SMART meter understanding

The gas side is pretty naff. The in-house display only updates every 30 minutes, so it should show gas consumption. The Electricity is very good.

How would an ammeter help with gas. The In-House display is very good at showing instantaneous electricity consumption. It updates every 10 seconds. You can set it to show power not cost. Mine is very good. I just turned some lights off to check and it just dropped from 800 watts to 780 watts within a couple of updates.

An ammeter is very inaccurate in a modern home. Despite what many adverts and videos imply you only get charged for "real power" and many modern appliances have what is called a "power factor" other than one, so the average volts x average amps is not the power you are being billed for. If you have a smart meter you can see the power factor in the smart meter menus, but not in the in-home display.

You used to be able to get "clip on" current sensors but really they are pretty useless if you have lots of switched mode power supplies, LED or CFL bulbs. These all have a power factor other than 1. You need to take account of this, which your smart meter does.

The same goes for some of the cheaper plug-in monitors, which go in a socket, and then you plug the appliance in to the socket. You need one that measures power factor. Here is a page about this and how one product handles this..

Dave

They might be comparing your usage during the ‘free’ hour, not with your daily average of 0.25kWh/h, but with your consumption during that hour when there wasn’t a ‘free’ offer in place - and as this might be well above your average, there won’t be much of a payback. You need to find out exactly what is being compared to what, and that isn’t clear from what’s been posted.

Frankly, ICBA with organising my daily life round the random pricing of electricity. I’m on a fixed tariff and use whatever electricity I want when I want, pay by DD that I can vary, and don’t build up large debits or credits.

A simple BG minim display tells me instant consumption, consumption since midnight, yesterday’s, last seven days, and last 30 days, so I have all the info I need to keep an eye on things. It looks like this:

Ask Octopus to turn your meter into dumb mode, and get on with life…

A clip on current sensor coupled to a voltage sensor and a decent chip like a Pi Pico to calculate and average the instantaneous VI will give you 'true power'

Indeed - dedicated power measurement chips (as found in a smart meter) run at frequencies like 20kHz and integrate V*I over many samples of the 50Hz waveform to produce accurate energy consumption and power factor readings.

They're a far cry from the 'moving coil ammeter' suggested.

Theo

That, typically 1400-1500h, consumption is 0.25kWh.

there won’t be much of a payback. You need to find out exactly

That ball is in Octopus's court. I'm not holding my breath.

I suspect that there is a Comms issue. On the Octopus website there are pages which detail when the last update was received. They disagree.

FUBAR !

Yes, but the whole point 'selling' smart meters was to allow the householder to watch power consumption quickly and easily. For this requirement accuracy doesn't really matter. What you want to know is that there's something consuming about 2kw, or not. Whether it's

For billing of course accuracy is required.

As an example of sledgehammer, nut, and energy costs, my petrol car costs

But so many of these projects omit the instantaneous VI..

If you are trying to get your background load down, 100watts difference does matter. At present 100 watts is roughly 2.4kWh per day @ the price cap that is 62p/day or around £19/month.

Dave

Some people have swimming pools etc, but you don't need that kind of monthly consumption. This is just in an instantaneous half hourly period, so having electric water heating running (a couple of 10kW electric showers or an electric boiler) could take 20kW. Or three EVs on charge concurrently.

If you submitted it on paper, somebody would have had to transcribe it. The smart meter system has automated data collection and processing, so somebody would have to actively go in and change things. There would likely need to be a reason for them to do that. Or there could be a bug in the processing code, but a bug would likely have some kind of pattern to it - it wouldn't just randomly flip data.

What does the Octopus website say about your consumption readings for that day? You should be able to see the half-hourly consumption graph.

Theo

And where does this "background load" come from? What is contributing to this 100W every hour, day and night? The EU has recently introduced a limit of 0.5W (falling to 0.3W in 2 years) for equipment in "off" mode, and 1W in "standby" mode. Just how many TVs, radios, routers, clocks, etc would you need to leave on to get that 100W? How much equipment has to be left on anyway if you want it to work when required, such as a PVR, timer-operated washing machine, PIR security light, etc.

In my experience, there's very little "left on" unknowingly. The light is on because I have to see to read; the heating is on because I'm feeling cold; the TV is on because I'm watching it, etc. Even if one of us forgot to turn off the bathroom light before going to bed it'll only be on for perhaps 10 hours using 5W. So that's an extra 50Wh - less than 2p!

I’ve just downloaded the stats from my car charger for the last 3 years.

In that time 12,730 kWh of power has been delivered to my car at 7p per kWh (£891) In that time I’ve driven about 45,000 miles which works out at a smidge under 2p.

If I had been on a “regular” fixed tariff I would have paid somewhere over £3,000. For me the advantages of being on a smart tariff are clear but I do accept that my mileage is higher than average.

Tim

In our case, fridge freezers. Most folk leave those running 24/7.

Tim

That's not background. That's essential power, and it's not running

I didn't know there were 'projects' I was going to make my own.,.

Golly. That is nearly as much as I spend on coffee beans.

And it all goes to heating the house, admittedly at a rather higher price than oil

True. All my kit is left on knowingly. And it's actually ON. Not on standby.

Always on ====== Three of those plus a chest freezer. Sewage treatment plant VHF/UHF distribution amp PABX Router ONT

On standby ======= Two TVS Laser printer. Dishwasher Washing machine

It all helps to keep the house warm and if this country ran on nuclear power instead of f****ng windmills it would be cheaper than burning oil to heat it.

Mind you its nothing compared to having a wife unit permanently plugged in. Or a couple of dogs

I have one which reports power both in W and in VA, the ratio between the two being the power factor. For some reason I've never looked at a device with a low power factor (motor, switched mode power supply) to see how much difference there is between the figures. I'll do that out of curiosity!

No but quite a bit of stuff is actually on, I have the router, the ONT, I think four WiFi Access Points, NAS box, Smart Speaker, Smart Heating controller and the real power guzzler, a peltier mini fridge for the beer.

Dave.

In which case a greater sum would be rebated - but both I and the extreme case you hypothesise would each get a similar *percentage* rebate. The narrow-minded thinking behind this foolishness doesn't fit at all with Octopus's "Fill Your Boots" statement.

The paper forms were meant to be machine-read. The case I'm talking of was an online submission.

The

Do you know how naive that paragraph reads? I've come across many organisations with a hi-tech image and yet using work-by-hand methods and/or fundamentally wrong software implementations. Not the least National Savings and Investments.

For the moment I'm leaving Octopus to do the barking. That's what I pay them to do and I've other more important affairs to deal with. Up to yesterday they've done nothing but re-bill me. So, FOUR DD requests set up in just over three weeks. Great.