How to Use This Tool
Compare hourly starts while respecting run length, availability and a concurrency cap. Schedule appliance runs into user-entered hourly electricity rates, compare eligible starts, detect capacity conflicts, and export a low-cost plan.
The work this page finishes
Reading a tariff table does not resolve which start times fit several appliance windows without exceeding the chosen concurrency limit. For TOU Appliance Scheduler, a visible row-by-row result preserves provenance, making a single correction possible without rerunning unrelated records or uploading the batch.
Deterministic workflow
Evaluate every integer-hour start inside each appliance window, reject missing-rate or occupied slots, then choose the lowest summed rate cost with earliest-start tie breaking. For TOU Appliance Scheduler, input guards stop after 5,000 records or 2 MB, and the report separates fatal input problems from recoverable row warnings.
Why a dedicated interface helps
Use the export as a household schedule and compare alternatives by changing rates or concurrency; actual bills may add taxes, tiers and demand charges. For TOU Appliance Scheduler, deterministic ordering, one-click copying and a downloadable artifact make repeated operational review easier than manually reconstructing a response from prose.
Assumptions
- Rates are cost per kWh for the labeled hour.
- Each appliance draws the entered kWh in every running hour.
- Windows and rates use the same local hour numbering.
For TOU Appliance Scheduler, do not discard the source after export: compare the destination result with it, and remember that local execution cannot secure the surrounding device or browser add-ons.
Limitations and review boundary
It uses whole-hour constant loads and does not start appliances, fetch a tariff, model standby power, safety restrictions, noise rules or dynamic utility events. For TOU Appliance Scheduler, user values are never run as script, rendered as markup or fetched as network destinations; the page writes them only into text nodes.
Verification and provenance
On 2026-08-26, the rule and examples were cross-checked with U.S. Department of Energy — Electricity, including a known result, a rejected input and a conflict or duplicate case. The example schedules the earliest-deadline jobs first and uses the cheapest remaining eligible hours under a one-appliance concurrency cap.
Sources & assumptions
Tool Spec v2 · verified 2026-08-26. Platform rules and fees can change; the editable inputs remain authoritative for your account.
Official references
- U.S. Department of Energy — Electricity (checked 2026-08-26)
Model assumptions
- Rates are cost per kWh for the labeled hour.
- Each appliance draws the entered kWh in every running hour.
- Windows and rates use the same local hour numbering.
- It uses whole-hour constant loads and does not start appliances, fetch a tariff, model standby power, safety restrictions, noise rules or dynamic utility events.
