Hydro One's myEnergyRewards in Action

I am probably not a suitable candidate for demand response programs.  I signed up for time-of-use (TOU) billing and try to shift electricity usage into the weekday low period from 19:00 to 07:00.  During the summer, the air condition mostly runs at night, cooling the house to 21C from 23:00 to 07:00.  If I am expecting a particularly hot and sunny period, I pre-cool the house a bit more overnight. At 07:00, the thermostat raises the setpoint to 25C.  My home automation starts the furnace fan running for 5 minutes/hour at 23C and increases the duration by 5 minutes for every 0.5C increase up to a maximum of 20 minutes.  This pulls cooler air from the basement and keeps the house from feeling stale.  It is unusual for the air conditioning to come on before 19:00.  Ideally I should open windows at night, but the breeze disappears, the humidity rises, and temperatures are not dropping that much at night during the summer.  

I experienced my first myEnergyRewards demand response event on July 26th for one hour starting at 16:00.  As the chart above shows, about an hour before the start of the event, my thermostat set point dropped by 2C to 23C, causing the air conditioner to run for an hour.  When the event started, the set point increased to 27C. The myEnergyRewards documentation mentions pre-cooling but provides no detail.  In this particular case, the pre-cooling was unnecessary, consuming electricity that I would otherwise have not used, and at peak TOU rates.

Prior to the July 27 event scheduled for two hours at 16:00, I raised the thermostat setpoint to 27C, to skip the pre-cooling.  I noticed that the circulating fan did not seem to be working until 18:00.

On the June 28 event scheduled for four hours, I confirmed that even manually turning on the fan via the Ecobee thermostat did nothing.  At the end of the four hours, the house was getting quite muggy.  

I called Ecobee who initially claimed that Hydro One could independently control the setpoint and fan when calling for a demand response event.  Hydro One/CLEAResult said they were just trying to maximise energy savings.  After pointing out that disabling the fan was not documented, they checked with Ecobee and claimed Ecobee had full control over the thermostat.  After several calls and escalations at Ecobee, I was told that during a demand response event, Ecobee removes all 'holds', defined as settings that deviate from the programmed schedule.  Ecobee treats running the fan as a 'hold'.  I expressed my concerns about this undocumented feature - Ecobee said they would pass my input to the appropriate department.  So far, I have not received an update - I will raise the matter in early summer next year.  I was repeatedly informed that I could manually cancel the demand response event on the thermostat - the reason I installed an Ecobee thermostat was to reduce manual adjustements.  

There is value in giving up a degree of control to automation, but the automation has to work as documented.  In general, I was surprised at the poor documentation about the myEnergyRewards program and the difficulty of finding detailed information.  Part of the problem is the number of parties involved, their lack of in-depth knowledge about the system, and no-one seeming to have overall responsibility and authority.  Sadly, that seems be increasingly common.