Smart meters - good or bad or neither?

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maple1

Minister of Fire
Sep 15, 2011
11,082
Nova Scotia
Found a couple old threads. One locked and the other likely would be if resurrected. Both with dated info.

Those who have been through this in their area - good bad or neither? Can you relate experiences? Lots of hysteria can be found on the net if you look for it.

Our utility is starting a roll-out, with an opt-out option for a nominal monthly fee.

Feedback?
 
My natural gas utility finished an AMR (automated meter reading) rollout about 2 years ago. Lots of problems scheduling reads of basement residential meters, along with increasing slip/fall and dog incidents. Rollout was quick and only involved the small "meter head", not the meter body, so most required no service interruption. That was important because any interruption would involve pilot relights so the customer would need to be home. I think the system is Itron based, and a "radio van" drives thru the neighborhood and "pings" the meters as it drives by. Before, reads were every other month with stupidly high over-estimates in between. Now we get read and billed actual usage monthly.

My electric utility is in the first year of a three year rollout (likely to become a 5 year rollout). Drivers were similar to above, but I think "time of use rates" are on the horizon and these new meters are more like mini computers than simple car-type odometers. The meter swap takes about 60 seconds, so you will see a service outage. There are several AMR systems from different vendors, mostly differentiated on the type of communication used for back-haul to the utility.
One system, the slow speed comm is based on "carrier signals" sent from the local substation using the power lines. I have that in the vac cabin in the Pocono's of PA for two years now. I don't know how often they can ping (read) my meter, but they seemed to have prior day's data when I last called them.
My home utility is going with some kind of proprietary radio system that requires them to install hundreds, if not thousands, of these "12 inch candle stick" size antenna on their wooden distribution poles. I envision they'll have a form of cellular or broadband wifi RF signal overlaying the entire service territory with the ability to ping each meter in real time. I imaging this would be a mid speed comm system, but probably way more that they need for AMR (so I could see them renting out data capacity to others, like security companies or whatnot).
The "best", but most expensive, AMR system seems to be based on the existing cellular and future 5G wireless tech. The problem here is that the tech is so quickly evolving that the local utilities are not ready to mingle their "customer cash registers" with this uncertain comm system. Even more likely is that the old school utilities don't want to lock themselves into comm and hardware contracts, and effectively turn their "customer billing" over to someone else (like Verizon, ATT, or Sprint).

I have been out of this business for 20 years, and it was all R&D back then. But I did call, back in Feb, to get on the list for early meter swaps, and they were delighted that I wanted one. Three weeks later I noticed my clocks blinking and then saw the new meter on the side of the house. I now get monthly actual reads, but they are behind on their web designs and I have very little of the promised extra visibility of my daily usage. I suspect when they work out the kinks they'll want me to forgo my paper billing in exchange for the full monte. I also learned by watching a YouTube contributor that these AMR meters have a small motor-contactor inside, implying that a "disconnect" could now be performed remotely. Lets see how that little Easter Egg comes into use in the future.

Hope this was helpful. I don't buy into a lot of the internet conspiracy on RF radiation. The RF output is in line with our cell phones, and even my refrigerator is now appearing on my router list as a wifi hotspot. Plus my RF exposure limits were probably well exceeded during my Ham Radio days. Times change, pick your fights.
 
No issues here. They have been in place for almost a decade in our area.
 
No issues here. They have been in place for almost a decade in our area.
Us too. About a decade. I can't imagine why I would have a problem with these meters. All meters can be inaccurate.
 
Smart meters tend to be regarded as bogeyman . Some utilities did a very poor job of rolling them out. The actual internal electronics are pretty robust and tend to be more accruate then the old style mechanical meters. There are several types of smart meters. Some, like mine, are just read remotely by a employee that is driving by. Its always broadcasting an ID, and the instantaneous readings but they are only read when the driver drives by. They are popular in rural areas as the utility does not need to build a lot of infrastructure. The standard smart meters in more urban areas are sending a signal to the utility continuously in real time using a couple of different technologies usually wirelessly. The utility then can look at your usage minute by minute and collect lots of useful information. This allows then to predict power demand and determine if a customer has lost power. If they know what customers are without power they can predicatively guess what utility circuits are out of service and dispatch repair crews to fix the faults in the system. The utility can also use the data to encourage customers to load shift big loads into periods of less demand and guilt them by comparing them to their neighbors usage. They also can do tiered billing where the price for power varies during the time of day or when the price of wholesale power goes up.

