Montreal City Weblog

Kate 18:45 on 2022-01-11 Permalink Reply  

• Raymond Lutz 22:29 on 2022-01-11 Permalink

  if it didn’t pass

• ant6n 04:34 on 2022-01-12 Permalink

  That’s like 5KW per person. Not bad.

• Raymond Lutz 04:56 on 2022-01-12 Permalink

  Our peak power run aways are ridiculous, and Hydro-Quebec using it as argument to build new dams is/was infuriating. I remember reading an HQ engineer letter denouncing that HQ don`t use its remote offloading mechanism its industrial clients must support by contract (from electric to diesel for heating). Also, please put a timer on each domestic water eater so it won’t turn on during peak hours. Voilà, réglé.

  Sure, I`ll see people in the street shouting “touche pas à mon chauffe-eau, liberté! Mon chauffe-eau, mon choix”… fck them.

• dhomas 06:28 on 2022-01-12 Permalink

  HQ now offers a plan where they will give discounts if you reduce your usage during peak times: https://www.hydroquebec.com/residential/customer-space/rates/winter-credit-option.html. They give you about 24 hours notice of the peak periods. The peak periods are from 6h to 9h and from 16h to 20h.
  Using home automation I already have, I “pre-heat” my home for a couple of hours before the peak period, then I completely turn off the heat during the event. The residual heat generally lasts my family throughout the event (though the basement gets a little chilly). I haven’t really checked to see if it’s giving the expected results to my usage. This week will be the big test, so I’ll check my stats at the end of it.
  Also, I’ll have to see if I can add my water heater into the mix. Thanks for the tip, Raymond.
  I have noticed that my energy usage has definitely ballooned with the advent of working from home, since the pandemic. When everyone left the house to go to work/school, my home automation would just turn everything off when we left the house.

• Andrew 09:15 on 2022-01-12 Permalink

  It’s mentioned in the article, but Hilo is the program where they supply smart thermostats and during a cold snap you let them pre-heat the house like dhomas does. You can choose each time, but if you participate enough you get a cash reward.

  https://www.hiloenergie.com/en-ca/

• Joey 10:11 on 2022-01-12 Permalink

  I signed up for Hilo earlier this year because I needed new thermostats. They offer you a smart home hub, up to five smart (i.e., wifi-enabled) thermostats and a few smart wall switches/plugs at a very steep discount to get you to commit to three years of their service, as long as at least 50% of your heating comes from electrical sources. Once the cold snaps begin you receive notices that you are supposed to participate in a “challenge” as dhomas and Andrew described – you are to reduce your electricity consumption during peak hours, with Hilo effectively controlling your thermostats while the challenge is on. You can lower a thermostat without consequence during a challenge, but it sounds like raising the heat might exclude your participation – it’s not entirely clear to me.

  In practice this has meant that on cold days your electricity use is restricted between either 6 and 10 am, 5 and 9 pm, or both. During the two hours preceding the challenge (4-6 am/3-5pm) they jack up the temperature to pre-heat your house. Effectively it’s intended to automate what dhomas is doing, giving the HQ algorithm the flexibility needed to reduce demand during peak periods among thousands of customers automatically. You are given a cashback reward if you come in under the maximum consumption amount for the challenge period (it’s dynamic, so the less electricity you use the more money you save – typically a few dollars per challenge).

  As Andrew mentioned, your participation in any given challenge is voluntary, but the terms of the agreement are such that you are expected to participate in almost all of them. If you withdraw from or fail five challenges (apparently there are about 30 per winter), you can lose half the cashback rewards you earned and if you miss 10 you can have your agreement cancelled and wind up paying the equivalent of the discount on the thermostats.

  Currently Hilo is manging demand by focusing on baseboard heaters but I gather they are looking ahead at incorporating smart water heater controls as well.

  While I’m no fan of the whole Internet of Things, Hilo seemed like a no-brainer considering the fact that we needed new thermostats (the old ones were installed by a previous owner – they were also “smart” but the company went out of business – because of Hilo? – and they were no longer working).

• Kate 10:58 on 2022-01-12 Permalink

  dhomas, I’ve been signed up for the Winter Credit Option for 2 years now. It got pretty cold on Tuesday when I had the heat off for four hours from 4 to 8 pm. (I don’t have thermostats – this place is pretty basic. Either the baseboard heaters are on, or they’re off.)

  Also, what they do is compare your savings to your usual usage. My tendency has always been to turn the heat off at night, because I like sleeping under lots of covers in a slightly chilly room. So I don’t win anything back by having the heaters off from 6 to 9 am, because they normally would be off anyway.

  But so far this season I am up (checks website) $34.95.

• jeather 11:40 on 2022-01-12 Permalink

  I know people who just signed up, but my monthly bill is about $50 and is barely seems worth it. My heat is rarely on — it was, I grant, on yesterday — so it’s, what, timing the dishwasher or oven or dryer daily? Nah.

• dhomas 14:46 on 2022-01-12 Permalink

  I looked into Hilo, but I’m not a fan of letting go of control of things as essential to me as my thermostats or anything else electrical in my home. Also, I already had most of the components to build my own Hilo-like system. But there are too many stories of companies either going bankrupt (not going to happen with HQ, but check out the Canadian home security company Hub6 for a recent example), deciding to no longer support certain devices therefore rendering them inoperative via a remote kill switch (look up Sonos’ “recycling” program), or killing a service altogether. It’s happened to me before (and again just recently with my Google OnHub networking hardware https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/11257354?hl=en), so I like to have devices that I control entirely. It’s more work, but it works better for me. Also, I like setting up the logic for the automation and tailoring it to my survivors needs (disclaimer: I work in IT automation, so I’m into this kind of thing).
  For anyone else that doesn’t have my concerns or pre-existing hardware, Hilo seemed like a pretty amazing system, especially for the price.