For heatpumps/heating in general - we have a after market-product here that you can install in your old "dumb" central heating system - you connect it between the outside thermometer and your boiler/pump/what have you. It then fiddles with the outside temperature readings as to trick the pump to run harder/easier depending on the electricity price (and thus in extension, towards peak production).
I used it in my previous house and it worked well! (no affiliation except as a former customer, but the product in question _I used_ is called ngenic tune [0])
I think that everyone still converts what-ever-unit used to time. For example, from one of my earlier jobs, we had "T-shirt"-size units, ranging from XS to XL. It took two weeks after introducing them until someone figured out that XS is two hours, so in a sprint you should be able to do $SPRINT_DURATION / 2 XS tasks. And then the person figured that S was equal to, say 4 hours and so on and we were back on square one. But we didn't estimate in concrete time units. /s