On Tue, 08 Feb 2011 07:53:36 +0000, Dave Liquorice wrote:

On Mon, 7 Feb 2011 20:51:22 +0000 (UTC), Jules Richardson wrote:

On Mon, 07 Feb 2011 14:48:46 +0000, Dave Liquorice wrote:

We're seeing about 10 cents per kWh here at the moment for
propane,
whereas our electric baseboard heat is charged at 4.5 cents per
kWh,

I'm in the US, not NZ

Oops WTF is in NZ? Ah "Matty F"...

yup! :-)

- so I think that's about 6.1p/kWH for propane and 2.7p/kWH for 'leccy.

Still considerably cheaper than over here. Good 'ole "Rip Off Britain".
The cheapest of the off peak rates aren't far short of double your
electric rate. Standard rate cheapest is more like 8p/kwhr.

Yes, but you have to factor in average salary, I think, to make a fair
comparison - as a proportion of typical income, I think it'll still be
cheaper, but perhaps not *that* much cheaper.

The electric for the baseboards is load-controlled, so gets switched
off remotely by the power company at peak periods

So a variable off peak rate, is there a guranteed minimum number of
hours/day that you will get supply for or can they switch it off for
days at a time?

I just checked; it doesn't seem to say for baseboard/UFH heat - in
practice I've never known it go off for longer than a six hour stretch at
a time, and it's not been off at all in the past two days. For other
devices that they allow on the load-control lines (such as water heaters,
dryers etc.) they commit to them not being off for more than 8 hours
during the day and never for a period of more than 4 hours at a time
(whatever "day" might be defined as :-)

Those sort of tarrifs might start to appear when "smart" meters have
become more common.

I don't think there's any intelligence at all in our meters (we have two,
one which shows total use and one which shows use just on the load-
controlled side). All of the switching is done by a control box and a box
of relays in the basement, and there's a seperate panel (umm, consumer
unit if they're still called that in the UK :-) for connections to the
load-controlled devices.

Wiring must be along the lines of:

power ---(M)--+------------[P]---- 'normal' devices
from |
street +--(M)---+---[P]---- load-controlled devices
| |
[C]--[R]

(where 'M' is a meter, 'C' is the control unit, 'R' the relays, and 'P'
the breaker panels)

cheers

Jules