Smart Meters

Think of it as being sort of like piracy.

The pros and cons simply come down to which ship you are on.

If you're talking about the ones they're trying to promote around here............I wouldn't touch them.

The way these work, they give you a one time $25 payment to hand them over control of your electricity usage via control of your AC unit, etc. No thanks.

We have one in Arizona, but it doesn't regulate how much power we use. The feature is probably there.

You CAN save money, if you want to rearrange your life. I go out and stare at ours every once in a while. It gives you 3 different sets of numbers so you can see how your are doing.

The money savings comes from a reduction in personnel. Meter readers are not needed.

We've got those here. They are able to read the meters remotely. I'm not sure what the OP is referring to.

The add on units I was talking about, allow them to turn off the AC or other appliances during periods of high demand..................without any warning. They just have control over your stuff.

They're gonna have to give me more than 25 bucks to hand them over that kind of control.

They benefit the utility!

They may promote energy savings but they do not save the customer any money at least not in my case.

As far as electric utility "Smart Meters", consumers in my area were told that we would save on our electric bill because meter readers would no longer have to come out to read the meters.

We were also told that the meters would pay for them selves in a year.

Two years later, I am using less KWHs per month, being charged the same per KWH as two years ago and paying $35.00 more per month due to a new line item called "User Equipment Fee".

Meter readers never came out in the first place. The utility would mail a card each month for the customer to fill in and then call an automated billing system.

When I called to inquire about the added fee, I was told that the User Equipment Fee was to pay for the installation of the "Smart Meters".

Not so smart if you ask me but unfortunately they will be connected to every customer's utilities in the not so far future. I guess this is called progress

We didn't have a choice on the new meters. Of course I don't really miss the meter readers traipsing into the yard with no warning either. I don't live near anyone close, so I could easily be walking around the yard in my underwear.

Yup, I can relate!

The mind boggles, it could have been worse though.

Here in Oz they are rolling out this smart meter plan to have these devices installed in every building that uses power. I have one at home and like some of the other posts I too have a look at the display now and then. No benefit to us at all, increased cost for the installation, Have had door to door sales people try to get me to install "Power saving" devices for "Free" in return for singing a contract with their company! Told them to Shove it! There have been several house fires attributed to "Smart" meters and /or faulty installation of the same! Not sure what the outcome was! One can refuse to have the device fitted but this is merely postponing the inevitable!!

Utility companies here in Oman are promoting smart meters aggressively. We yet to understand its advantages

I have heard a lot of negative comments from customers on the smart meter front. Could help or possibly hurt depending on your old meter I assume. http://www.apostleair.com/

All advantage is central, all disadvantage is local.

It allows multitier pricing.

It allows a new "equipment fee"item forever.

Central reading

Central control of your equipment. The soccer mom

want to wash the uniforms now. Sorry, no can do.

By midnight the power might be turned back on.

Tinpots wet dream.

One advantage is every month at the same time /day readings could be taken remotely eliminating extra charges for late readings. Main disadvantage is it is subject to tampering by hackers who can mischievously switch on/off remotely and increase your bill even when you are not at home.

Smart meters are registerd FCC devices and use pulsed microwaves for communication that "allow" utilities and customers the ability to monitor usage. Of course this would also "allow" the ability to "intercept" the usage data. Wou would use that information....well think about it, if I knew that at 7:30am Monday through Friday your electrical usage dropped off significantly...my guess is you leave the house and it's empty.

On my primary residence, I am being charged for a Smart Meter but one is not installed. Texas okay-ed a charge in advance of installation. (Thanks Rick Perry) I have paid for this about 2.5 - 3 years now.

However, at my home in the country, one has been installed(it's a long way from the front gate). My bill has been consistently higher since them by about 20%. I have all my statements since I have owned the property (about 7 years).

Companies don't do things like this for the consumer. We may get small benefits, but they aren't the real reason for the change.

I can now be charged a rate for peak demand hours and another for off peak hours.

I am sure it freed up money which wound up in an executive's bonus.

GA- Good information.

I have to say though................around here, I don't see any savings showing up on my bill.

Smart meters don't switch power on or off. All they do is allow the utility to remotely read your meter. They can be used to monitor and log your power usage over the course of the day. Some utilities are offering this info to customers to allow them to adjust usage patterns to use energy more efficiently. When properly set up and networked, smart meters can be used to pinpoint outages as well.

