OVO energy. Although they take a fixed monthly direct debit like all the others they give 3% interest on any excess credit balance. They also have a "Flexible Direct Debit Plan" which apparently gives the customer more control over how much to pay each month but I'm happy with 3% return on any overpayment.
So they can cut your power now if they want to. Why would they bother with a house when they can shed a street?
HV current transformers are used for earth leakage detection on the HV circuits, and for overload/fault current detection on the higher voltage circuits where fuses become less viable or automatic/remote reset is required (reclosers).
I am not aware of any metering.
British Gas. I've been providing monthly meter readings and getting accurate monthly direct debited bills as a result for the past 2 years.
However, my contract with BG has just expired and the best deal I can get from them [1] is around 11% more expensive than I was paying so I'm in the process of moving supplier.
[1] One other "supplier" gives a saving around £220. The small print says that BG is their source and the bills come from BG trading. I'm not going to give them my trade this way if I cannot get the same deal as an existing customer.Luckily there are plenty of other alternatives with savings of £220 to £200 based on my average energy consumption figures for the past five years.
The company I work for are involved in supplying equipment for a large number of installations where data is returned to a processing hub where the information can be used for any purpose including remote metering as well as fault monitoring.
I guess it may not be too many years before even the smallest of substations or transformers on poles have this type of monitoring equipment.
Where I work the gas smart meter seems to have malfunctioned, they got a bill with a wildly innacurate remote meter reading totalling ?4500 (usual blll is ?250) and by the time we spotted it, it had already been taken out of the account by direct debit.
YES!YES!YES
NEVER NEVER take anything that a supply authority gives you for nothing, there is always an ulterior motive, it will always be for their benefit, it will always come back and sting you.
Victoria Aus woes
I have many times asked EDF if they know if the software to look at them from a computer is accessible to the blind user, and they seem not to know. Just another case of being clueless and in the end leaving themselves open to action under the Eequalities act I suspect. Brian
They would not "shed a street" either.
That would involve pulling at least (generally) 2 sets of 3 link fuses rated at anywhere from 300 amps up, *each*. Would you like to undo the bolts on a connection then lift out an assembly with 240V on it, 415V to the next bit of metal and (but now) way in excess of 300A running through it?
Well, do post the youtube video!
No. They do one of two things, cut whole districts at the substation or cut off one house with a personal visit.
It must be useful for the DNOs to know how power is flowing around the networks to, with respect to planning upgrades.
In the old days, only the biggest substations had any sort of metering - he sort that were inside a building with a permanent attendant. Now, especially if there are ready fitted currant transformers, how attractive it must be to pop a Li battery black bog with a 3G SIM on those for very little cost...
The one I would take would be water as long as the data was realtime at a daily or better hourly level. It would be a fantastic way to know if you had a slow leak whilst away.
A clever water company would sell this as a feature: set the times you are away and we will text you if you have any sort of water consumption. We'll also text you if you seem to have any sort of small water consumption overnight that did not involve a sudden surge (like using the bathroom).
Just turn off all your taps, wait for any tanks to fill and then look at the meter. If it is going round you have a leak it only takes a few drips for the meter reading to change. I had this 'conversation' with whoever installed my meter as I was not convinced their joint was water tight. I have always wondered how the new meter is connected to my old steel pipes.
In message , at
16:44:47 on Fri, 6 Mar 2015, Mike Clarke remarked:These sorts of comments are based on an ability to do a waveform analysis (of your total consumption) and pick out the components using fairly basic digital filtering methods.
For example, if you see a 2kW spike that lasts around 90 seconds, you can hypothesise that it's an electric kettle or a toaster. And if it happens during Coronation Street advertising breaks, more likely the latter (and will also correlate fairly well with watching ITV).
Other appliances will have their own characteristic components.
The TV programme thing is also related to being able to filter out a pattern where the power consumption of the TV varies with the brightness of the picture, and seeing if any of the contemporaneously broadcast TV channels has a likely candidate.
What I'm not convinced about, however, is whether the smart meter in your house [one of which was shown on Breakfast TV this morning] can use those sorts of techniques to tell you how much power your deep freeze is using (you'd need quite an impressive user interface - and they just seem to have a few buttons and a small LCD display).
Meanwhile, one of the hiccups with the scheme is apparently that telling people what the cost of their consumption is *now* [I have had a clamp-on meter for that for over five years now] results in them using
*more* electricity not less.For example mine is telling me that my current consumption [the background on a Saturday mid-morning] is ~600W at a cost of £1.77/day.
That's very little incentive to go round switching off lights just to save the odd 20p.
Although when the next bill comes in, at typically £250/*quarter* then it's possible I'll think about how I might get that down by £50.
In message , at 19:52:14 on Fri, 6 Mar 2015, Andrew Gabriel remarked:
British Gas keep nagging me to go onto such a scheme. But I refuse because it's just another thing to add to the list of monthly tasks-for-other-people (and which I'll forget, or not be at home that week etc).
A quarterly post-paid bill is much better (that way they are lending me energy, not me lending them money).
Are you on a monthly-DD-estimate tariff because you've been told it's cheaper?
I must admit to having just dumped OVO. they have recently introduced a lower tariff in much the same way as the big suppliers but are charging existing customers £30/fuel to change to it!! Cheeky bastards
After a discussion with them they admitted yes, it is £30/fuel to change tariff and another £30/fuel when you leave them but only £30 fuel to leave them. It seemed obvious to leave and just pay once and they made no move to persuade me otherwise. They do not deserve to succeed IMHO The 3% interest on credit balance was creative I'll give them that. I've gone back to Jock power, slightly lower tariff and lower Std charge than the new OVO one and no exit penalty.
You missing the point old chap :)
I can't do any of that whilst on holiday ...
But what you say is still a good idea - I was looking at it from an automated alarm point of view...
No, I'm on quarterly post-paid too. I would be happy to go onto direct debit if it reflected actual usage.
Just been a small mention of smart meters on Moneybox (Radio 4). At the moment, none of the smart meters are interoperable between suppliers.
Also, government has not made any progress standardising the meters to be used in the national role-out, meaning it now can't happen in the original timescales, as that required the roll-out to start this year, which cannot now happen.
Lots of doubt is being raised on the viability of the whole program in other places.
The main consumer benefit quoted is that you can see your power usage in real-time. This has been available for many years with consumer self-install monitors, and smart metering is not required to do this. Indeed, research with early smart meter adopters has shown that after a couple of months, the interest in this wears off, and consumers find that appliances actually cost vastly less to use that they guessed beforehand, and they quickly stop bothering to try saving.
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