Unsurprising article on smart meters

Customers had to pay for them to be fitted in the first place!

As the gas meter relies on a battery to report the reading there must be millions of "working" meters coming to the point where new batteries are required.

Mine in now on year 13 of an expected 10 years, I've had Cadent replacing pipework this week, which involved them moving the meter [not to where I really want it, but they claim they can't put it anywhere else].

While they were moving it, I asked if they could replace the battery, "Oh no mate, you'd be better of kicking it, then they'll come and replace it"

Nothing wrong with kicking things, official policy for SWR trains. When they stop at a station where the track is on a camber, a door will often unlock but not open. The official policy, courtesy of a guard, is kick the bottom of the door and it will open. Not enough gas pressure apparently to lift the weight of door not hanging vertically. Quite a common sight these days on SWR, people kicking the doors

Known in the trade as "percussive maintenance"

If it's a computer, you "boot" it!

I didn't - they were just fited.

I doubt if all the batteries had the same "end of" date.

Surely the ditching of 3G will kill off tens of thousands of these 'smart' meters

Nominal 10 year life, e.g.

No, but but the (later) ditching of 2G will.

Ah, the magic money tree again. Where do you think the money came from? Yep, a charge on your utility bill.

A predicted 10 year life. Approx 15 million smart gas meters with approx

There seems to be some confusion between the smart meter and the IHD. It's the latter that seems to have a 12 month warranty and not the actual meters. The customer does not "own" the meters although they will have been paid for by increased utility bills.

That would have been true of all previous meters and all the infrastructure, too.

Ah, a bit like OSI networking protocols, then.

That's what happens every time a large organisation starts to micromanage. The number of times I got a spec of 'everything we could possibly want, please' and started costing out the various parts of it, and then discovered that like Net Zero, huge parts of it were not wanted badly enough to pay the price....

...and 'what we *actually need*' was in fact way way smaller.

We dont *need* renewable energy, batteries, interconnectors, wind farms, solar farms, grid backbone expansions, smart meters, heat pumps and electric cars.

We just need nuclear power plants dotted round the country on industrial estates.

And a naturally rising price of fossil fuels as the low hanging fruit are all picked, will sort it all out.

I think I’ve thrown away four now. Certainly not worth paying for.

Tim

Yeah. I am thinking about hooking up a clamp on ammeter sensor and a votage metering device on mine and using a Rapsperry Pi Pico W to calculate power levels, and send it back to my home heating controller.

I certainly don't need a 'smart meter' for that.

Yes, and there has always been a meter replacement program which would have been a mix of new and refurbished/recalibrated meters. Labour costs, plus overheads, to replace meters probably would have cost more than the meter.

I use an old BG Minim power meter like that. It tells me the instant consumption, as well as yesterday’s total, and that of the last seven and thirty days. Batteries in the sender unit last two years, it tells me everything I want to know, and it’s totally reliable.

I log the actual meter readings once a month.

Me neither.

It depends where in the country. In the North-West, smart meters are on the Archiva network, not the mobile phone network.

Only for southerners, us northerners and scots have a dedicated network that does not use the mobile network, possibly because the mobile network is poor up hear.

However I understand this split means that the meters actually have a replaceable communications unit, meaning that only this needs to be replaced to upgrade to 4G...