EDF direct debit

why does leaving bluetooth enabled on my smartphone run its battery down so fast ?.

With a gas meter the transmission is very short once every 30 minutes so not necessarily in a higher power mode 100% of the time. It's much like some of the circuits you can find to flash a LED for many years using a AAA alkaline battery.

The electricity meter can transmit a reading every 10 seconds.

Because it spends its time looking for partners, at increasingly higher RF power. Same as the phone does when it's not connected to a tower.

Good luck with that...

TBH although it was exactly that model I simply wasn't interested enough to bother to remember how I did it.

I will be dead before the new current battery :-)

Many years ago I had a Toshiba AAA battery which powered a miniature LCD clock-calendar for 25 years before the display became almost invisible. Just before I removed it, I measured its on-load voltage (if you can call 1 microamp a load!) as 0.956 volts. For comparison, the current with a new replacement battery was 1.9 microamps.

It never leaked.

Nag persistently, but politely, via Twitter/X. I’ve had three meter swaps before they put the comms unit on a short extension lead (that seems to have fixed my issues). I’ve found them to be pretty responsive when approached this way.

Tim

Obviously not a Duracell battery then. ;-)

Tim

For smart meters to work here, they would need to communicate through 2 walls, both 22 inch(ish) thick rubble stone. The walls do take up some amount of ground moisture, so in addition to their mass they tend to act as a crude Faraday cage. Is there a version of smart meters which uses a more reliable communication medium? Cleft stick? Pigeons?

The more I read here on uk.d-i-y, the more I am glad that I have neither Smart meters (gas or electricity) nor a water meter. If it isn't fitted, it can't cause problems.

The 'feature' I would like to see on my phone would be that, when attached by WiFi to my home router, it would shut down its desperate attempts at a 4G (or whatever) connection and stop wasting battery life.

After all, if a 4/5G signal was available here at home, I probably wouldn't be using extra battery life to enable 'WiFi Calling'.

same here.

I leave my phone on permeant charge and wifi, at home

If you are in the South so on the mobile network then you can get an external antenna. If you are in the north you can have a meter with cellular interface and an external antenna...

.. or others have tried innovative solutions...

In 90% of cases they are fine. Normal meters have problems as well.

Dave

Octopus are effectively trialling readings via wi-fi to broadband with their Octopus Mini although it's not yet officially recognised as a method of meter reading for billing purposes.

Interesting, but that doesn't address the point I raised, i.e. that ability of the gas meter to talk to the electricity meter.

The ability of the electricity meter to transmit data to the network would indeed be a problem here, but I don't think it would be worthwhile to spend money on a _possible_ solution to that, without fixing the first problem.

I agree that Dumb meters can go wrong, but there is less in them to _go_ wrong. No battery, no electronics, no comms.

On the same topic but at a different price point, the first few batches on Amazon Basics AA alkaline cells I bought were pretty good. The most recent batch were much less good.

Have you checked whether you can set the phone to prefer Wifi calling, rather than prefer mobile network? Mine can ...

Settings, Network & internet, SIMs, O2, WiFi calling, Calling preference

And I’d be a couple of thousand pounds poorer every year without one. For some folk there are huge advantages to be gained by having one.

Tim