The tradeoff is a homeowner is giving away data that can be abused. Anyone with access to the data can make assumptions on when folks are home, kind of handy for a burglar. The other issue in Maine was that the utility data collection system is powered by the grid so during a big storm much of the useful data on outages can not be read and customer meters were not read. Their new billing software was buggy and defaulted to estimated billing based on prior months during a period of very high power demand or just plain generated very high bills based on incomplete data. Users got bills based on a prior period of normal usage and then the next month got socked with a very high bill to make up for the difference between estimated billing and the actual use. There were other billing issues but to a customer its just attributed to the smart meter.

The RFI issue has been universally proven to not be an issue except for a psychological one of the homeowner. RF is everywhere in an urban setting and the meter is not contributing significantly over the background level.
 
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One cool thing with these smart meters is that there are many that let you access the data. Many utilies allow acess on their websites and there are many third party devices to read the data from the meter. Since this is revenue grade data its way more accurate than any panel added energy monitor.
 
I wish I could find again & link here some of the tinfoil hat stuff being floated around here (where I am) lately on FB. :rolleyes:

EDIT: Found one No Smart Meters
 
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I wish I could find again & link here some of the tinfoil hat stuff being floated around here (where I am) lately on FB. :rolleyes:

The noise to signal ratio tends to be quite high on Facebook ;)
 
I can't wait to get Smart Meters. In two NY locations, we still have a person walk to the meter to read it - completely ridiculous in 2019. Then, we get estimated reads every other month since it costs too much to read a meter every month.

But the Smart Meter rollout seems very slanted to the benefit of utilities only. If they gave more incentives to customers to want these meters, e.g. favorable off-peak rates, instantaneous meter readouts in the house, nice web portals, etc. there would be more customer acceptance, in my opinion.

Agreed also that the never-changers and tinfoil hat types will never want these for a variety of reasons that they can't explain or that we won't understand.
 
Like others, it must be a decade now we've had smart meters, and I'm on my second one. The first was programmed for single direction feeding, and would continue to add to your bill if you somehow managed to back feed the grid. (Say you installed a PV array and didn't notify the utility) The second unit we've had since August 2013. It's a completely different brand than the first smart meter and is programmed to read bi-directionally (for Net Metering). I suspect the utility uses the make it totally obvious rationale for using two different brands of smart meters. If you have one like mine, you obviously have some form of onsite production with a Net Metering agreement. If you have the ordinary meter everyone has, you don't. These two meters rely on different radio systems to relay the data back to the central office. For several months after our Net Meter was installed, we lost the ability to keep daily and hourly track of our energy usage. Once the utility installed the additional infrastructure necessary, I can see yesterday's hourly usage data with a few clicks of my mouse, sitting anywhere there is internet access. I can see data further back, but the most recent data I can ever see is "yesterday". For real time consumption, I have my own devices.

After 10 years using a "Smart Meter", would I go back to a mechanical utility meter? Why? That's like asking if I want to go back to manual windows in my car... Mine will do everything others have described, from outage tracking, to hourly usage data. At my house, using energy consumption to determine whether anyone is home or not is flawed logic. Having a producing PV array on the roof totally tweaks with the energy consumption of the house, as do some automation systems I have.
 
I can't wait to get Smart Meters. In two NY locations, we still have a person walk to the meter to read it - completely ridiculous in 2019. Then, we get estimated reads every other month since it costs too much to read a meter every month.

But the Smart Meter rollout seems very slanted to the benefit of utilities only. If they gave more incentives to customers to want these meters, e.g. favorable off-peak rates, instantaneous meter readouts in the house, nice web portals, etc. there would be more customer acceptance, in my opinion.

Agreed also that the never-changers and tinfoil hat types will never want these for a variety of reasons that they can't explain or that we won't understand.

I used to get a thank you note from utility in the winter for running a snowblower track past my meter. When my meter went in, the local supervisor insisted that my meter had to be on the front of my house and closest to the street. Unfortunately my driveway accesses the back of the house which means a long walk through deep snow if I did not run my snowblower past it. My oil tank connections are near my meter so when I used oil it was long pull for the hose.

IMHO, the utilites switched out the meters to cut manpower and upgrade their system. There were large incentives thrown at the utilities to put in smart meters as a backdoor way of subsidizing US businesses who made the equipment and infrastructure required to support it.

Real time smart meters are a step towards real time pricing. Its used in a few utilities. Much of the cost and air emissions of running a power system is dealing with short term peaks, putting in automatic consumer disincentives for using power when demand for power is high is a viable approach. Folks with home storage can program their batteries to take over when power rates are high and recharge when rates are low.