All your fears about Smart meters confirmed

[Michael Chare]

Criminals working for the suppliers might like to know when you are not at home.

[Robin]

Useful for what?

This isn't about critical systems - eg an automated landing system for airliners. If the system is used simply to alert health visitors, social workers etc to visit people (or to visit them sooner than they would otherwise) then "false positives" have a financial cost but do not harm anyone.

And a SMETS2 meter is technically capable of providing data at intervals much less than 30 minutes. But suppliers aren't allowed to collect data with that granularity - and even 30 mins needs explicit consent from consumers.

[harry]

There'll be problems too with anyone with solar PV panels.

[Andy Burns]

Looking for a car on the drive, or ringing the doorbell is likely to be more reliable at that ...

[Brian Reay]

There are far easier ways to do that.

(No car on drive etc)

[Harry Bloomfield]

Andy Burns submitted this idea :

..and the 30 minute readings are stored and forwarded in one transmission, so it is still not actual live data. The mobile network could never cope with live data.

[Harry Bloomfield]

It happens that Dave Liquorice formulated :

I think you are assuming a level of intelligence and processing in the meter, which simply does not exist.

[Harry Bloomfield]

Brian Reay submitted this idea :

Even supposing it were possible, there are much better ways like heart monitors to trigger alarms.

[Harry Bloomfield]

[e-mail] formulated the question :

It would certainly be struggling with me - I sleep when I feel the need and often rise in the early hours restless, to work on something. I usually rise between 07:30 and 08:30, but this morning slept through to

10:00.

[Andy Burns]

I think the proposed system would rely on additional analysis done centrally, I agree that even 30 minute data is not much to go on, but over a period of weeks/months it could learn the bones of what's normal for a given house, and across a whole fleet of meters it could adjust for seasonal variations ... so it *might* be able to tell that Mrs Jones' daily variations from "using stuff" on top of the background are no longer happening and maybe she's pegged it!

You'd hope that relatives and neighbours would do a better job though, bloke down the road pegged it after christmas, it wasn't the post or milkbottles that came to attention but the wheelie bin left out longer than normal.

[Dave Liquorice]

switched

Not in the meter but applied to the data the meter sends.

[tabbypurr]

I daresay it could cope with a small minority of people being closely monitored no problem.

[Steve Walker]

Not very reliable though, as many families have a young child, a stay at home parent and the one working has the car; or an elderly person who no longer drives, but carers come and go; or a couple where one is shift worker and sleeping during the day. Knocking on the door would be much more accurate, but is open to being reported to the police (possibly with CCTV footage), especially if a nearby neighbour, with no-one in, is robbed soon after.

As an example of the risks: apparently, two nights ago, a car with four men in it drove slowly along our road, with no lights on, in the early hours of the morning. They were seen and the registration reported to the police.

Far better for criminals if they can remotely identify when a house is likely to be unoccupied and look it over with Streetview.

SteveW

[voyager1space]

EON keep pushing me to get a smart meter and I've told them I don't want one. Their reply "That's fine. We'll contact you again about it in a few months".

[Dave Liquorice]

The meter doesn't have to do anything other than report the consumption of the a given period. The data analysis is done elsewhere using the entire data set. Don't under estimate the power and capabilty of modern data processing.

Given a big enough data set it isn't that hard to spot similar changes taking place at around the same time be that daily or 5+2 days. The system doesn't need to know that it's the kettle that gets used somewhere around 0730 weekday mornings just that something is. It's the patterns and any regularity that is looked for.

30 mins is probably a bit long TBH but I reckon you could still spot when someone gets up, goes to bed, etc. It's not going to work very well, if at all for a multioccupancy household, it's not aimed at that though. It's aimed at people slightly "at risk" and living alone.

Say person has a fall and stops doing what they would normally do. It might take the system several hours to flag up that the person was following their normal pattern but has now stopped all apparent activity. ie. power consuption is still at normal "in and active" levels, but is far too constant, no cups of tea, telly on/off, no meal prep, no lights on/off etc. If they'd gone out the lights, telly etc would have been turned off so consumption would be lower.

[Dave Liquorice]

Always assuming that the person remembers to wear it, keep it charged, switch it on, etc etc. Even the simple dongle round the neck emergency call button can be a challenge for some.

[Dave Liquorice]

They keep nagging me as well. I tried to tell them no, once, but their system was down so couldn't register the instruction. I just ignore them now, that includes at least one card through the door.

I'd answer that with "What don't you understand about No?" If I change my mind I'll contact the relevant supplier at that time.

[tabbypurr]

People frequently stop doing what they generally do, so such data won't have any validity for a day or two. Not a good way to detect falls etc but better than nothing, & no hardware cost.

Of course it will be misused too, these things ever are. Burglars would love to get their hands on a list of addresses where no activity has happened for 3 days. It's worth £££ so will happen.

NT

[Robin]

Do you mean just like happens with employees of ISPs telling burglars when there's been no activity at an address? (I know some people use remote access, stream security video etc but that's not different in kind from the power used while people are away for PVRs, heating, automatic watering systems, people coming in to check the post etc etc.)

[jrwalliker]

They almost certainly do know about power factor as they digitise current and voltage and calculate power delivered from those measurements. That gives them everything necessary to know the overall power factor.

The smart meters I have seen the insides of use a four-terminal current sense resistor and a resistive divider to get current and voltage data which is conditioned with analogue op-amps and then digitised.

John