Humanity can accurately measure electrical consumption, right? Instead of limiting peak loads, why not limit daily use? Hell, you can have prepaid electricity. Charge up a card and put it in the limiter. I know there's a deactivated one in my basement, its more than a decade old.

It's more fair, let the family go right up to the edge of what they can pay, and when everything is 'solved' deactivation costs next to nothing compared to removal.

Maybe this is because the utility has installed smart meters that can measure usage but not do remote cut-offs? Making every smart meter cut-off capable will increase costs in a hard to politically justify way (ie. "I pay my bills on time. why am I paying for this just so some delinquent can have an easier time?"), as well as massively expose attack surface (imagine if attackers can remotely shut down all electricity to households).

But the limiter works on an instantaneous or 1 minute basis, not a 24 hour basis. Your comparison doesn't take into account how spiky electricity demand is, especially during meal prep times when there might be multiple appliances on at the same time. Even though your 24 hour usage might comfortably fit within 43.2 KWH, it's very easy to run against the 1800W limit at any instant in time, especially during cooking.

I was thinking of that, so I just signed into my ComEd account and brought up the last several days readings from the smart meter. This reports usage hourly, and most of the days didn't have any hour exceeding 1.5 - 1.6 kWh. I did see 2 separate hourly samples over the past 2 weeks that got to 1.9 kWh and another that hit 2.3 kWh for those two samples, but the rest of the days had a peak hour of less than 1.6.

But I just realized, that since I have gas heat (but an electric stove), the heating isn't included in this report. Not sure what the averages would look like if I had a heat pump, but I'm assuming it would be similar to the A/C peak in the summer which adds about .5 to 1 kWh.

Out of curiosity: what is the base load, and what is the load when cooking dinner?

HN already determined washer/dryers are out. Assuming you cook for 20 to 30 minutes, how much instantaneous load does this add?

Presumably top peak load is during dinner time. I think the story and/or other commenters have mentioned that 240V service isn't working either, so that excludes stoves. With that in mind the biggest load sources would probably be:

* furnace blower: 400W

* fridge: 300W

* microwave: 1000W

* toaster oven: 1200W

* slow cooker: "70-150 watts on LOW and 150-250 on HIGH"

* hot plate: 1500W

With these in mind, it's not hard to imagine how you can hit the 1800W limit when you're cooking. If you get unlucky and the furnace and fridge both decide to turn on at the same time, you only have 1100W available for other stuff. It's definitely very limiting, but at the same time it's also not something that would prevent you from cooking a healthy/cheap meal (eg. running a rice cooker + slow cooker)