I’m toying with a super-local idea and would love sanity checks: a “Demand-Shift Club” on my block to move our energy-heavy chores to cleaner, off-peak times. Where I live, midday is often the cleanest (lots of solar on the grid), but most of us run dishwashers, laundry, baking, etc. in the evening. What if we collectively nudged those tasks to cleaner hours and made it fun?
Rough sketch:
- A group chat + simple shared calendar with “power hours” for laundry, dishwashers, baking, dehydrating, EV charging, etc.
- Monthly “batch” sessions to fully load efficient appliances (e.g., one neighbor hosts an oven day for batch baking/roasting so we’re not heating half-empty ovens).
- A tiny “appliance clinic” where we help each other set delay-start, eco modes, and induction/slow-cooker habits.
- Pool a slice of the bill savings into a mini fund to buy shared items (induction hotplate, dehydrator, thermal cooker, heavy-duty power strips with individual switches).
Questions for folks who’ve tried anything like this (or who can spot the holes):
- Impact: At a neighborhood scale, is this meaningful? Any simple way to estimate CO2 saved by shifting a few kWh from evening to midday? (I’m a beginner with this math.)
- Tools: Are there beginner-friendly apps or methods to see local grid carbon intensity and ping the group when it’s a good time to run things, without getting super technical?
- Privacy/trust: How do we track progress without feeling intrusive? Would anonymous “we shifted X kWh this week!” be enough?
- Safety: If we do oven-share or dehydrator days, what food safety or liability issues should we watch for? Also, any electrical load gotchas when multiple devices run in one home?
- Inclusion: How can renters or folks with rigid schedules participate (e.g., delay-start features, someone nearby pressing start at noon, smart plugs)?
- Incentives: What small nudges work-gamified points, monthly potlucks, raffle funded by savings?
- Measurement: Easiest way to baseline and track? Photo the meter once a week? Smart plug totals? Any low-effort method you’ve liked?
- Pitfalls: What social dynamics or “oops” moments should we expect (e.g., forgotten loads, noise, allergies with shared cooking)?
If this sounds workable, I’ll pilot it on my street for a month and report back. If not, what would you tweak to make a neighborhood demand-shift initiative actually stick?