Time of use pricing

Do “weekends” also include holidays. Up north, in PG&E-land, they do, which makes things even more complicated.

And what do the other 8 months of they year look like ?? And is the breakpoint right at the start of June and the end of Sept ?

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@franklyn
Have you ever seen on television when the police hit someone with a taser?
When I saw your weekday pricing at .37 I had a similar look.
I’m paying a flat rate of .0845 or so in eastern Kentucky. All of our power comes from coal.

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I looked and it doesn’t say, and it’s a mute point now. They are discontinuing this rate plan as of next month, but I am grandfathered in for 2 years.
The good part of the .37 cents during the day is that I am earning from my solar at that rate and not using much power. Although, summer and my AC will change that.

I have attached both summer and winter rates.

I can change my plan, but will wait and see how my billing goes for a few months. I can only change twice a year. And once I move off this plan, I can’t go back.

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yes if the Sense programmers would just build a simple 24/7 grid and let us figure out what to put in each hour for each day we could get a much more accurate billing estimate. I don’t need to hear any crap about how it is so complicated and everyone has a different system to work with. At least with a 24/7 grid to fill in our rates we would have better than we have now which is basically nothing. So something even not perfect in this case will be a lot better than what we have now nothing.

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@rex,
I’ve done a little experimentation, and for me, with my TOU rate schedule setup, a simple yearlong grid, that doesn’t take into account separate weekends/holidays and winter/summer rates, isn’t any more accurate for estimating costs than simply using a single fixed cost based on the average blended cost for an entire year.

Of course it’s pretty straightforward to build a simple grid table, as you describe, in Excel, then use it as a VLOOKUP table to calculate hourly costs. Then you can use a Pivot Table to summarize. I have attached a .xml version of an Excel file that shows this (right now, I can’t post .xlsx file on the forum).

Just open the file using Excel and take a look.

  • The Sense tab is essentially your Sense downloaded data. In my example, I stripped out all the other devices except Total Usage, but you could do this exercise and see costs for every identified device in your house. Notice the formula’s in the Pricing, Elect Cost, and Hourly Cost columns. The are the magic that pulls the data from the grid into this usage-focused spreadsheet.

  • The Grid tab is essentially your simple grid for every day, with the pricing tag, plus cost for each of the 24 hours in a day. I simply entered @franklyn 's summer weekday grid.

  • The Summary tab shows the Pivot Table mostly followup of costs. The key is setting up the Pivot Table fields correctly to get the summary you want. If you had included all the devices (not just Total Usage) in your computation you would add Device Name to the Pivot Table columns.

55%20PM

Give it a try - it might help you. But if you really do need a more complex grid, then the job becomes harder.

1-hour data from Jan 01, 2019 to Jan 01, 2020.xml (1.0 MB)

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One more bit of help…

I have extended my spreadsheet to work for separate summer and winter grids. To do so, you need to add an additional Boolean in the main usage spreadsheet that identifies each row as summer or winter based on a month comparison in the formula. Plus the grid needs 1-2 more columns depending on whether you want to see the rate name in your main spreadsheet. Once you have that, you can select different grid lookups depending on time of year.

1-hour data from Jan 01, 2019 to Jan 01, 2020.xlsx (200.6 KB)

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I second the request for at least some simple TOU pricing. This was one of the reasons I got a Sense, since XCel is now offering a couple of those plans (Xcel Energy) but I didn’t know if enrolling would decrease or increase our bill.

I appreciate the spreadsheet from @kevin1, and may give it a try if I have time. But something simple in the app like the 24/7 grid of prices would indeed be very useful.

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@RyanAtSense, any feedback on whether some simple version of time of use pricing will be implemented soon?

No updates at the moment. I’ll share when I have news.

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+1 on this feature!!! Absolutely necessary, granted possibly convoluted. Every power company probably has their own confusing way to do it. But even if it allows you to do peak, part peak, off peak, with different prices for Summer than Winter… that would be amazing, amazing AMAZING! Sense is already way better than anything I’ve seen so far, but this would put it over the top.

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Don’t forget the demand charge. :grin:

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Adding my vote for variable pricing. I am on Hourly Pricing from ComEd in Illinois. The price fluctuates every hour and is only know after the fact. ComEd published estimated prices and then true prices at the end of the hour.

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I second demand pricing. I’m hoping my state doesn’t go that way, but it is currently on the table…

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You seem to be about 20% below the national average.

In 2018 Kentucky was about 25% NG+Hydro+renewables (electric generation) and the rest in coal.

In March 2019, residential electric in the US averaged 12.83 c/kWh
Lowest: Louisiana at 9.29
Highest: Hawaii at 33.99

Hours of fun poking around here:

The feedback loops therein for Sense users are a little mind boggling.
Enough to make you want to move?

@RyanAtSense Updated ETA, please. I’m in a SoCal Edison region. A self-editing tool would be sufficient for my needs.

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What is the current eta, why is this taking so long, my cost info is useless at this point

@reuben.sterling, @dchurco,

If you really want TOU calculations today, you can do in Excel and downloaded Sense data. Pretty straightforward. Sample spreadsheet here:

  • Fill in in the Grid lookup table with pricing
  • Download your hourly data from Sense for Total Usage via the Web App.
  • Add the last four calculated columns
  • Use a pivot table to filter and a sum hourly cost for whatever period you want to.
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We understand that this is an important feature for a certain subset of users, but that is still quite a small subset. We do intend on supporting the varieties of dynamic billing plans in time but implementation is far from simple, as has been elaborated on above.

I will update this thread when I have more news.

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Get on it please :slight_smile: I would love to have this to understand what I can do to save some coin during the winter. Even if you just allowed one to enter in rates by time block, it would be enough! :slight_smile:

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Adding my vote for this. Mainly as a way to determine if TOU pricing would make sense for me. at the current moment I am having to export and do the excel method. A straightforward simple approach would at least get me into the right ballpark.

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