One for the smart meter sceptics

My experience with the Oil watchman (around that frequency) is that its about thee same as wifi (2.4GHz), or perhaps slightly worse.

No I don't. I just think they should have said it was a way to get rid of meter readers and not claimed that it would enable you to save money.

I decide when to eat based on habit and hunger; I don't want the energy supplier deciding for me (or, even worse, "nudging" me).

They'll just bump up the rates for the dumb tariff.

Expensive if you fit one to each appliance. Awkward to swap them around if it has to be behind the fridge - also hard to read if behind.

Some things don't like to be powered down to swap, such as PVRs that are about to record something.

Not suitable for a cooker.

Does it give average power and total energy over a period?

It could be the power level of the signal, or, the modulation scheme does not have enough "features" for robust detection (something like FEC Forward Error Correction, which has been used to get a couple more dB of sensitivity).

It could also be a subscription or channel fill problem. For example, our smart meters here, transmit every fifteen minutes, and the Store and Forward protocol used, there is no sign the communications scheme has limits. Whereas your readings are on a one hour or four hour basis. I could see on the 4G network, you don't want to be compromising normal phone usage, but perhaps on this other scheme, the reduced reporting rate is to keep the channel capacity up (support more customers).

The nice thing about the frequency choice, is you could use a cheap SDR for sniffing purposes. Not because you wanted to "check your readings" and decode what is in transit, but rather, just to see if the equipment is doing a lot of retries and seems to have good signal amplitude (coming back from the receiving box). Maybe the signal has enough amplitude, but is corrupted by another station transmitting at the same time.

The first time I got Ethernet working in the lab, it was pretty funny. You're supposed to use a random number generator for the backoff algo. So I'm doing a test of the first bringup, and every time two nodes go to transmit, they stomp on each others toes, go to max retry, and both time out. As if the channel is full. It didn't take too long to figure out that I'd managed to seed the random number generators in a "less than random way". A trivial change to the firmware and it starts working :-) I hope given this is a custom scheme, that the bugs have been worked out :-)

Paul

The ones I have are wifi-based. Not these ones, but similar can be had for about 8 quid a pop:

Presumably there is some way to safely power those down? You don't need to swap very often.

There are current transformer versions:

Yes, they do - as well as graphs etc in the app.

(you can always connect them to a better system like Home Assistant to do more analysis of the data if you want. I replaced the firmware on mine so they also have a local web page)

Theo

That's part of the purchase decision by the user. The meters have a "basic measurement capability". There is usually at least one button on the meter, for the derivative information, such as the parameters you describe (average power or summed kwh). As I indicated, you can also input the cost per kwh into the meter, so it reads out in pounds, but really, having the readout in kwh is good enough.

I've also not seen any Bluetooth versions of these things, so you can pass readings to a personal computer for further analysis. The boxes seem to be mostly self contained and not IoT material.

But on balance, I feel every household should have one of these, just to settle arguments over "vampire loads". For example, say you have a big screen TV, and one family member insists it is wasting power when it is off. By using one of those meters, you can answer the question, by cycling the TV on, examining some readings, cycling the TV off, watching for a minute or ten minutes, for activity. Some of the snooper TV sets, even listen in with a microphone when the TV is off, and those sets will have some electrical loading while doing so. Having a power meter, gives you a hint about whether it is "snoop capable". To be EuP, perhaps the set should really only draw about 0.5 watt at most. If you're seeing 10 watts, maybe it's a snooper.

I monitor my PC for "unseen activity", using the power meter. And there have been some weird changes in consumption. The power consumption was dropping with time (over the months), which does not make a lot of sense. This would not have happened in the WinXP era.

Paul

You can get WiFi plugs which record to an app for half that price. I bought one of these:-

Measuring PVR consumption is pretty pointless. The standby power is still limited by EU law, so you can calculate that...

No

.. the app for mine has lots of graphs....

Dave

It helps ME to save a LOT of money. I doubt this will get past your blinkers though…

But you could choose to time-shift other power consumption if you wanted to. Dishwasher, washing machine, maybe immersion heater, other electric heating. The choice is yours.

So that makes it smart to stay on a dumb tariff?

