A cry for help?
"The next stage uses the Smart Meters themselves to report an outage. When a Smart Meter senses that it is losing power it sends a ?last gasp? ?? message back to the central office. This message is interpreted as a new outage in the OMS even though the customer probably hasn?t called yet. Typica lly the IVR tries to communicate with the customer advising the status and expected repair times."
It would be trivial to have the meter generate it's own power
Without power, how does that happen? Do you mean to charge a backup battery, when power is present?
That might work for an electric meter, but my gas and water meters have no power. Could, I guess, but don't currently. (NPI)
If it's a pressure regulator as well, the difference could be scavenged but it wouldn't be much. Perhaps it could burn some? ;-)
OK, I can work with the "burning gas at the meter" possibility, but burning *water*?
It's witchery, I say, witchery!
There are moving parts in a water meter. The spinning internal works "might possibly if there is even a meter that does this" turn a miniature generator to recharge the battery.
But now that there are life time batteries in the newer water meters, no need for a generator.
How did we make the leap to gas and water meters? The OP was regarding electrical meters.
Trace the path up.
Actually the OP was discussing a compressor that ran continuously.
Welcome to usenet. ;-)
Gas and water meters have rotating parts.doesn't take a lot of engineering know-how to have the meter generate a small amount of electricity and store it in a supercap to run an RFID device for a month or so. The new electronic power meters are a slam-dunk. they "talk" over the grid in most cases
electromagnetic induction from a rotating magnetic field coupled to one of the rotating metering components of either the gas or water meter. Run the raw low voltage AC signal from the coil mounted in close proximity to the rotating magnet through a rectifier to charge a supercap or lithium cell to power the RFID transmitter and coder/decoder - and the NVRAM that stores the data - - - -
The remote head for my water meter (mounted outside) looks like it could have a battery in it - or mabee it's a supercap charged by the spinning magnet??
Which are a "slam dunk" they are networked over the grid (or "mesh") and are polled by the utility on a regular basis (for time of use data, etc) and when a meter fails to "wake up" it is "flagged". If it fails twice, or whatever, it is noted as "off line" and the techs start investigating. If there is a "cluster" of sleepyheads they send out the crews right away.
I was replying *directly* to the "charge a backup battery when power is present" comment, not about the device generating it's own power.
But as long as you brought it up, is the method you describe actually being used someplace?
You don't get jokes, do you?
Well it is hydrogen-hydroxide. Sounds dangerous to me.
It can surely kill ya dead!
[SNIP]
battery, when power is present?
Yep, just like saliva. It causes cancer, you know. Fortunately, it causes it only when swallowed in small amounts over many years!
At least that's what George Carlin told me. ;)
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