Lets hope the readings are correct. One of our electricty meters has a spot for a meter reading to be taken automagically. To my knowledge that meter has been read like that precisely twice in 10 years and one of those reading was wildly wrong... Manual reading albeit, with the data stored on handheld computing device, has never messed up a reading.
and what is a minute or second if not a unit? The only difference today is that the 'units' are chopped up rather more finely.
I think the distinction is that the whole thing was inverted relative to the current situation. Whereas you now pay on a pence per minute basis, the old charging system worked on a minutes per charging unit basis - where a charging unit was fixed (ISTR about 4p at one time) but bought you a variable amount of time depending whether your call was local or long distance, and at what time if day it was made. You would have got very little time for each 'unit' when calling a mobile - if indeed mobiles existed at the time!
It is around here. Folkestone water company are installing them at all properties.
Our was fitted last Sept.
Yep. It may appear to be the same on the surface but there are some implications. Say a unit buys you 10 mins, if make a call 10m 1s long it will cost you twice that of a call 10m 0s long, not just (X p/min)/60 more.
What's a "Yep", please?
This is somewhat OT as it's about moving the meter.
The meter at a friends house is inside, just after the stop tap where the pipe emerges from the floor in the downstairs loo adjacent to the pan. The meter at this location is quite unsightly and he wants me to move it by taking the pipe through the wall into the garage and relocating the meter there. The job seems straight forward from a practical point of view, but what about the meter reading implications ?
The meter is the type that has a remote reader, linked by a wire to a fat disk on the outside wall, so the meter man never needs access. The wire has a plug and socket connection to the meter, so may easily be disconnected, (I would have to extend the wire to the new location) but if disconnected is the reading in the sender/meter lost or reset ?
Is there any official restriction on moving it ? Will the water co kick up a fuss and get us both sent to a gulag or worse, forced to watch several episodes of Strictly Come Dancing ?
Roger R
Like I said before. The only difference is that if the 'unit' is one second that is more fine grained than a unit of 240 seconds.
EXCEPT that the old unit *wasn't* 240 seconds - or any other fixed amount of
*time* - it was fixed amount of *money*!With the current system, the cost of a call increments by the appropriate variable ppm rate whenever a new timing unit begins. With the old system, the cost of a call incremented by a *fixed* charging unit whenever the variable time allocated to that unit was exceeded. So the call charge bill was always an integral number of charging units.
They're *not* the same except for the granularity - because one uses a time granularity and the uses uses a cost granularity.
That's true, but seems somewhat pedantic when my point was that the cost of a local call in the UK varied in some relationship to its length, whereas in the US it did not. Exactly what that relationship is and was is not really relevant.
I do remember phone bills with "units", but not paying them :-)
Pete
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