Smart meters: what's the catch?

[Andrew Gabriel]

They have the ability to remote disconnect you without any visit. Some people might regard that as a disadvantage.

Personally, I think this control needs to be taken away from the suppliers and passed to an independant body which will require some suitable evidence and/or court order before allowing disconnection. I'm not very comfortable with the suppliers being able to control it themselves. There's also the issue of this control being broken into due to poor security - imagine if some school kid in Russia finds he can switch off the power to

10 million UK homes at the push of a button on his laptop.

[Chris J Dixon]

Are you sure that these meters have that capability?

Chris

[Mark]

All the information states that there will be two-way communication between the utility company and the meter. Nowhere, in their marketing leaflets, do they suggest a use for communication from company to meter only the other way. So what use could they put it???

In addition - in the consultation documents it states "further work is needed to asses some of the issues raised before a final decision is taken on this element" (remote disabling). Only remote disabling for commercial customers has been ruled out.

[funkyoldcortina]

They check that before they fit the meter.

[funkyoldcortina]

I already indicated why they need two way comms.

From another post:-

The same meters can be used for pre-pay or post-pay billing. For pre-pay billing, the customer can pay on the web, over the phone or at a Paypoint location and the account is automatically topped up a bit like a mobile phone topup account. The credits are added to the meter over the GPRS interface and you can see on the meter how much credit you have remaining. If you switch between pre-pay and post-pay a signal is sent over the air to the meter and it alters its behaviour accordingly.

[Chris J Dixon]

ISTMT the final details for the national roll-out of smart meters is yet to be fully agreed. Therefore any early implementers can only be working to rules of their own devising, and may well have to replace such meters with ones complying with whatever is imposed.

Chris

[funkyoldcortina]

That is not likely to be anything more than a software upgrade. The meters are made by Landis+Gyr (AMPY). Our electric meter looked like this

the left) - we did not have the optional remote display.

The gas meter had a digital display which you could read locally by pressing a button.