wrote in message news
Rod Speed wrote:


wrote in message ...
tim... wrote:

"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...
On 26/03/16 11:28, tim... wrote:


Telling people that at some random part of the day their
electricity
is
going to be cheaper and that they should "look out for it", just
aint
gonna work


What is both possible and practical is to key the mains frequency to
the
price, or have some online access to live markets, and then have
very
smart appliances that gobble up e,g. freezer power when a gust of
wind
hits scotland.

But we need the smart appliances

... but the smart meter is pointless in this case. The information
that "electricity is cheap now" is coming from the electricity
supplier. It can go direct to the appliance. We have this clever
thing called the internet for doing such things.

The smart meter is still needed to record the fact that
the power was used when the electricity was cheap.

My economy 7 meter does that to some extent already.

That only allows 2 rates. Smart meters with a time of use tariff
usually has at least 3 different prices for electricity used during
the 24 hour day and often has two intermediate bands on
either side of the peak band as well as a lowest price band.

Before smart meters we have a different system where just
heatbanks and storage hot water cylinders use the cheapest
power and they are remotely switched on and off by signalling
on the mains by the supply operation. Normally the heatbank
gets something like 8 hours in the middle of the night on
week days with another couple of hours in the afternoon,
and with some systems 24 hours a day on weekends.

Hot water usually has a much smaller time in the night
and still has the topup in the afternoon too.