I've seen a couple of things recently that said that peak consumption (in California, at least) is in late afternoon and early evening, as people return home from work and turn on their air conditioners and other appliances. It's not right in the middle of the day, as you might think.
Probably depends on where in California. If you look at google maps in SoCal, it seems like almost every house has a pool. Pool pumps take a lot of power, and you're supposed to run it during daytime. Those 4-6 hours its running is our highest power usage.
I can literally look up my hourly power usage online. The 4-6 hours my pool pump is on is almost 2x higher power usage than any other time. I consider that a lot of power.
Edit: we had our house unoccupied for 2 months with everything unplugged and off, but our pool pump and sprinkler system. Based upon that, and looking at our historical usage, I would say our pool pump accounts for about 65% of our monthly kwh.
Wow, it surprises me that it's that high, but you clearly know your numbers. Presumably the rest of your house is quite energy efficient?
If it something that interests you, you could probably reduce the power usage considerably by switching to a smaller pump that runs for more hours. All else equal, the power required for pumps increases much more than linearly (proportional to the cube of the flow), so a pump with half the flow rate that is run for twice as long would use less than half the total energy per day for the same amount of water circulation.
