Air Design used to spend hours every day manually calling their 600 members to schedule seasonal tune-ups.

They turned on Podium's AI Membership Coordinator. It contacted 471 members, booked 187 jobs, and generated $24,000 in revenue.

Across home services, the story repeats.

Magnolia Plumbing cut invoice-to-payment time to 6 minutes and saved 60 hours of admin work every month.

This is what Podium's AI Operating System does: phones answered, jobs booked, invoices collected — automatically, without adding headcount.

If your schedule isn't packed this summer, it can be.

See How It Works

It's July 4th. Your AC has been running since Thursday morning. Your July Con Ed bill is quietly stacking up — and here's something most New Yorkers don't know: there's a decent chance you're paying the wrong rate entirely.

The difference can run $200 to $600 a year. Sometimes more.

Con Edison operates multiple residential rate structures. The vast majority of customers get defaulted onto the most basic one when they first set up service, and that's where they stay. Nobody emails you about the alternatives. There's no pop-up in the Con Ed app. The rate you were assigned five years ago is the rate you're still on today — unless you actively change it.

Here's what's actually available, and how to figure out in 40 minutes whether you've been leaving money on the table.

SC-1: The Default

If you've never touched your Con Ed account settings, you're on SC-1 — the standard residential rate. It charges the same price per kilowatt-hour at midnight as it does at 3 PM on the hottest weekend of July. It's simple, it requires no thought, and it's what Con Ed puts every new customer on automatically.

SC-1A: Time-of-Use (The One Worth Knowing)

Con Ed's Time-of-Use rate charges different prices depending on when you consume electricity:

The off-peak rate is significantly lower than on-peak pricing. If your household does laundry after 10 PM, runs the dishwasher overnight, pre-cools your apartment before 8 AM on weekdays, or simply isn't home during the day — the shift from SC-1 to SC-1A can be meaningful on your bill.

The honest caveat: if your household is home all day with appliances running during peak hours and you have no flexibility to shift usage, Time-of-Use might cost you more, not less. You need to run your own math first. (That's what Step 2 is for.)

SC-1C: Space Heating Rate

If your building or apartment uses electric heat — more common than most people realize in certain older Queens co-ops, Brooklyn brownstones, and Manhattan high-rises — there's a separate rate class specifically designed for high-heating-load households. A meaningful number of electrically heated apartments are still sitting on SC-1 by default.

Log into coned.com → Account → Bill Details → look for "Rate Schedule" or "Service Class" on your billing summary.

If it says SC-1 and you've never changed it, you're on the default. This takes about two minutes.

Pull your last three months of Con Ed bills or view your billing history online. Grab your average monthly kWh usage. Then open ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini — any free tier works — and use this prompt:

> "I'm a NYC Con Ed residential customer using approximately [X] kWh per month. My household is home during the day [yes/no]. I typically run laundry and the dishwasher [morning / evening / late night]. Based on Con Ed's SC-1A Time-of-Use rate — on-peak Monday through Friday 8 AM–10 PM, off-peak all other hours — estimate whether I'd save or lose money per year if I switched from SC-1. Assume summer on-peak rates are roughly 30% higher than off-peak, with less variability in winter. Show me the math."

The AI walks through the calculation and gives you a rough annual dollar estimate based on your specific usage pattern. It takes three minutes, and it tells you whether the switch is worth pursuing before you touch anything.

Beyond Con Ed's own rate schedules, NYC residents have another lever that most people don't know exists: retail electricity competition through the ESCO program. Energy Service Companies buy power wholesale and can sell it to Con Ed customers at competitive rates. You still pay Con Ed for the delivery portion of your bill — that line on your statement doesn't change — but your supply charge can drop.

There were real abuses in this space years ago, and New York State cracked down. The legitimate options are now straightforward to compare.

Official comparison tool: powerofchoice.ny.gov — run by the NY Public Service Commission. It's free, takes about ten minutes, and shows certified ESCOs side by side with current supply rates. No sign-up required to browse.

Red flags to skip: anything requiring a multi-year contract, any offer that doesn't clearly show the rate after the introductory period, anything presented by a door-to-door rep.

If your household income is at or below roughly 80% of the NYC area median, you may qualify for Con Ed's CARE rate — a permanent discount that reduces your electricity supply charges by approximately 25%.

Rough 2025–2026 income thresholds for NYC:

Apply at coned.com or call 1-800-75-CONED. Unlike HEAP — which is a one-time seasonal credit — CARE is a permanent rate reduction that applies every billing cycle. They stack: you can receive both.

A household currently paying $180/month on SC-1 that qualifies for CARE could drop to roughly $135/month. That's $540 a year, permanently, from a single 15-minute online application. Con Ed does not proactively tell you about this program.

Every step below can be completed today, on a holiday, from your phone:

1. Check your rate class — log into coned.com, find "Service Class" in billing details (2 min)

2. Pull your monthly kWh average — available in billing history (2 min)

3. Run the Time-of-Use estimate with free AI — use the prompt above (5 min)

4. Browse ESCO supply rates — powerofchoice.ny.gov, no account needed (10 min)

5. Apply for CARE if your income qualifies — coned.com or by phone (15 min)

Total time: under 40 minutes. If you take none of these steps, your August bill looks exactly like your July bill. If you take even one, you're ahead of the vast majority of your neighbors who are on the same default rate they've been on since they moved in.

Once you've changed your rate or switched a supply contract, the biggest mistake is treating it as finished. Rates can shift, ESCO contracts sometimes adjust after introductory periods, and your usage pattern changes season to season.

A home management tool like HomeZada lets you log and track all your utility accounts in one place — electricity, gas, water — with month-over-month comparisons that make billing anomalies obvious before they cost you. It's built for homeowners who want to stay ahead of costs rather than react to them after the statement lands.

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