Having gone from a standard meter to a time-of-use smart meter, I can attest that our power bill went down despite our usage going up due to the addition of two electric vehicles.
Either your brother-in-law doesn't know what he's talking about or you misunderstood what he told you. Traditional power meters measure all of the power that passes through them. Once per billing period, a meter reader writes down the total meter reading (in kWh), subtracts it from the previous meter reading (in kWh), and voila, you have your consumption for that billing period (in kWh).
You fire up a peaker plant (usually natural gas) and go on with your day.
Actually residential meters only measure real power P(watts), there is also reactive power Q(vars) that the meters do not measure. Businesses that use lots of reactive power are required to have two meters for this reason. You could theoretically use a lot of reactive power in your house and not get charged for it, but its not real power so its useless anyway.
Not sure if its that easy to throttle a power plant.
He DID say it recorded kWh, which IS real energy. No one 'uses' reactive power, thus why power meters cancel it out and record only real power.
I don't think that electric cooking power usage amounts to a very large percentage of a typical bill.
Yep... sometimes you need a peaker... that's why I said;
Not ALL of the time.
In our house (mostly gas), it's the two refrigerators that pull the most current. I'll add to that the four TV sets that the wife has to have on all at the same time. Drives me nuts! Our electric stove is rarely used as I cook on the gas grill outdoors. Seems like that's the norm around here.
I think you have pretty typical usage. Heating/cooling, refrigeration, and electronics seem to use the most power on average. Cooking is probably 2-4% of consumption typically.
I find this confusing.
This is the only part where you are a little confused. The "boosting" in the GSHP system is the "HP". The heat pump. I've never heard of anyone doing a direct "ground exchange" system although I suppose that someone out there probably is trying it.
That's not quite right. A ground sourced heat pump can both cool well below the ground temp., and heat well above it. The air source heat pumps that are extremely popular these days do have a hard time heating when ambient temps drop below freezing. They are quite good at cooling though. A ground source system is exceptional though- twice as efficient as air source.
Yes and no. They make extended low range units that heat well down to -13 F (Mitsubishi Hyperheat for example). But that is a significant challenge in northern climates unless you are using them in a modern "low load" type building. As it gets colder and colder outside you need more and more heat and you get less heat.
That's the case for any heat pump. The "work" the pump is doing is directly related to the difference between evaporator and condenser pressures, which are directly related to indoor and outdoor temperatures. This is not anything specific to ground source. In fact, it is reducing this difference that makes a ground source heat pump work better than an air sourced unit in most situations, especially extreme weather.
Yes, that's why I mentioned it. I certainly wasn't suggesting that gshp's operate on some different principle of thermodynamics than ashp' s.
Although storing heat isn't necessarily a bad thing...