Many utilities are pushing remote switches to allow them to cycle a homeowner's air conditioner or heat pump. Doing this, they can reduce peak demand. This does not affect the rest of the household. The device is connected to the A/C unit directly, not to the mains supply. It allows them to avoid upgrading infrastructure due to growth in suburban areas. I have not heard from anyone who has one of these, so I can't say how annoying it might be.

I can see how utilities would want to avoid having their employees shocked by seeing Kramarat in his skivvies. That's an added benefit for the utility with smart meters.

Actually, most smart meters on the market today include a solenoid operated disconnect under the glass. The old method of dealing with those who were perpetually delinquent paying their bill is a disconnect built into a collar which connects between the socket and the meter. The collars are big and bulky and easy to bypass by just unplugging them and reinstalling the meter.

The next step is to offer customers the option to pre-pay their usage, which is already happening in Texas. Here's one company which offers that service. The concept is very similar to pre-paid cell phones. You pay in advance for a certain amount of energy. Since you pay in advance there's no deposit or credit check. As long as you have a positive balance, the electricity keeps flowing. But if you forget to make a payment and your account runs dry, your power is immediately interrupted. Turning it back on is as simple as making a payment online or by telephone. There's no reconnect fee or penalty.

My understanding is that "smart" meters are required for the new "smart" grid fed by alternative energy sources. As these sources fail, no wind, sun etc. loads will have to be shed. In the bad old days, entire blocks or areas were browned out. This practice is unacceptable in the new order. With smart meters, individuals can be turned off, allowing our betters to share the remaining power.

Economist, et.al.

Most of the comments appear to be solely for electric usage and address only the topic of who benefits. Smart meters are electronic devices subject to the typical benefits and difficulties associated with them--high cost for early adopters and decreasing costs as quantities increase and engineering standardizes, possibility for component failures or loss of component calibration, susceptibility to high voltage surges or spikes, etc.

If my memory is correct, initially they were used only for large customers whose loads could be interrupted or scheduled on a time-of-day basis, for peak shaving, emergency load management, etc. The customers received reduced rates for their consumption, as an incentive to reimburse them for this probability of temporary loss of power to portions of their plants. The utility received a big benefit in the ability to maintain loads within the capacity of their system. After the 1960's, electric utilities have increasingly embraced (or grudgingly tolerated) energy conservation, peak load shaving, and even third-party interactive connection to their grid in the form of cogeneration and other power sources. The utility has the fixed expense of building, maintaining, and operating a system capable of delivering the maximum amount people try to use (the demand) even if this only happens during a relatively short amount of time in the year, the month, or the day.

Who benefits? Initially, the manufacturer of the meters; secondarily the utility. If the utility is appropriately regulated or publicly owned, then the customers will benefit in the long run. Comments have emphasized this slow or missing benefit to the customers. To the extent that the smart meter data is available on a real-time basis to the customer and the rate structure encourages it, knowledge gives the customer the power to make choices that can cut his/her costs.

If/when smart meters become fairly common, the rate structures will be modified to include time-of-day rates, demand rates for non-industrial and non-commercial customers, credits for participation in peak-shaving via automatic micro-sized load shedding (example is automatic precooling of a home in the early afternoon before the late afternoon peak demand time then cycling the compressor on the A/C off for 5-minutes out of every 20 at the hottest time of the cay--letting the home warm back up by the 1-2 degrees it was precooled).

Promoting energy savings? Unlikely. The real energy savings comes in the choices of light source types, higher efficiency appliances and motors, use of components that replace a fixed load with one that can be varied to meet the actual need (typically variable-frequency drives on fans and pumps, but now available on more efficient air conditioners and furnaces). The long-term savings will only come as we move towards structures that incorporate energy savings into their designs as part of the building envelope or part of the community plan.

Time of use schedules? Discussed above. Definitely coming.

Use of smart meters on water and gas utilities? Less likely to come any time soon. Electric utilities have to maintain a rock-steady frequency on their power lines because of the interconnection of one generation plant to another, to another... in the grid. They can shave the voltage some (a brownout), but bringing on additional capacity can require as much as 1 to 8+ hours time. A hydro plant can respond very quickly, but most utilities don't have them. Unlike this problem with an electric utility, gas companies and water companies can store excess within their system in the form of pressure changes on the mains or level changes in the tanks. Therefore, they can tolerate substantial peaks in usage without needing the built-in capacity to supply these peaks instantaneously from their plants or wells.

