Hollow hours

Our electricity plan has low rates for les heures creuses, or hollow hours—periods of low use. Some people have one long period at night (eleven to seven?), but we are lucky to have two periods, noon to two in the afternoon and again one to seven at night. Each household is (randomly?) assigned one of these plans; you can't change.

Having two period of low rates makes it easy to do two load of clothes each day, one starting at noon, the other starting in the night. We have the washer on a timer to help this along. The dishwasher comes with a built-in timer, making it easy to run that in the night. (The tiny water heater for the kitchen sink runs whenever it needs to make more hot water.)

The other big electricity user is the hot water heater for the bathroom. This is installed on its own line, which has a special switch that turns it on whenever rates are low. When we need extra hot water, for example, when we have company and there's lot of shower-taking going on, then it can be switched to the On position, and it will pop back to Automatic on the next cycle.

Well, that's the idea. But it seems this gadget has broken. When it's on Auto, there's no hot water being made at all, as Kaye discovered to her dismay one afternoon. The heater does work when the switch is in the On position, so now we have hot water being made all the time. One more thing to be fixed. Can't wait to see the next electric bill!