Load scheduling will play an important role in achieving Demand Response (DR) at the consumption level of the emerging smart grid. This paper presents the evaluation of a heuristic approach for scheduling residential smart home appliances. The proposed heuristic schedules appliances one after the other in accordance with a greedy strategy without backtracking. This is such that the worst-case computation time is reduced compared to an exact search, at the expense of a potential loss of optimality in the obtained solution. In this paper the performance of the proposed heuristic is evaluated against an exact algorithm across the course of a full year using representative hourly prices of electricity. The results verify the suitability of the algorithm for the implementation of residential energy management decision support system.