Tim

Yes, it is all bollocks isn't it. As if we have time to waste spending all day scheduling power usage and the like. Oh wait, you could get one of the servants to do it. Servants will be back to being two-a-penny once the green revolution kicks in.

At the cost of a lot of time and effort. Anyone can save dosh by going around after everyone else and turning thermostats down, lights off, and being in charge of when appliances run. My brother did this for grins because they'd installled a new meter (this was several years ago) which started off by reading zero. He managed to reduce his power consumption by 50%. Mind you, a lot of this was turning off billyuns of wall warts which the family just left plugged in and on. But you have to be really anal to achieve this.

Since we're oil and wood-burner heated here, that leaves the DW and the WM. Savings on teh volts would be peanuts. I could turn off the computer systems overnight but I choose not to do that.

I listed why the "smart" meters just don't give you the necessary information for this.

You can turn the thermostat down, turn off things that aren't necessary and replace appliances with more efficient ones without consulting your magic meter.

My washing machine uses about 25p worth of electricity for the usual cycle I use.

I used to live in a place with Economy 7, a storage heater and an immersion heater on off-peak electricity. Quite a good system, but somewhat wasteful as you can't turn the heat off when you go out and you have hot water when you don't want it. Gas is a lot cheaper in any case and you only use it when you want it.

No, it enables the suppliers to make more money. Like the way Economy 7 bumps up the peak rate to make off peak look better. (The difference between the peak and off-peak rates reduced with time.)

"Deep" standby mode stops the aerial signal from passing through to the next device, so is useless.

May I suggest that you can walk and chew gum at the same time which is why you could do this!

An awful lot of people really are too stupid to understand they don't need a smart meter to save money on their current energy consumption habits.

That reason belongs alongside electric street lighting putting lamplighters out of a job or alarm clock manufacturers putting “knockers up” out of a job.

No. You listed a range of fantasy ideas that you have about what you thought smart meters ought to do.

Yeah, there’re making a bundle out of me. From a recent bill I can see that I used 809 kWhrs of power in one month and paid £79 (and that includes standing charges). That works out at just over 9p per kWhr.

How much are you saving on your tariff?

Tim

Most of the "In Home Display" things remain connected AND unfortunately ignored in homes where the users don't really understand them.

Spending a fiver a day on Gas and Electric, is well - cost of a happily disposable beer down the pub. For some people it might not be like that, and monitoring might make some sense - but once the initial fascination has ceased, these things will just live in a drawer.

I don't know why they bothered to send them out to all. Someone profited.

I'm not saving anything, I'm just paying a large amount or a small amount accoding to the tariff.

They would if they were any use. And they still wouldn't be "smart".

I pay 7p per kWH (for gas) where I am living now.

We live in a far from ‘remote’ place but, oddly, our house in particular has suffered from issues with mobile coverage in the past- even though the various companies show otherwise. (Nth Kent, about 1m north of J4)

We were with 3 and it took ages to convince them we had no coverage. Eventually, they provided a pico node, which linked our 3 mobiles via the internet.

One of our daughters was with another company - I think O2- and again, there was a strange black hole.

When I requested a Smart Meter about a year ago - fitter in Feb- Octopus checked and said they needed to fit a particular type. I assume due to coverage issues.

When it was fitted, the chap made a similar comment.

So far, readings etc seem reliable - or at least regular. No reason to suggest anything amiss.

Three coverage was improved BTW, although we’ve since changed to another mobile provider.

I doubt very much that anyone is going around adjusting their usage day to day to achieve what can be large savings. They get into a habit of ,say, loading the washing machine and setting the delay so it comes on when the supply is at its lowest cost, charging a EV when it's the lowest cost, not using certain appliances when it's the highest cost. All of these are likely to be the same each day of the year with most cheaper tariffs. It doesn't necessarily mean that you change your meal times nor turn on the heating at a different time if it suddenly gets cold.

Smart tariffs are replacing things like economy 7 but often by reducing the "off peak" hours can offer electricity 4x cheaper during those hours. Some people now have lifestyles that can take real advantage of cheap of-peak electricity. People with electric storage heaters may save money being on a tariff primarily aimed at charging EVs overnight. The utility companies don't care what you are doing with the electricity, charging EVs, or topping up storage heaters or shifting domestic usage with a 10kWH battery etc.