Best Time of Day to Run Appliances

As an aside, I love zoho.com. Dump Microsoft Office. Zoho is online. It's free. It lets you save your documents into a format compatible with office. And easily embeds in your blogs. Nearly a dozen other tools, as well. That's a story for another day, though.

If you are a PGE (Portland General Electric) customer here in the Northwest, and if you care about your electricity bill (which you should), then you NEEEEEEEED to know this. I had mistakenly based some of my appliance-operating decisions on a flyer posted on my in-laws fridge in Bellevue, WA.

Wrong.
Way wrong for Portland.

Running at the wrong time of day can cost double or triple what it costs to run in off-peak hours. At current rates, that can add up to a few dollars a month.
Granted, it's not always convenient to do a few loads of laundry after 10pm. But, if you run one load a night, to keep up with the laundry generated, that wouldn't be so bad.

In any event, you can print this chart, or bookmark this article for reference. I believe the information here is a bit easier to understand than what PGE has posted.

If you are not a PGE customer, then run a search on your utility name, along with some terms like kWh, off peak, on peak, etc. A lot of companies don't make this information readily available, so you may need to give them a call.




And, as always, <=1/20/2009