Consumer awareness of what appliances use the most power should really be a lot higher. It's actually pretty simple too - devices that generate a lot of heat are the ones consuming a lot of energy. That includes devices whose purpose may be to keep things cool - your fridge and A/C still generate significant waste heat even in the latter case it's vented externally. A rare exception would be a car-battery charger, which can obviously draw significant power but the heat is generated later when the power is drawn from the battery and in a dissipated fashion that's hard to detect directly but is still significant.
Have houses automatically heat up earlier in the morning before people start waking up and consuming more power
Prior to "Time of use" billing (and having to upgrade all our meters in like 2016) i dont see how this was possible.
The old meters simply measured how much power was used, they had no idea of WHEN it was used.
The electric company would go house to house and "read the meter" once a month and report this back to billing. Based on your usage a bill would be produced and sent to you.
How/when would a "high usage light" come into play?
I grew up in a house which was over 40 years old, there was no "high-usage" lights near the waster/dryer. Mostly because homes built back then had the waster/dryer in the basement and any "usage lights" would be ineffective.
But since it's been around since the late 70s, clearly you can do this without needing too much advanced tech - which is what I interpreted as being the perceived problem. (Perhaps incorrectly, but it looks like I wasn't the only one...)
I wasn't debating if these meters exist or not, it was that they were never used in Ontario.
Continuing your logic, did Canada ever use these "multiple-tariff" meters? If they did, what was the point of the light the OP mentioned?
If the light was on, people paid significantly more. It was very very effective at reducing peak consumption.