Severn Trent came yesterday to change the existing water meter for a smart one. In the letter ST sent about the change they made a big thing about having the capability of detecting water leaks before they got too serious but said nothing about being able to read the meter remotely, which I would have thought was the key feature, especially for users whose existing meters aren't capable of being read from outside. (I assume the new meter contains a chunky battery but can it be charged by the water flowing through it?)
I imagine it’ll be similar to the smart gas meters and have a 10year life battery. Like the gas meter, it’ll only transmit every half hour to conserve the battery, maybe even less often.
They are useful for detecting consumer side leaks. I doubt I would have spotted the leaking gas valve in my boiler without my smart meter. If the water companies were smart and proactive enough they could warn customers about anomalous consumption from leaking pipes or cistern valves. With modern flapper valves it’s very easy to not spot a steady trickle down the back of the pan.
Our water meter is inside the house, and has one of these modules on it
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The spec says battery life is 10-15 years. There's definitely no micro-turbine recharging it. Presumably it can signal the water company when the battery starts to get low, and they come and change it.
With a water meter it's more likely to be continuously dormant until triggered by a signal from the passing remote reading device. So only likely to be actively transmitting for a few seconds every 6 months.
I think that would be classed as a “remote read meter” rather than a smart one. I think the essence of “smartness” is that they give real(ish)time data.
We got the same non-technical description for our water RF unit, and as far as I know, readings are only collected once a month by a water truck driving by at slow speed (20km/hr). If there is a leak detection function, it is a non-real-time report, so not of much usage if a months worth of water fills the basement.
I've seen the water truck on my road here, at least three times in the last week or so, and it could be that the battery on mine is flat. A water guy will be out this week -- the work order says "replace entire meter", which I find unnecessary when only the battery in the external unit needs to be replaced. We'll see when they get here, how carried away they get. I don't really care if they turn off the water to work on it, but if they use the external cutoff, it is crusty and hard to move.
When they originally installed the radio unit, they also replaced the mechanical meter *twice*, because after a few days with the first meter, they decided the batch of mechanical meters was bad and so the first one had to come out. The money for all of this fine work, eventually works its way out of our pockets.
My gas meter, an outside unit, is still read the old-fashioned way, which means there are no batteries to expire. The meter is regularly replaced... every fifty years. Whether it needs it or not. Before the house got gas, the house was originally heated by oil. There is still one house on the street, heated by oil (I guess the owner lived in fear of gas). So at least one utility specializes in "not bothering the customer". That's a nice feature.
That makes absolutely no sense to me, why/how would they do that? Without some sort of network, there would be no way for them to receive the transmitted data, and would they even need such frequent date anyway. My best guess, is that the van parks outside, transmits a request, and the meter responds with a batch of data.
I agree, but cost of e and g is much higher, and therefore the need is there for the data. Water data is much less essential, and I have never heard of real time water consumption data in the UK - have you a link to confirm it is used anywhere in the UK, for domestic use?
That depends on what you mean by "real time". But there's plenty of meters reporting hour by hour usage using mobile phone SIMs
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Doesn't seem to me unrealistic that others may be using 30 minute intervals given Ofwat have funded several other projects to get "near-real time" [their term] data on usage.
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