote and a very hot summer season in LA across 2022, it was money well spent - no longer did I sweat at my desk in the afternoons.
Unfortunately, no good deed goes unpunished - I quickly realized that the AC unit consumed significantly more energy than the rest of my apartment put together! In turn, my electricity bills jumped up from the $40ish/month range to the low hundreds - quite a bit of money.
In Comes TOU
So many people had the same great “let’s get AC” idea as me that our electricity utility, SoCal Edison, defaulted everyone into new electrical plans. The new plans focused on pricing usage by time-of-use (TOU), with substantial rate hikes for electricity consumed during the “peak” hours of 5pm - 8pm.
While this makes total economic sense in aggregate - higher prices during the peak should incentivize people to collectively consume less - it can be slightly painful for each individual! The 74c/KwH rate SoCal Edison charged this summer for peak usage is shockingly expensive - over four times as expensive as the national average electricity price per KwH of 17c/KwH, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
My Infrared Blaster Purchase
After spending a ton of money on electricity this July and August with my AC cranking 24/7, I figured there must be a way to intelligently reduce my consumption while still getting the majority of the cooling benefit. At the end of the day, there were really just two blocks of time each day I absolutely needed to have the AC running - each afternoon starting at 1pm, and late each evening to cool things down before bed.
To get this sort of scheduling control, I purchased a $25 infrared blaster on Amazon which is capable of integrating with Alexa and setting scheduled usage periods with Alexa Routines.
Visualizing my Electrical Bill by Month and Hour of Day
At the very end of August, I was able to get the IR blaster set up, the Alexa routines triggering properly, and the scheduling right so that my apartment maintained a constant, mild temperature through the day, while avoiding excess electricity usage in the other hours of the day, where the AC wasn’t necessary.
Since September fully used this new regime, I figured it would be really interesting to see how much my consumption dropped - and lo and behold, the difference was significant!
Take a peak at the chart below which visualizes my SoCal Edison bill by month and hour of the day - I encourage all readers to experiment with simple tools like this to reduce consumption!
