Smart meters

[Andy Burns]

Bwahahahaaaa!

They'll still be estimating based on a siberian winter.

[SteveW]

That's why we are having smart meters fitted tomorrow (after an ongoing battle that ended up with Ofgem telling Eon Next to get their finger out and sort out merging our gas and electricity accounts). The EV charger goes in the day after.

Pity the car is not due until August!!! However, it is a Motability car for my wife, so we may ask them to change it to the new MG4 EV Long Range, which has just gone on the list and we could get around the end of April.

[Jeff Layman]

OVO have made the local news in Hampshire for using their smart meters to remotely cut off at least two customers, and replace their credit payments with pre-payment. Both were 83-years old and one had been in hospital for 4 weeks. After BBC local radio got involved, OVO restored the credit payments and paid both customers compensation - £150 and over £300.

(No online link to this story as yet)

I don't have a smart meter and don't want one.

[whisky-dave]

How does it do that ?

[Martin Brown]

If you pay any attention to it (and haven't had a realtime display before) then it can show you where energy is being wasted and if some high usage device like an immersion heater has been left on.

The one in our Village Hall has saved us a fortune by preventing people walking away leaving a plate warmer, oven or hot water system still on.

No matter how often you tell them people leave things on by accident. Checking the display at the door as you lock up is almost fool proof - although the odd fool still manages to ignore it. We have a lower electricity usage as a result (still rather big now due to ~3x increase). No cap on VH prices - treated as a business.

[Dave Plowman (News]

When I was on a fixed monthly payment, I was in credit part of the year, and in debt at other times. I've no doubt they worked it out so they won, though.

[Dave Plowman (News]

That was the only reason I wanted one. Gas meter mounted sideways in the cellar (on a convenient, for the installer, sleeper wall) so I had to use a torch, lean over and likely get dirty reading it. Electricity one had already been moved to the top of the cellar stairs.

[Tim+]

By giving me access to a variable time of day tariff. Currently on a fixed

4 hour discount tariff but I could also have access to a tariff that would give me six hours, but with times chosen by the power company through the night to spread demand.

Because I can time-shift my heavy consumption devices, my current *average* daily electricity rate is just over 16 pence/kWhr.

Tim

[Chris Green]

That's not how they try to 'sell' smart meters though is it?

[charles]

a great many years ago the Gas Board suggested I pid monthly. They worked out the paymenst by dividing the previous 18 months (which included 2 winters) total by 12. Needless to say, I carried on paying quarterly for what I had consumed.

[Tim+]

I think people hear what they want to hear about smart meters. A lot of tin foil hat wearers making a lot of noise I think.

Tim

[Harry Bloomfield Esq]

That will depend on the item actually drawing current at the time you look at the meter - things like ovens, hot plates and water heaters, regularly switch on and off, as they maintain a temperature.

[Harry Bloomfield Esq]

+1

[SteveW]

For my garage, I simply have a switch next to the lightswitch, which switches all the sockets, except one 2-gang one reserved for the freezer and whichever tool or car battery charger I want to use. A hall could have a switch controlling one or more contactors.

[whisky-dave]

But it's not the smart meter that saves you money, it;'s the person reacting to it. I don;t haveb a smart meter but I do have a wireless thingy wrapped around the single core 'live' wire the th comsumer unit fuse, so it pretty much gives me the amount I'm using.

I think the problem is calling them smart and the less smart amonst the population think these devices magically save them money just by having them installed.

Yes by user intervention not the device itself.

Yes the best way to set them up for most people is to display the amount the current/electricity (pun intended) usage is costing per hour. Then let them decide where to turn stuff off or not.

[Tim+]

As I’ve explained, in my case it gives me access to a “smart” tariff that you simply can’t have without a smart meter. My tariff saves me lots of money.

Of course I still have to use the tariff smartly so in that sense, I am reacting to the data but it goes way beyond simply finding some unappreciated power hogs in your house.

Tim

[Dave Plowman (News]

Quite.

[Jonathan]

I pay SSE on three properties via quarterly billing. I think I pay a bit extra for the paper bills but I don't lend them money. When my father died four years ago, they owed him over £1K from his overpayments on DD.

Jonathan

[alan_m]

+1 Recent we hear a lot about what's happening to some people with smart meters. Go back a year or two and the media was full of peoples' problems with conventional meters - mainly getting into serious debt because the meter hadn't been read for years.

[Paul]

A current transformer, by itself, measures VA.

You take the Amps reading and multiply it by your best guess of what the Volts are at the moment.

Consumer power is measured as W or Watts and involves cos(theta). The Smart Meter is very good at working out cos(theta). And one of the reasons, is it measures the consumption waveform 500,000 times a second. And integrates the area under the curve.

This is how they can lay claim to an accuracy of 1% of so.

To give a demo of the error you can make with a current transformer, these are the numbers for my (soft OFF) PC, where the +5VSB is still running on the thing.

W 1.4 <=== what a Smart Meter would say (bill-able power) VA 8.2 <=== what a current transformer tells you

PF 0.17 cos(theta)

If you know two of the numbers, you can work out the third.

No matter what other crimes or underhanded business practices are associated with smart meters, metrology should not be an issue.

If you had a house filled with incandescent light bulbs, they were all on, the TVs and computers and modems were disconnected, no motors running... then the current transformer would agree with the Smart meter (as the load is then PF=1.0).

Paul