Margen
22.05 on a Tuesday. You put the washing machine on, convinced it is already the cheap hour, and it is not the cheap hour: at 22.05 on a working day the electricity is in the middle band. The genuinely cheap one, the valley band, does not start until 00.00.
And before you set the machine for three in the morning: the whole of Saturday is valley. And Sunday. And national public holidays, all twenty-four hours. A wash on Saturday at eleven in the morning pays the same network charge and the same levy as one at four on Wednesday morning, and you don't have to stay up for it.
On the Spanish mainland there are three bands on a working day:
1. Peak: 10.00 to 14.00 and 18.00 to 22.00. The dearest hour, and the one when half the country has the hob, the iron and the oven on at once.
2. Middle: 8.00 to 10.00, 14.00 to 18.00 and 22.00 to 24.00. This is where that 22.05 wash you think of as a night wash actually falls.
3. Valley: 00.00 to 8.00.
(The Balearics and the Canaries follow this same table, hour for hour; in Ceuta and Melilla everything shifts by an hour and peak runs 11.00 to 15.00 and 19.00 to 23.00.)
The three energy prices are in your contract. Let's take ordinary ones: 0.19 euros per kilowatt hour at peak, 0.13 in the middle band and 0.09 in the valley. A 60-degree wash uses close to one kilowatt hour, and a dishwasher on a normal programme a little more. Moving one wash from the middle band to the valley saves you four cents.
Four cents. But between laundry and dishwasher an ordinary household runs eight loads a week, and eight loads moved from the middle band to the valley come to around 17 euros a year. If three of those eight were going on at eight in the evening, in the middle of peak, those three save ten cents each instead of four and the yearly total rises to about 26 euros.
So don't stay up and don't set a timer for three in the morning: leave Tuesday's laundry for Saturday morning. Same machine, same detergent, the cheapest band there is, and at an hour when you are awake.