--JMM

I agree with most of your post, but some information is a bit off.

"...initially they were used only for large customers whose loads could be interrupted or scheduled on a time-of-day basis, for peak shaving, emergency load management, etc."

Customer interruptions have only recently become a part of meter technology, but interruptible rates have been around for at least 50 years. Major industrial customers have been and still are interrupted by a circuit breaker at a substation because they are the only customer on that feed. Other customers have agreed to open their own service disconnect when requested (in addition to the lower rate for agreeing to interruptible service, they also get a bonus payment for every actual interruption). Still others have traditionally been offered the option to turn off certain by loads using a dedicated contactor or breaker located on the customer's service and equipped with a radio receiver. Rural co-ops in the US have been doing this for decades with water heaters. Advances in wireless communication (ZigBee for inside the premises, mesh networks for backhaul) and component miniaturization have recently allowed the meter to serve as the communication node for control functions which had previously been handled with separate equipment, and to have integrated disconnect capability.

"Use of smart meters on water and gas utilities? Less likely to come any time soon".

I agree that a "smart meter" with control capabilities makes little sense, but "smart meter" is a very nebulous term. Putting communication capability on fluid meters is a no-brainer for utilities which offer more than one commodity. The biggest advantage of to a utility is reducing or eliminating the cost of reading meters. That won't happen unless you put communications on every meter at a site. In my community we have wireless reading for electric, gas and water meters because they're all owned by the same utility. The payoff was less than 3 years. Costs have stayed down and those dollars have stayed in our customers' wallets.

That sir is a very fine post. One small point, how does the smart meter determine if I'm using a toaster, microwave or heart monitor? Must be very smart indeed.

On LI in the late '70s or early 80s LILCO offered and provided a box that could be attached to various appliances that would shut off the appliance via remote control. A signal was sent over the power lines.

I had them installed on the pool pump, hot water heater and dryer. (they wouldn't install one on the kid's stereo) Got a rebate for each unit. Never did notice any operation except on the pool pump. They had activated the system, had no dryer either.

Simple. When you die, when the power fails on you, your estate sues the pants off them. They raise a mausoleum for you, and toast you on every single birthday. Now, are you satisfied for the fair outcome? I would think, it is more than fair!

That LILCo box is the granddaddy of the devices that are now part of some appliances. Instead of having to reach every appliance directly, the new systems use the meter as a router. The same long-distance communication (either power line carrier or radio/wireless) talks to the meter, and the meter uses a short-range comm system like ZigBee to talk to smart appliances and maybe the gas & water meters.

This application is a marriage of the existing technologies for meter reading and home automation.

Thank you

Its known as NonIntrusive appliance load monitoring.. Here is a good introduction slide...

Just confirms my original post. Shed power for RESIDENTIAL users. No mention of unnecessary government buildings being shut down. They run A/C 24/7 and are occupied less than 200 days year.

alot of power companies in my area will give a discount to people drawing electric during off peak hours. the meter keeps track of time of day and the amount of energy being used at different hours of the day.

Recently had a Centron (Ito'n) AMRS (Automated Meter Reading System) installed and it does NOT just transmit when interrogated, it actually transmits ALL the time.

How do I know this? Well, our local power company, Tucson Electric Power Company, contracted with Tendril to install modules in selected homes (ours was one) that "receive" the AMRS transmissions and routes them onto the internet and back to a Tendril website, where *we* can see daily, weekly and annual WHr-usage graphs by logging into their Tendril website.

Because I already daily monitor our WHr-meter readings, none of the TEPC/Tendril "bells & whistles" stuff was useful to me, so I disconnected their two little "black-boxes":

• Tendril TRANSLATE (TXL-6-001) - which "receives" the AMRS WHr-transmissions and retransmits them to their internet box (below).

• Tendril GATEWAY (GWY-8) - which receives the retransmitted signals and routes them via ethernet connection into the internet.

So, be advised that *some* AMRS meters DO transmit ALL the time, not just when the meter reader truck drives by!