Date: November 2025

Residential and SMB thermostat programs are typically activated during brief peak-demand windows with large temperature adjustments. If disruption to customer comfort is reduced by lowering the adjustment amount, participants are less prone to manually override their device(s) to opt out of events, thus allowing for extended event windows. When pairing an extended event window with the peak-demand window, both greater savings and greater customer satisfaction can be attained. In their Gas BYOT program, National Grid tested a one-degree adjustment over 20 hours as a supplement to the standard four-degree adjustment over four hours. This resulted in a negligible difference in opt-out rates during the four-degree period and yielded approximately 60% greater gas savings over the entire 24-hour gas day. Moreover, since the 20-hour period included incentives separate from the 4-hour period, customers indicated they may prefer this scheme as 15% more participants earned incentives than they would not have otherwise.

Speaker:
Corey Rost,National Grid