I might be missing something here but just an hour ago I did a favour for a friend and took a card to a shop, gave them some money and they printed out a receipt with a multi digit number on it. I then typed * long number# into a keypad by the meter and it credited the money to the electricity meter. As far as I can see no telephone line is connected so how does that work? At no time other than at the shop did I need the card.
The *longnumber# will be an encrypted string for that particular meter including the amount of credit to be added, issued from the supplier's database over the paypoint network.
If it's Northern Ireland Keypad it's usually a 20 digit number, but 40 and 60 digit numbers are also used occasionally and can be used to encode a rate change.
The supplier's database and the customer meter will be reconciled with a physical meter reading (in theory annually).
Owain
Well, it probably is misreporting, but varying a resistive load would cause *some* phase shift - don't forget all those transformer coils and generator windings.
Cheers
Ah OK thanks for that so the meter has an algorithm thing to read the 20 digit number, not magic at all. It's republic rather than north.
I don't see how; the variable resistive load constituting the the instanttaneous power consumption of the country would overwhelm it if it did.
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