Which appliances actually set your peak

Not every load is worth controlling

A house has dozens of electrical loads and only a handful of them matter for demand. Your refrigerator draws a few hundred watts. Your LED lighting draws less. Your phone charger is a rounding error. None of those set a peak.

What sets a peak is the group of large loads that switch on and off on their own schedule: heating, cooling, water heating, drying. Each of those pulls thousands of watts, each runs in cycles rather than continuously, and none of them coordinate with each other. When two or three happen to overlap inside the same demand interval, your monthly peak is set.

The Energy Sentry Demand Automation Computer watches total demand at the service entrance through current transformers on the incoming mains, sampling 1,000 times per second. It is not looking at individual circuits. It is looking at the whole house and asking one question continuously: at the rate demand is rising, will this interval overshoot the limit? If the answer is yes, it acts before the limit is reached rather than after it is crossed.

Which load it holds back, and for how long, depends entirely on what that load is. A water heater can wait ten minutes and nobody notices. A dryer someone just started should not be interrupted at all. That difference is the priority order, and it is set at installation based on your specific home or building.

The seven guides below explain each major load type: what it typically draws, why it spikes, whether it stores energy and can therefore be deferred, what a brief interruption actually feels like, and where it usually sits in the priority order. Each one includes an honest caveat, because no load is a perfect candidate.