This is not an ad.

APS customers who are on the “4-7 With Demand” rate plan can cut their demand fee in half.

This is not an ad. This is a tip that could save you hundreds or possibly thousands of dollars per year on your electric bill.

Warning: A long article follows, but I implore you stick with it and share it with your fellow APS customers. Here goes:

Did you know you can significantly or even drastically reduce your APS bill by hacking the “4-7 with Demand” rate plan?

(TLDR: Break your energy usage over the top of the hour during peak hours, and you will cut your demand fee in half.)

I did this for a customer in Prescott Valley, and it reduced his bill 65 percent. With a 20-minute phone call. I didn’t even set foot in his house. (See the attached photo.)

Here’s more detail:

On their website, APS says of the Demand rate plan:

“You can save money on this plan by shifting more of your energy use to lower-cost off-peak hours and staggering the use of major appliances like the washer & dryer, dishwasher and oven during higher-cost on-peak hours, between 4pm–7pm weekdays. Avoid using some major appliances during higher-cost on-peak hours and if you do use some of these appliances during on-peak hours, try not to run them at the same time.”

This is absolutely true, and you should follow their advice. But it’s not the whole story.

The Demand plan is set up like this: APS sits in the bushes like a traffic cop and watches your energy usage. For their demand fee, they treat each hour as a single entity – 4-5 p.m., then 5-6 p.m., then 6-7 p.m. They do this on non-holiday weekdays for each entire month. They find the single hour where you used the most power, and they apply a fee to it -- currently $16.88 per kilowatt from May through October; and $11.85 per kilowatt from November through April. If you use 10 kilowatts during a one-hour period, APS will *add* $168.80 to your bill. (Also, your taxes and other fees, which appear on the left of your bill, increase commensurately.)

Here’s the hack: APS stops looking at the previous hour’s demand once the new hour starts.

“So what?” you ask.

Well, if your A/C uses 4 kilowatt-hours to run, then running it for an hour from 4-5 p.m. will use 4 kilowatts and will count against you when APS calculates your demand charge. If you use it for a half-hour starting at 4 p.m., then APS will see a 2 kw demand.

But what if you use your air-conditioning for an hour *starting at 4:30 p.m.* instead of at 4 p.m.? APS will only ding you for 2 kilowatts’ worth of demand. If you use your A/C for a half-hour *but run it from 4:45 to 5:15*, then APS will only get you for 1 kilowatt demand. This is the hack: breaking your usage over the top of the hour. This may seem like too much trouble, but you can program it into your HVAC system so you never have to think about it.

Remember that it works for everything that uses electricity. Therefore, the key is to *always* use your big-kilowatt electric appliances over the top of the hour during peak hours if you must use it. If you have to use the oven to bake a cake for a half-hour during peak hours, then start it at 45 minutes after the hour rather than at the top of the hour. An oven will use an average of 4,000 watts (4 kWh). If you baked a cake for a half-hour, it would use only half of the 4 kWh – so only 2 kilowatts. If you started baking the cake at at, say, 6 p.m., APS would add that 2 kw to your demand. But if you started it at 5:45 and baked for a half hour, APS would only add 1 kilowatt. You’d save $16.88 on that one kilowatt, plus the reduction in taxes and fees.

If you can change your habits to break your energy usage equally over the top of any given peak hour, you’ll save a ton.

Here’s what I tell my customers: Pre-cool your home several degrees during off peak hours starting from, say, 2:30 p.m. and shutting down just before 4 p.m. Then coast through the entire 4-7 period if you can without using your big energy eaters: A/C, electric dryer, electric water heater (if you have one), oven, pool pump, etc. If you find that you really must use your A/C, or your oven, etc., during peak hours, then break the usage equally over the top of the hour. That's it.

Of course, it helps to make sure your house is efficient – insulation, air-sealing, shade screens on sunstruck windows, and duct-sealing & proper design. (That's where an energy audit comes in.) Also, timers on electric water heaters pool pumps set to ensure they don't turn on from 4-7 p.m. are a massive help.