Smart Limiting Electricity Use in High Risk Conditions

Basic considerations

Under particularly difficult power delivery conditions, all consumers may be required to voluntarily reduce power usage to avoid total failure of the power grid which may lead to shortages and, eventually, blackouts. While voluntarily reducing power consumption may not amount to much in actual terms, the perspective of avoiding a highly disruptive blackout is the most important achievement.

Global objective

While large and small devices have an important contribution, the most difficult to cope with situation is the instant requirements that can quickly disrupt a power grid with low reserves. This goes against some recommendations.

Essential consumers

There are always essential consumers and ones that can be lived without. Depending on conditions, the ones that ensure life support, particularly for persons having specific health issues are deemed essential. This means that devices which ensure temperature comfort should be treated with the outmost attention.

Season specifics - Winter

Heating a building, for a commercial or residential purpose, requires the highest amount of energy. Only under specific stressful conditions localized heating, only for particular rooms, shall be exercised. This means that bathrooms and bedrooms should always receive heat from any energy source. In extreme circumstances, only the bathroom may be heated due to requirements of personal hygene.

Season specifics - Summer

Cooling buildings is important in summer. The risk of life-threatening conditions due to heart ailments raises significantly during very hot and humid periods of time. This means that only air conditioning devices and refrigerators should be kept on, while anything else could be considered optional.

Appliances that should remain off

While lighting, air conditioning devices can be turned off, there are much better consumers that should be used as sparingly as possible due to their large instant power grid demand.

Any electrical cooking device, particularly ones that release heat should not be powered on. Cafetiers, electric kettles, grills, ovens can have a very high impact since they have hundreds of watts of power load that can be many times switched on and off during use.

Electric boilers that prepare hot water are also an important source of electricity demand. The water temperature can be safely lowered by 5 or 10 degrees in the summer, particularly when the weather is very hot and the water temperature is between 40-50 degrees. When serious risks arise, an accumulation boiler can keep heated water for a few hours when powered off.

Cleaning and comfort devices are also having a major impact. Clothing irons in particular require a lot of power. Somewhat similarly, hairdryers, vacuum cleaners and other such devices have a major impact due to instant loads.

Washing machines

Washing machines should be used without water heating. This saves a lot of electricity and most washing powders and solutions will still be somewhat effective at room temperature water, particularly in summer. Centrifugation does require little energy compared with heating and the washing cycle without any centrifugation uses as little energy as a TV left on for a couple of hours.

Going for a one hour washing cycle compared with typical one and half one can reduce energy consumption as well as avoiding prewashing. A 30 minute washing cycle is rarely as practical. Lower centrifugation speeds such as 800-1000 can also reduce energy consumption and lowering them further is better than avoiding centrifugation altogether.