On the major alert front, it’s not unique to NYC but an interesting aspect of electrical monitoring is catching things like “You seem to have left your AC on cool … which is fighting against your gas boiler-fired steam radiators right now”. I have encountered that in other domains.
I’m all resistive electric (no heat pump yet) for heating so my Winter bills are fun. The one psychological upside is that I treat everything as a heater (because it is). Eventually one imagines Summer should feel the same. Surely solar-powered cooling has the magic that Allie Fox was going for in Mosquito Coast?