[OT] Smart meters

How much water has it saved ?

In message , at 13:42:14 on Sat, 21 Jul 2018, Andy Burns remarked:

I used to have a Severn Trent water meter installed inside the house (in effect in the kitchen where the stopcock was) but had some gadget where it could be read electronically from outside the house.

Well if smart water meters don't exist the the answer must be "none at all".

If they do exist you'd need to look at what the companies have reported. Like the figures in the link I gave you.

"with more than 4,200 leaks detected on customer pipes so far, the ambitious programme has already saved an estimated 930,000 litres of water per day across London"

Since then Thames have more than doubled the number of smart water meters allegedly installed.

At the risk of being accused of repeating myself, any product with "smart" as part of its name is only smart for the person or organisation selling it and certainly not for the customer.

In message , at

Only with a few hiccups. There was a huge row in Cambs when the infamous new GTR timetable had a side effect of shifting the first off-peak train for local commuters twenty minutes later (to a 09:36 arrival in Cambridge) which hit a lot of people trying to get to work for 09:30.

There have also been many rows about the introduction of late afternoon peak periods, on flows when none previously existed.

Then there was the great "simplification" of fares about ten years ago with much renaming of tickets, which bumped the cheapest returns to London for a large number of longer distance passengers to close to midday, forcing them to buy a significantly more expensive ticket if they had any business in the late morning to conduct.

In message , at 12:52:06 on Sat, 21 Jul

I've heard they help the water companies identify leaks. Which is a somewhat different water saving modality.

Yep, but there are also several types of radio transceiver in use, so no easy answer there either ...

Andy Burns pretended :

Common sense would have had a standard data port added to the side of the display, as part of the spec. to couple up to a PC :/

So similar to electricity/gas companies having meters dotted around the grid and using discrepancies to narrow leaks/theft to a small geographic location ?

Fair point then.

I don't think that's how they are using the 100,000s of smart water meters which serve an individual property. They use them to identify problems within the _individual_ property. One common example is a WC which - with silent fill and internal overflows - the occupier doesn't even know has a leaking valve. Smart meters can pick that up as there aren't many people who deliberately have a small but constant (24/7) use for water. Another is leaks in supply pipes (which around half of users don't even realise are their responsibility).

A better comparison is possibly the way monitoring electricity usage could - especially in the early years - pick up "leaks" the user didn't even realise they had: eg the audiovisual gear using significant power even in standby and that old PC used as a server left on 24/7.

That?s always been one point of smart meters, recording when you use the power, so you can have time sensitive tariffs which encourage people to use some non time critical devices like water heaters, washing machines and dishwashers when there isnt peak demand for power.

Smart meters may all have the ability to record usage in time-based registers, but in the UK none of the suppliers have time based tariffs, indeed having an economy7 installation seems to be a bar to having one installed.

They'll use it for cookers, so you "have" to eat then the power company says you can.

You want to be "coerced" by the power company?

Who will take responsibility when the freezer fails to turn back on and you come home from holiday to soggy, stinky food?

The discussion is about whether you would notice that the iron has been left on against the total consumption.

It doesn't tell you how much power an individual device is using, or integrate the consumption of a period.

Yet. Everywhere else that has smart meters do.

Just another utterly mindless conspiracy theory. Smart meters don?t control anything, they just RECORD when you use the power.