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About this tool
Shift flexible appliance loads into your cheaper electricity tariff windows.
The Appliance Load-Shift Planner takes your tariff windows with their per-kWh prices and a list of flexible appliance cycles with their energy use, sorts the windows cheapest first, and assigns each cycle to a window — filling the cheapest slot up to your maximum-parallel limit before moving to the next. For every appliance it shows the suggested window, the price in that window and the cycle cost as kWh × price, plus a total for the whole plan. It is aimed at anyone on a time-of-use or economy tariff who wants to know where the dishwasher, water heater and laundry should sit in the day.
Open Appliance Load-Shift Planner on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Fill the Tariff windows box with one window per line as start-end | price — it opens on 00:00-06:00 | 5 through 22:00-24:00 | 6 — and list your Flexible appliances as appliance | cycle kWh, such as Dishwasher | 1.2 and Water heater | 3.0.
Set Maximum parallel cycles to how many appliances may share a window (1 by default); the “Three appliances” button under Examples refills both boxes and Reset restores the defaults.
The Result panel shows the total scheduled energy cost with a “parallel cycle(s) allowed” caption and a table of Appliance, kWh, Suggested window, Price/kWh and Cost; Copy puts that summary on the clipboard and Download saves appliance-load-shift-planner.txt.
Windows are sorted by price per kWh and cycles are filled into them in that order, so the plan is an explicit cost ranking rather than a rule of thumb.
The maximum parallel cycles setting controls how many appliances share a window before the next-cheapest one is used, matching a real circuit or hot-water constraint.
Each row shows the cycle's kWh, its assigned window, that window's rate and the resulting cost, so you can see which single appliance dominates the bill.
Tariff windows are sorted from cheapest to most expensive per kWh, then appliances are assigned in the order you listed them, placing up to your maximum-parallel number of cycles in each window before moving to the next. It is a cost-ordering aid, not a scheduler that knows appliance run times.
Cycle cost = cycle energy in kWh × the price per kWh of the assigned window. A 1.2 kWh dishwasher cycle in a window priced at 5 per kWh costs 6; the total shown is the sum of every row.
One window per line as start-end | price, for example 00:00-06:00 | 5. The price can be in any currency unit you like — pence, cents, rupees — because the tool only multiplies it by kWh and never converts. Lines without a numeric price are ignored.
Not always, and cost is only one input. Follow the appliance manual on unattended operation, keep water-heater temperatures high enough for hot-water hygiene, and consider noise, ventilation, fire safety and any demand limit on your supply before running cycles while you sleep.