Aiming at the actual situation of high energy consumption and lack of power consumption optimization strategy in general residential areas, this paper firstly establishes the mathematical models of adjustable load, non-adjustable load and temperature control load. According to the flexible time of adjustable load, an optimal power consumption strategy based on ant colony algorithm is proposed. The working characteristics of air conditioner and electric water heater are obtained by simulation on MATLAB platform. According to the working characteristics, the optimal strategy of group electricity consumption of air conditioner by changing setting temperature range of air conditioner and the optimal strategy of group electricity consumption of electric water heater by changing the setting value of water temperature and preheating are proposed. At last, the Monte Carlo method is used to obtain various load curves and total load curves before optimization and after optimization. Simulation results show that the strategy proposed in this paper can help users to save electricity costs and reduce peak load and valley filling under the circumstance that it has little impact on users.