Peak-Hours Habit Planner

Why this page refuses to print the hours

The single most useful thing a peak-hours tool could do is also the one thing it must not: tell you the current on-peak hours. Both major utilities in this valley publish time-of-use plans, both revise them, and the window differs between plans and between seasons within the same company. One plan’s peak is a different set of hours from another’s, and a plan that prices a late afternoon in summer may price a morning in winter. Any page that printed a set of hours as a fact would be wrong within a billing cycle or two, and its reader would have no way to tell. So this page does something less convenient and more honest. It gives you the control, offers a few example shapes to start from, and links the two utility plan pages so you read the current hours from the company that sets them. The only window it ever uses is the one you set, and it says so on every screen.

What an example shape is, and what it is not

The buttons that load a window are labelled, every time they appear, as an example shape rather than a claim about any company’s hours. They are there because a control that opens on an empty window is hard to use, and because the shape of a summer peak (a stretch of the late afternoon and early evening, on weekdays) is a common one worth seeing against your routine. What the examples deliberately do not do is carry a utility’s name. If one of them happens to look like your plan, that is a prompt to go and read your plan page, not a confirmation of it. The distinction is the difference between a tool that helps you check and a tool that pretends to know.

Which habits can move, and which cannot

A useful habit planner has to be honest about both. The movable loads in a Valley home are mostly the ones that draw a lot of power for a while and do not care when they run: the pool pump, which is often the largest single movable load in the house; an electric vehicle, which charges overnight in most households anyway; the clothes dryer, which is the heavy half of a laundry load; the oven; and the dishwasher, which nearly every machine can delay. The fixed ones are the working day and the air conditioner. The air conditioner is on the list not because it can be moved but because it is the load the whole peak window is aimed at, and a planner that left it out would understate how much of a summer bill is immovable. What can change about the cooling is how hard it works (a higher setpoint, more shade, a clean filter, a house pre-cooled before the window rather than cooled hard through it) and the tool marks it that way rather than pretending a schedule change will fix it.

The pre-cooling habit, and why it comes with a caveat

Pre-cooling is the habit people most want to believe in, so it is worth being careful with. The logic is real: run the compressor hard while power is cheaper, then let the house drift upward through the expensive hours instead of fighting the heat with costly power. Whether it pays is a question about the house as much as the plan. It works best in a well-insulated, well-shaded house with a genuine price difference between the hours, and poorly in a leaky one where the cooling leaks out as fast as it is stored. The federal guidance this habit is built on is written for efficiency rather than for a rate plan, which is why the item is worded as something to test over a billing period rather than as a saving the page can promise. The only place the answer exists is your own bill.

What the tool actually counts

The arithmetic is deliberately small. Each habit you tick has a start hour and a rough duration, and the tool works out whether any part of it falls inside the window you set. What it does not do is estimate a cost, a saving or a rate. It does not know what a kilowatt-hour costs you, whether your plan has a demand charge that prices your single worst hour rather than your total, or how much of your use is the fixed load it cannot move. Those numbers decide whether any of this is worth doing, and none of them is on this page. The honest version of the claim is narrow: these habits, at these hours, sit in the hours you told the tool are expensive, and on a flat-rate plan that fact changes nothing at all.

Where this tool stops

It is not a rate comparison and it is not financial advice. It cannot tell you which plan suits you, whether to switch, or what a change would do to a bill, and it does not try. It gives a routine and a window the same axis and shows where they overlap, and it leaves the rate question where it belongs: with you, your bill, and the utility that sets the hours. That is a smaller promise than most tools of this kind make, and it is the only one this page can keep.