Published August 31, 2026 by the EnergyIQ Team
Most homes buy electricity the way most people buy gas: whatever the price happens to be at the moment they need it. But if you are on a time-of-use rate plan, the price of a kilowatt-hour changes by the hour, and the spread between the cheapest and most expensive hours can be two to one, three to one, or more. That spread is an opportunity. Shifting flexible loads, the dishwasher, the laundry, water heating, and especially EV charging, into off-peak windows costs nothing in equipment and nothing in comfort. It only costs a little planning. This playbook explains how time-of-use pricing works, which loads are worth shifting, how to build a weekly schedule, and how to prove the savings on your own bill.
Under a time-of-use plan, your utility divides the day into blocks, most commonly peak, off-peak, and shoulder or super off-peak windows, and prices each block differently. The logic mirrors the physics of the grid: demand spikes in late afternoon and early evening as people return home, and meeting that spike requires expensive peaking plants. Electricity at three in the morning, when demand is low and wind output is often abundant, is cheap to generate. A typical summer structure might price peak hours from four to nine in the evening at two to three times the overnight rate. Some utilities add a partial-peak shoulder on either side, and many now offer a super off-peak window overnight designed to encourage EV charging.
The first action item is simple: find your own windows. Check your utility bill, your utility's website, or your rate plan document, and write down the exact hours and prices for each block. If you have never chosen a plan, you may be on a flat rate without knowing it, in which case switching to time-of-use is the prerequisite move; many households save on the switch alone, especially if they are already night people. Note whether weekends and holidays are off-peak all day, as they often are, and whether your plan is seasonal, with different summer and winter windows. Everything else in this playbook hangs on this one page of information.
Not every load can move. Refrigerators run when they want, and nobody schedules dinner cooking at two in the morning. The key concept is load flexibility: which appliances produce the same benefit regardless of when they run. The dishwasher cleans plates whether it starts at seven in the evening or eleven at night, and modern machines hold a clean load overnight. Laundry works the same way, with the caveat that in many climates you also want to avoid midday drying in summer for cooling reasons. The big four shiftable loads in most homes are dishwashing, laundry, water heating (if you have a standard tank), and EV charging. Add pool pumps, spa heaters, and battery pre-conditioning if you have them.
Start by estimating what each load uses. A dishwasher cycle uses roughly one kilowatt-hour, a washer and dryer pair around four to five, an older electric tank water heater can draw ten to fifteen kilowatt-hours a day, and an EV pulls anywhere from seven kilowatt-hours for a short top-up to sixty or more for a full charge on a large pack. Multiply each load by the price difference between peak and off-peak in your plan, and you get the daily reward for moving it. In a plan where the spread is twenty cents per kilowatt-hour, a household that shifts forty kilowatt-hours a day of flexible load saves around eight dollars a day in the extreme case, and more realistic shifts of ten to twenty kilowatt-hours still save two to four dollars daily, which compounds into hundreds per year.
The trick that makes scheduling stick is to anchor each load to a time you do not have to remember. Morning laundry people can start a load at six in the morning if your off-peak window ends at seven, since most washers run under an hour. Evening people can press the dishwasher's delay button after dinner and let it start at ten. The cleanest pattern for tank water heaters is heating overnight on a timer so the tank is full of cheap hot water for morning showers, then coasting through the evening peak with a tank that is still warm enough for dishes.
Write the schedule down the first month, literally on paper on the fridge, until it becomes muscle memory. A sample weekday template: EV charging from midnight to six on the super off-peak rate, water heater heating from two to five, dishwasher delay-start at ten, laundry on weekends or before seven on weekdays. If your utility offers weekend off-peak all day, move the big drying loads, multiple loads, and deep cleaning appliance cycles like washer cleaning or oven self-clean to Saturday morning. Check the schedule against your household's reality every so often: the goal is savings without friction, and a plan that fights your family's rhythm will be abandoned within a month, which helps nobody.
Manual scheduling works, but automation removes the willpower requirement entirely. Dishwashers and washers with delay-start buttons are the built-in option: load after dinner, press a button, and walk away. A heavy-duty timer or contactor on an electric water heater, installed by an electrician if you are not comfortable with the wiring, locks heating into the overnight window permanently. Smart plugs handle smaller loads like phone and laptop charging clusters, and smart thermostats already handle HVAC scheduling, which pairs beautifully with pre-cooling or pre-heating the house before the peak window so the HVAC can coast through expensive hours.
EV owners have the best automation of all. Nearly every modern charger and EV app supports scheduling: set the departure time and your target charge level, and the car will charge in the cheapest hours that still deliver a full battery by morning. If you own a home battery, the same logic runs in reverse: charge it overnight on cheap power, or from solar midday, and discharge through the evening peak. Utilities increasingly sweeten the pot with demand response programs that pay you cash or credits for shifting load during grid events, and enrollment usually takes ten minutes. The EnergyIQ app tracks all of these schedules in one place, shows your real-time cost per hour, and nudges you when a cheaper window is open.
Savings you cannot see are savings you will not sustain. Establish a baseline before you begin: pull the last three to twelve months of bills and note your average cost per kilowatt-hour and monthly total. After the first full month on your new schedule, compare the same month year over year if possible, since weather swings can mask behavioral changes. Many utilities provide hourly usage data through their web portals or smart meter dashboards, which is the gold standard: you can literally watch your usage histogram migrate out of the peak window. Take a screenshot of a typical day before the shift and after; the visual difference is striking and motivating.
Two pitfalls deserve mention. First, time-of-use pricing punishes inattention, so one legacy habit, like running the dryer at six every evening, can silently erase the savings from everything else; audit yourself monthly for habit drift. Second, do not chase savings into discomfort: shifting loads should be invisible to daily life, and if it is not, adjust the schedule rather than abandoning the plan. Households that stick with it for a year typically report savings between ten and twenty-five percent on the electricity supply portion of the bill, purely from timing, with zero capital spent.
Here is the seven-day version of everything above. Day one, find your rate plan windows and prices. Day two, list your flexible loads and estimate their daily energy. Day three, set delay-start on the dishwasher and move laundry to an off-peak anchor time. Day four, schedule EV charging in the car or charger app. Day five, price out a water heater timer or set its existing one. Day six, enroll in your utility's app or portal and turn on usage alerts. Day seven, review the week and fix whatever did not stick. One week of setup, then the schedule runs itself.
When you are ready for the deeper layer, phantom load hunting, smart panel upgrades, and solar self-consumption optimization, EnergyIQ walks you through each step with data from your own home. See EnergyIQ plans and start timing your way to a smaller bill.