Now you don't have every compressor trying to turn on at the same time, and can count on a certain percentage of them not even running. Ten minutes later that compressor comes back on and operates normally, and the next block gets shut down for ten minutes, and so on and so forth.
This assumes that your house is insulated enough to withstand the 10 minutes without the A/C going, and that your unit is properly sized. One would have to assume they take these factors into consideration in order for a person to qualify for the program, as it wouldn't make sense to extend the offer to a tin shack with an undersized unit.
That's what I'd like to know too. The only way this reduces the load the utility sees is if they actually reduce the cooling going into the home or business, by repeatedly cycling them so that they run less than if they were not being cycled. But they typically claim that it has no effect, which I believe is not true.
If you figure that most of the ACs are cycling randomly on their own, then I don't see how the power company cycling them is going to do anything to reduce the load, unless they cycle them off enough that they can't run as much as they would under thermostat only control. In that case they do reduce the load and the temp in the building rises. THAT is how I think it works. The rise is small enough that most people don't notice it. But we had one report here of someone that did have a problem with an upstairs becoming too hot. And that seems possible and logical to me.
That's sorta where I'm going with this. If the cycle time is shorter than the normal off-time of the AC, there is no savings. If it's longer, the temperature rises above the set point. On the hottest days, when one would expect the cycling would become necessary, this time gets shorter. IOW, I don't see this working, at least as advertised.
that's the point. hopefully if you keep moving that problem 10 minutes into the future, at some point, some heavy load is going to switch off (factory, etc), and they won't have to buy spot electricity, which is even higher than normal in cost.
You can only move it ten minutes. You can't move it further because that AC is now on. You've saved nothing. In 48 cycles (an 8-hour day), you've pushed
10 minutes worth of electricity for 1/48th of the ACs, after the (first shift) load drops off. Whoopie!
if you need XMW of power right now, and you only have (X-5%)MW available, you have to buy more. if you turn off 5%, you don't have to buy that 5% on the spot market.
the next 10 minutes, you still have X-5% available, and if your load is not X-5 then, you still don't have to buy more. you turn on that 5% load that you had turned off, and turn off a different 5%. if your load has gone up, you turn off more than 5% to keep your load under what you can generate. you keep doing this until your load matches your generation, and then you have enough in your own generating facilities to not buy spot electricity.
I don't know how your AC works, but all the ones I've had cycle on and off randomly. Therefore the cooling load is what it is. You can't reduce it by shifting the load out 10 mins. You have to DECREASE that load for real, by not letting the AC run as much as it would if it had power available constantly. And that translates into the temp in the building going up.
Let's say it's a very hot day. From 1PM to 5PM the power company sees it needs to reduce demand because either the system could go down or they would have to buy more very expensive power. All the ACs out there are either running constantly or cycling on and off. If they are running constantly, then obviously turning them off for 10 mins every so often is going to reduce the load, but it will also reduce the cooling.
If they are cycling on and off, then with all of them together, it's already randomized. Nothing the power company can do is going to reduce the load without it also causing less cooling going into the buildings.
Just look at it from an energy balance point. If the power company can reduce it's power output from 1PM to 5PM by 5% by screwing with shifting in 10 min periods, how could all the buildings be as cool as they would be with no intervention? How did we supply the same BTUs to all those customers buildings with 5% less power? Why not just do this miracle 24/7 and save everyone a lot of money?
Sure, you can do that. But you can't do it without less cooling at the buildings with those AC's being turned off by the power company.
" snipped-for-privacy@optonline.net" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@n19g2000yqc.googlegroups.com:
Could you tell me more about what you got? Just the switch they remotely activate to shut off the AC? Or the whole fancy thermostat thing? Did they give you the promised credits? Was the installation done professionally?
It was on the AC when I bought the house 20 years ago. It's just a radio controlled switch that's mounted on the AC compressor. Orignally they paid a flat fee, think it was about $25 a year. Recently they switched to paying I think $2 per activation. And they rarely activate it, so I get even less money. The only way I'd know is looking at bills. I guess there are a couple lights on it and you could also notice that the blower continues to run with the compressor stopped, but I've never noticed that actually happen. But then again, I'm not paying that much attention to it either.
The DEC computers and other gear was air cooled. I think there was an atomic clock in one of the rooms next to mission control. It was all raised flooring air conditioned by the Liebert units blowing air into the raised floor. GEEZ! There was a lot of wiring in that darn place. O_o
But it's nowhere near 5% of your load because your main load is industrial (or it won't go offline after hours and you're screwed even worse). The entire load is *not* AC.
Moons ago, we had a test floor with a bunch of Lieberts on it for cooling the ATE equipment. Some joker laid out the raised floor with grates under the desks where the operator's consoles were. For some reason the women had problems with that idea.
Once, over the July 4 weekend, the floor was completely shut down. On Monday, one of the managers came in to start the AC back up so it would be cool by start of work Tuesday. Sometime later, the thermostat stuck. Since there was no heat load (all the ATE systems were still powered down), it got *cold*. Tuesday morning people noticed that it was *cold*, so the moron manager opened all the doors to warm it up. Since it was humid (July, remember) water started condensing everywhere. Water was running out of the ceiling tiles and every piece of test equipment was wet, and visibly growing rust. Three of these systems were worth $2.5M each, and another half-dozen were $1M each. Of course rust wasn't covered in the service contracts (environmental control was a requirement). Ice formed on the steel raised floor and people were falling all over. Needless to say, it was a mess. We laughed our asses off. ;-)
I worked at Apollo goldstone. The one piece of equipment I was working on was a beast, with different kinds of circuits. That monster caused me a lot of worries. It also made the operating room colder, because they intensified the cooling to the whole building just to cool my gear. Also really cold to crawl underfloor. Most all equipment was noisy back then. A pdp 8/I had four 100 cfm fans. that was working at dec. When the NASA station shut down the air handlers, it sure got quiet.
I pushed a button one day and the whole station shut down. 75 hp motor shorted blowing the first, then the second breaker which was 4 miles away. It's that, did I do something wrong feeling.
Perhaps you misunderstood me, the DEC gear was in the same room as the Cray X-MP. I remember a separate cabinet that coupled the Cray's cooling system with the building's chilled water system. I distinctly remember seeing a 30lb jug of R-22 next to the cabinet. O_o
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