We just got our Smart Meter

This morning Southern California Edison came by and installed SmartConnect Meters in our neighborhood. As a society we use considerably less electricity during off-peak hours than during peak-hours, this is common sense, but what is less common sense is the fact that we waste electricity during the off-peak hours. To put it really simply, this is due to the fact that it is not efficient to power down and then power back up our power plants as demand increases and decreases, so we waste a lot of electricity in the night hours when energy demand is considerably lower than during the daylight hours. This is energy that can very easily be used during these off-peak hours for any of our needs.

Learning all of this, as well as knowing that smart meters were coming in the near future, when we moved to California we began to change our energy consumption habits. We began doing our laundry at night, and since we bought our new washer/dryer this has been much easier as we have one unit that washes and dries our clothes. We simply put in a half load (still a big load of laundry) if we are going to use the drier too. We can even delay the start of our load if we like. We do have a preference towards hanging our clothes out to dry, but they just seem to take forever to dry in the winter months so we do use our drier. Of course even in the winter we do hang some of our laundry up to dry.

Simply moving some of our energy use to the off-peak hours has been an easy adjustment for us and now that we have our smart meter we will really start to see it pay off in our electric bill as well as simply knowing that we are helping to keep the demand for electricity from growing as quickly as it would grow if everyone kept using mostly peak electricity. All we have to keep in mind is that some things can be done any time and those things are definitely worth considering doing during off-peak hours so that we are lowering our impact on the environment. It is easy to make small changes that have an impact on the world and if we encourage others to make small changes too then the overall impact can be really big.