Smart water meter

Out of interest, what do your neighbours say about their water meters? If it is one of their meters, are STWater confident that they have installed the meter in agreement with s3.(2) of The Water (Meters) Regulations 1988?

One neighbour who was already on a meter before the smart meters were fitted, has 4 occupants and 3 cars (including a teenage daughter) so comparing usage not likely to be very helpful.

The other is a couple, they've not switched to the smart meter since they were fitted, I will offer to read theirs to see if they might save money.

The meter certainly feeds my house.

They didn't ask whether we wanted meters fitted, they told us they were being fitted, however they did say we wouldn't automatically be enrolled onto the meters, I did expect they would be remotely reading them all the same, instead the sub-contractor (Network Plus?) seems to not have provided installation details to ST.

that's 14,000 litres ...50l per day.

Low, but not impossible

-- I was brought up to believe that you should never give offence if you can avoid it; the new culture tells us you should always take offence if you can. There are now experts in the art of taking offence, indeed whole academic subjects, such as 'gender studies', devoted to it.

Sir Roger Scruton

Pretty much my consumption. Draw your own conclusions . . . :-)

The number of occupants would obviously play into this, but I would love to know what impact having a home which is detached would have on water usage.

Am I supposed to turn the tap on more(or less) often than someone in a semi? Greater surface area for evaporation?

Ah, the great unwashed :)

Possibly a detached house will have larger garden using more water or have more shower facilities - again using more water

This is a detatched house - it's smaller than most of our neighbours semis. Water the garden??? (You obviously don't live in Wales.) We haven't watered the garden in the last 25 years, & use rainwater barrels for the greenhouse.

The number of showers (or baths) isn't relevant. Consider a house with a single occupant but 3 showers. Will that occupant shower more often? (repeat the thought experiment for any number of occupants)

I'd imagine it's a correlation based on property value and consumption of utiities in general - higher value, higher consumption. And detached properties /tend/ to be more expensive.

There's also a notion of 'energy decadence' - that consumption increases and awarenesss of consumption decreases in line with wealth.

Of course exceptions exist - some of society's poorest live in some quite high value homes. And plenty of low occupancy in larger homes.

But as a general trend, my guess is that's what they're doing. It may form the basis of a starting point - DD payments maybe. But once the actual trend becomes apparent the water co. should adjust payments in line with actual consumption.

They don't seem to factor in having teenagers in their algorithms, though when ours left home, consumption of bog paper dropped through the floor.

Not down the pan then…? ;-)

Tim

Some folk have a shower every 6 months whether they need it or not :)

But the transmission device on this water meter says LoRaWAN (as in Wide Area Network). This is the first time I've heard of LoRa being used for metering. Think how many receivers would need to be spread across the countryside to do this.

And that suggests it's not like the "lorry driving past" version. There's no particular reason a water meter would have a "full stack" for a protocol (not if you expect the battery to last ten years).

The transmission might not be in plaintext, so while you could listen for the signal (with say, a HackRF), there's no guarantee you will see the meter register value as a bit pattern.

Paul

I don't know whether STwater operates their own network of LoRaWAN receivers, or uses e.g. thethingsnetwork.org ?

I replied saying "ok, send a surveyor if you must, but it'll be a waste of his time".

Last night they sent a text to everyone in the street saying there's disruption to water supplies in your area, click here for details, and while there I saw a button to [apply for a smartmeter] which reminded me they hadn't replied, so I clicked and it said you've already got one, so someone did get their arse in gear.

Gave them a reading this morning and direct debit has dropped from £97/m to £27 (which they only take from april to november).