Patent ID: 8234018

Claim:
A method for managing energy usage of an appliance comprising: receiving a schedule having an off-peak time segment and an on-peak time segment; storing the schedule in a memory, determining a current time; determining an operation and associated cycles that need to be performed by the appliance; initiating the operation if the current time is within the off-peak time segment; determining if operation would be detrimentally affected if stopped for a duration and restarted at a later time; if the current time changes to the on-peak time segment, selectively continuing the operation if a present or a future cycle of the operation is detrimentally affected by stopping and restarting the present cycle or initiating the future cycle, or stopping the operation if the present cycle or the future cycle is not detrimentally affected by stopping and restarting; and, restarting the stopped operation during another off-peak time segment.