Despite having SM's for three years and my latest pair have been reporting in fine for many months, the meter reader has just been round yet again to take the readings. I asked them to take 30 minute readings for my own records, but they seemed not to be able to cope with that, but they do report and record the readings around once per week. Such a waste...
I had a chat with the reader whilst he was here and he agreed the whole SM system is a complete waste of money, with much duplication of his effort. He said he had just had to go out to the Dales, where every address he visited had an SM, reason was there was no mobile signal for them to be able to report home..
I had a weird one. A bloke turned up at the door saying he was here to do a safety check, I said come to the main entrance and he vanished.
Bypassing electricity meters is a stupid crime, the odds of getting away with it are poor. It's odd how petty criminals don't seem to notice that petty criminals always have money troubles.
Yep, when you don't have a SM and the meter hasn't been read by an official meter reader for more than a year or two , because you are always at work when they call, you may find that you get the 'threatening' letter informing you that the company has legal obligation to do a safety check and if you don't allow access they will get a court order. Ignore the letter and the meter reader will magically turn up in the evening or weekend. What makes a mockery of the system is that the meter reader will often post a card for you to enter your own reading to leave on your doorstep so he can obtain the values to stick in his hand held recording device.
It's got much more blazé, they've not looked at the meter here in over a decade. There's been no access letter. They've not even bothered asking for a reading in many years, the estimates have been near enough that I've paid them without fuss. I can only presume none of the neighbours are fiddl ing the meter, so all their monitoring point figures add up. I'm sure it wo uld be a different story if they didn't.
I was told that has to be checked every two years, well the connection between the incoming fuse the meter and the CU, I had to get my tails replaced with larger ones.
snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com explained on 23/08/2018 :
Hmmm, I wonder if that might be it, a neighbour fiddling the meter(s)? In that case, I would expect them to go to every address in the street, rather than a select odd few. They would have no problem with access, because almost all are accessible to read from out side.
What surprised me was that he typed in the readings, into a PDA. I would have expected him to take a photo of the reading. Possible the SM's flash the readings past so quickly, they struggle to catch the reading in the display.
They cannot check my consumer unit, that is indoors. I added an isolator to the tails, in the meter cupboard earlier in the year, just prior to them replacing the SM's for the third time. I ought to let them build a depot in my drive for the SM swappers, for their annual visit :-)
Why am I not surprised? Seems to me this has been seen as a great idea but nobody thought it through and particularly where the installation would be a complete waste of time. Rolling out meters that cannot cope with time variable charging seems to be almost criminal in its ineptness. Brian
Or are you being ironic? As long as public services are in the hands of people whose priority is Profit, not Public Service, there will be no viable, value-for-money public services.
I presume the suppliers are being paid a bounty (or as the Govt will put it: "on results") for installing smart meters?
I had an email from EoN a few months ago, extolling the value of SMs, and would I like one? I didn't bother replying.
Yesterday I had another email from them, the Subject being "Please confirm your Smartmeter appointment".
The email itself has the heading "We're fitting a Smartmeter for you".
Fortunately the next para has three buttons to click: "Confirm", "Reschedule" or "Cancel".
I clicked the 3rd of course, and was given a drop-down list for "WHY?" (forgot which one I chose -- I'll choose another next time).
The whole scheme stinks of transient, spur-of-the-moment, political correctness (on the part of the Government - whichever), and of bounty payments to suppliers.
Like HS2 (for example), nobody, but NOBODY has come up with logical, reasoned argument (as opposed to sound bites, cliches, platitudes and transient, spur-of-the-moment etc...) for this liberal spraying around of our taxes. If someone can show me _exactly why_ smart metering is _actually_ a good strategy _for the nation_, then I'll go for it.
That's all politicians understand, sound bites that don't add up. They don' t even understand that if it were good for the energy companies they'd alre ady be installing them. They've not even realised something as basic as tha t to be any earthly use the meters need to be compatible with all the energ y suppliers. They truly don't know what they're doing.
Another way to look at it is it's just another way to scam the taxpayer of money so they're all for it. It's not as if they have any real prospect of saving energy or money.
And of course it may get a few votes from people that don't understand why they're at best a waste of money.
Were they bell wire before? Surprised a meter reader would notice unless they were. They make no comment about the horrendous rats nest of tails and meters here. Mind you even when the DNO engineers see it they just say "it shouldn't be like that" and walk away...
Have they also abolished the requirement for the routine replacement of (mechanical) meters every 10 years? Ours are 51 and 38 years old. The other is electronic and only 22, I think they had a 20 year cycle.
It's not taxpayers money in the sense that the Government tax us and then they pass the money on to the energy companies. It's the energy companies spending the money and then charging us directly on our bills.
To be a useful project, it should have worked properly out of the box. I should have had no need for three different sets of SM's due to switching to three different suppliers since SM's were installed. Someone ought to have given thought to how SM's would work where there was no mobile signal - there ought to have been a fall back plan, maybe using the customers Internet, or landline phone. The indoor display ought to be able to display the actual meter reading, it doesn't - it misses the most important bit of information.
Like the SM project, I also support the HS2 project, despite the fact that I very rarely use rail. We desperately need prestige projects in this country, even if they might appear to be slightly unnecessary. We need to relieve the present rail system of being so over loaded, HS2 would do that to some extent.
The two aircraft carriers are prestige projects, nothing wrong with that apart from the poor implementation - leaving us for years without any viable aircraft carrier.
the route it takes is immaterial. Our money is being transferred to them against our wishes for no gain - other than them gaining our money. It's a scam that's illegal for us to not pay into.
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