Smart meters: Cops. Arrests.

[hrhofmann]

rote:

The Naperville water meters are inside at the entrance point of water through the basement walls. A cable runs from the water meter to a small box on the outside of the house that is the actual transmitter. It is about as big as a package of cigarettes. In our case, the nearest human activity is 3 or 4 feet away in the basement or outside, except when I cut the grass and am within 1 foot of the transmitter. But that is for a few seconds 39 times in a year, so I am not too worried about rf exposure, especially since I do use a cellphone and worked on Electromagnetic Compatiblity for Bell Laboratories for about

44 years.

[bob haller]

around here the water company totally elminated meter readers, kinda sad one was HOT:)

automating reading saves big bucks

[krw]

No basement. The house is built on a slab and the water manifold is well inside the house (in the laundry on the with the garage between it and the street). I'm pretty sure the meter is buried in the front yard so I really don't know where the antenna is but there aren't any meter readers in the city, either. I'm certainly not worried about cell phone usage. Given the distance difference (and power levels), worrying about utility meters is really silly.

[Wes Groleau]

"The Chamber continues to see suspicious activity, they say. A thermostat at a town house the Chamber owns on Capitol Hill at one point was communicating with an Internet address in China, they say, and, in March, a printer used by Chamber executives spontaneously started printing pages with Chinese characters."

Not likely to happen to a homeowner via an electric meter, but still interesting. From

[trader4]

Here where I live in NJ they have electronic water meters buried at the street. The town does drive-bys to read them. It's much faster as they don't even have to get out of the car or even come to a stop.

[Wes Groleau]

Mine's in the basement near the floor. It amazes me that the signal passes through eight inches of concrete with a rebar grid in it, then through twenty feet of gravelly clay, four feet of air, and the metal body of a van, yet is powered by something that never needs its batteries changed.

While my Sprint WiFi-enabled cell phone couldn't maintain a connection with thirty inches of air between it and the WiFi router.

[Mark]

thats the physics of bitrate...

the water meter has to send a few bytes of data and has hours to do it...

your wifi sends Mbytes of data every second..

the new water meters are interesting, a few months ago we had a note on our water bill informing us that one of our toilets is leaking... :-)

Mark

[Wes Groleau]

No, it has the ten or twenty seconds that the reader van takes to drive past.

It has to send the meter ID, the eight or ten digits of the measurement, plus some handshaking bits.

[krw]

I'll bet that's what they're doing. They said they had a "smart grid" but I don't think the infrastructure was in place yet. They were adding Internet service to their "smart grid" but that's a couple of years off. Meanwhile I'll bet they're doing drive-bys. I'm pretty sure the meter is in a pit in the front yard. The irrigation system is in that general direction, too.

[krw]

I hear ya'. The water, sewer, garbage, and electricity are all run by the city but there are two separate entities (water/sewer, electric/garbage) doing the work. They want to use one grid for collection but it'll probably be an Abbot and Costello movie in the making with them tripping over each other (and the new Internet service).

I can't wait, though the city is fairly well run, otherwise.

[M.A. Stewart]

I heard a rumour about the Texas woman who shot a power meter with a gun. The rumour is she said this to the judge.

"Sheeit your Honour... them smart meters ain't smart... ah pointed my gun at mine and it didn't duck!"