Smart water meters

[Jonathan]

We own three properties and for reasons to do with installing an EV charging point ended up having to have the electricity and gas meters replaced by 'smart' ones (long story). Each of the six meters has had to be reaplced at least once since they failed. I still have to often read the meters for SSE. They then recently sent me a letter saying they were reducing the frequency rerading of one meter from half-hourly to monthly. All attemptes to reverse this have failed!

Anyway Severn Trent have contacted me by letter saying they want to replace the exisitng water meter on one property by a 'smart' meter, I am ignoring this for the present. Dooes any one have any experieces of 'smart' water meters?

Mnay thanks

Jonathan

[Mark Carver]

I think they are supposed to have an RFID transponder inside them, that is 'woken up' by an appropriate signal, from a bloke from the water board wandering along the pavement with a device that harvests the readings as he walks along  ?

[Jonathan]

Well I already have one that can be read from outside the property but they don't seem to know about that.

Jonathan

[Dave W]

My water meter under the public pavement is 'smart', allowing it to be read wirelessly. I've never had any trouble.

[Andy Burns]

I think there's a lot less smartness in a smart watermeter, just enough to send a reading to a drive-by/walk-by device.

[Brian Gaff]

Depends what they mean. My new one is only a couple of years old and the guy who reads them simply walks along the road a bit like a water deviner with a gadget that bleeps when its read. As for electricity meters reading times, I elected for half hourly, and it thus feeds back to the edf app fairly fast, but in the billing they only poll the reading at the billing issue times, so it makes sod all difference to the bill. the internal device, the speaking one in my case is almost instant and you can see the price change as you turn stuff on and off in seconds. It works via encrypted wireless. I don't have Gas, but the most common problem is the battery it uses to send signals to the other meter. The battery looks like a D cell, and may be just that but it needs to be changed periodically. As I say I don't have gas but maybe it cannot let the user know to replace it since its too dead. However is signal is lost that might be a kind of clue?

Brian

[www.GymRats.uk]

By chance I had "parliament today(?)" or some other such reality t.v. droning on in the background yesterday. It wasn't the usual left/right arguments I'd expected but a load of old men sat in a comparatively small room. I presumed it was the House of Lords or something... Anyway they were discussing various things on how to "deal with" the water companies and why were some companies paying dividends when they were losing so much money etc etc. Then the subject of water-meters came up and one "Lord" proposed making it compulsory for all households to be fitted with water meters further to the recent water issues this summer (not that it affected us in the West country where we didn't have any hosepipe bans).

The jolly "unelected old men born into power" gang all agreed that water meters should be made compulsory and it could be done without the requirement of any additional "laws" being passed.

So I expect there will be a huge surge in "smart" water meters being rolled out in the imminent future, no doubt starting with the wors affected areas of the country.