We’re very excited to announce v34 for iOS and Android, adding support for Time of Use billing plans, where the cost per kWh varies depending on the times you’re consuming electricity. This feature will add improved cost accuracy for those with Time of Use billing plans and provide alerts, enabling you to take instant action and save money during your peak rate periods. This update will initially be available on iOS and Android, with updates to the web app coming soon.
Rate Zones
You are now able to create discrete “Rate Zones” for each time period where your cost varies throughout the billing year. These can be filled out with information from your utility. Once your plan is implemented via Rate Zones, Sense will begin to input cost data on these new rates. You can enter Rate Zones for your active billing year as well as create historic zones to backfill prior data, increasing the accuracy of your entire Sense history. To avoid having to input new Rate Zones every year, you can either create “future” Rate Zones(which will go into effect on the specified date) or set your Rate Zones to automatically roll over to the following year. You can enter Rate Zones via Settings > My Home > Electricity Info.
Alerts
With this release, Sense will now provide specific alerts related to your Time of Use plan.
- You can set optional alerts for when you enter each of your rate zones
- You will receive timeline notifications (and optional push notifications) if you exceed your average usage during a peak period.
These alerts enable you to take real-time action based on your Time of Use rates, like shifting loads to a non-peak period.
As part of this feature, we will also begin defaulting new users and users who have not inputted billing rates to their national or state $/kWh average.
You can learn more about the feature here: https://sense.com/learn/billing/
For an example of an actual Time of Use billing plan set-up in Sense, click here: https://sense.com/learn/ratezoneexample/