British Gas - Smart meter bullying tactics

[Robin]

No problem: you pays your money, you takes your choice.

[David Wade]

That is fine but I am sure you will eventually pay. Perhaps its worth noting in other countries you:-

1. Have to have a SMART meter
2. You have to pay to rent it.
3. There are multiple price bands for power.

Dave

[Brian Gaff]

Well, blind them with science. Ask them which generation of meter they are fitting. In the end you should find, as somebody I knew did that thewill take you off the list at least for a while. I'm not sure what your objection is though, as you should be able to stay on the same tariff and all that when they change, except that you can see what you use. If you get the Electric that way then have one that does both. The older ones could not be used to switch suppliers, but the engineer I spoke to says the new ones are all read by a third party and the contract details allow the readings to go to your current supplier.

Brian

[Chris B]

And I believe (but maybe wrong) that the French system charges even domestic customers for apparent Power. (ie unlike the UK they do not ignore the power factor of your installation).

[Max Demian]

How do they know what your power factor is? Commercial premises can be inspected to see what high power electric motors they have for lathes &c.

(Incidentally, does a traditional mains transformer affect the PF, or does this depend on what it connected to the secondary? In the past, lots of things like radios would have mains transformers.)

[The Natural Philosopher]

They don't. The meter measures just measures power, not current. I.e the intergal of V*I over a cycle. How this used to be achieved was by a very cunning arrangement of electromagnets. I assume today its done in software.

It is affected by what is connected to the secondary. If nothing is, it is basically an inductor and should ideally draw no power at all.

[Theo]

Proposal here to charge differently by geographic area, so that generators get paid more for putting generation nearer to consumers, rather than in the north of Scotland where there is no grid capacity to take it south:

(whether it would be purely at the wholesale level or the charge would come through to consumers is unclear)

Theo

[Robin]

I don't know if it made it through to the final text of the formal spec for SMETS2 but it was certainly envisaged that they should measure both active and reactive given the expected developments in domestic use. And our Landis + Gyr E470 does so.

[Dave Plowman (News]

I've recently had them installed. Mainly because the gas one was awkward to read - in the cellar, and side on so had to lean over and use a torch to read it. Electricity one was fine. And I am pleased I have. Use Loop on my phone, and can see a histogram of hourly use. And costs per day (etc) for each easily. And don't have to send readings in.

Still not got an IHD (in house display) that works properly, though. And on the second one.

Of course if you're rich as a cabinet minister and don't have to worry or care about energy costs, no need.

[Dave Plowman (News]

Bollocks. They will be changed to pre-payment first.

[Geo]

I am glad I have resisted the smart meters.

The meter reader came round to read the electric (inside house) and then gas (outside box on the wall). He knocked on the door a few minutes later and asked if I had smelt gas before - I could not. He phoned the emergency number, turned the supply off and after he had told the operator what bits to click on her screen, left me with a reference number. An engineer turned up within 30 minutes and eventually traced two leaking joints either side of the meter. Said the soldering was bad and the pressure test showed a 2 mb drop in two minutes with nothing else connected. He cut the pipes and installed new regulator and fittings and re-tested. The meter had been installed in 2015.

So glad I still employ a reader...

[Dave Plowman (News]

Could be Smart meter fitters are rather smarter than the cowboy who installed yours?

[Jeff Layman]

So you've been paying for 7 - 8 years for gas which you didn't use, but was being recorded on the gas meter. Have you been offered a refund?

[David Wade]

If you had accepted a smart meter when offered, they would have done the same test, fixed the problem, and you would not have paid for the gas lost from the premises side of the meter....

Dave

[SteveW]

And they still come and read the meter once in a while - both to ensure that you've not fiddled with it and that there is not a leak.

[Davey]

Which, while true, cannot be used as a reason to switch to a Smartmeter, as nothing was known about the leak.

[Paul]

Digital power meters, all measure real and reactive power.

The entire table of numbers is sent up the line. The digital meter does not have the authority to meddle with the information it collects. It just sends it.

It is up to the billing design, to show you all numeric fields, or only show you the fields they bill on.

On a digital power meter, there are two sigma-delta converters running at 500KHz or so. They are ADCs, and give you a string of digital values. One is for Volts. One is for Amps. Using a dedicated hardware processor, there are a standard set of equations used for working out the quantities. If something needs to be integrated, they integrate the area under the curve. The high sampling rate (500KHz compared to 50Hz), ensures the math is of good quality. There are regulations to be met on accuracy, so that a digital power meter is every bit as good as that old rotating platter thingy. As far as I know, it's good to around 1% or so. Even if the current flow waveform is "ugly", the meter properly measures that. Your digital multimeter on the other hand, does not measure that waveform properly. Your hand held multimeter samples at 1Hz or 2Hz or so, whereas the power meter runs at 500KHz.

*******

As my power systems professor would quip, the "reactive power sloshes back and forth between the consumer and the power plant". All current flows, result in resistive heating and losses. The penalty for a consumer, having too high a reactive component, is a measure of the need to beef up components (transformers, wires) to handle the extra current flow. Only the "real" component is typically billed for on consumers, while industrial power users are billed on reactive powers, so that the industrial user will consider installing a capacitor bank, to reduce the magnitude of the reactive power.

Some industries are extremely reactive on power, and so the management know they need to correct their power factor, before they even connect to the grid. It's not a "surprise on our monthly bill, and geez, we need to fix this". They already know by design it needs to be fixed.

*******

As for those power meters, someone actually found an error in those equations. Too funny. You may find a reference to that, if investigating "how a digital power meter works". The error was not something that affected billables in a significant way. And it happened quite a while ago.

One of the reasons for my interest in the topic, is my hand held meters giving me bullshit readings (obviously wrong values) and wondering what was going on. For example, some computer here, it was soft off, and one of my meters was indicating it was "using 100W". Which is absurd. A Kill-O-Watt gives numbers which match conventional knowledge on the topic. You can see the real component "W" and the reactive version "VA" on the meter, and can see just how bad the power factor is on the computer when it is soft-off.

My computer is using 49W, 91VA, PF=0.53, and on my power bill I pay for 49W. No, the power supply is not modern, it is not an 80+, and I could run off and change it over to the spare I've got. But the power supply is compatible with poor-quality UPS supplies (stepped "sine").

Paul

[Paul]

The only way it could be worse, is if you lived like this.

Half their grid is 50Hz, half their grid is 60Hz.

They have frequency converters between the two halves of the country (which is kinda like HVDC links in a sense), with insufficient capacity to do much of anything in an emergency.

Maybe the solution is to move more people and light bulbs, to Scotland ? :-) For it appears in Japans case, the need does not drive the construction. It did not foster more conversion capacity between grid halves.

Paul

[The Natural Philosopher]

At least Japan has a grid that meets its needs. It not designed along political lines for profit, but along engineering lines, to work.

[Harry Bloomfield Esq]

Too late, that is already the case, with cheaper tariffs offered if willing to have one.