Smart electrical meters

[LCHIEN]

Anyone have one? Doing anything with it?
I've got one and the electricity supplier is charging me three dollars a month to have it so he can save money reading it remotely....Hmmm. At least I figure he's getting the most benefit.

Anyway I decided to look at it. Here's my electrical usage one recent Tuesday. I can see when i get up at 5:20 AM... and when I come home at 5:15 PM and we turn on the lights, TV, and fire up the stove... No A/C yet. Looks like my wife quite watching TV and went to bed about 12:30AM the night before. ANd I'm betting she got up at 7:30AM.

What are you guys doing with your data, if anything, or what can you do... any free apps out there?
Stupid web page can save the 15-minute interval data for any day I choose... except it uses the same file name every time.

[jackellis]

No fair baiting me like this.

At the recommendation of the builder, we installed heat tape in a couple of places to protect the roof from ice dams. I though I remembered hearing the stuff would only turn on when the temperature was below freezing - silly me. We've had three months of electric bills that are double what we normally pay, because my wife pays the bills and I don't see them timely. If we'd had a "smart meter", I'd have spotted the problem immediately, including the fact that I only shut off two of the three breakers. Would have saved me about $200.

Where these meters could come in really handy is matching up consumption with time-of-use pricing. About 30% of the roughly 60,000 MW of generating capacity in California is needed for less than 200 hours per year. At current replacement cost, that's about $28 billion worth of assets that mostly sit around waiting for the few hot days when everyone cranks up their A/C. Properly structured time-sensitive electricity pricing would encourage people to figure out how to stay cool without causing these infrequent demand spikes.

I don't have the statistics for Texas but in California, the average utilization of an electric generating plant is around 40%. Some run a lot more, but most run a lot less. By comparison, most other industrial production facilities have to run at 75% or better utilization to break even.

See if you can get yourself on a time-of-use rate that's very cheap outside the peak hours for A/C use.

By the way, most of these meters are not smart at all. They're electronic and they measure and store electricity consumption hourly, whereas the older meters were electromechanical and measured cumulative consumption only.

[leehljp]

That does look like useful data. I would enjoys being able to figure out, like you did, what went on, or off, at what time and who came in or left at what time.

[JR]

Nope, not using it here. There has been a movement toward this lately, with RF transmission of the information. The RF has driven the vocal citizenry crazy.

JR

[LCHIEN]

according to the information I downloaded, my "smart" meter communicates with Zigbee (an RF protocol somewhat like Bluetooth and 802.11x Wifi) and it has the ability to remotely connect or disconnect my power...

Zigbee power is something like one milliwatt and its behind my garage some30 feet from the house.
I'd be more worried about:
Wireless phones
Cell phones (~1 Watt inches from your head)
Wifi Networks in your house (100mw transmitter)
Bluetooth 1-100mw RF

[LCHIEN]

I don't have to tell Jack, I'm sure he knows this, but utility companies have a variety of power sources, among them coal, gas, oil, nuclear, hydro, wind and solar.
Some of them are only available periodically, such as wind and solar. Some are available all the time such as hydro, and some have high fixed costs and low running costs (like nuclear), where as some have low standby costs and high running costs (like natural gas, oil and maybe coal.)

There is always some fixed part of load they call baseband...and they want to keep the wind turbines and the hydro and the nuclear running to supply that demand. The nuclear because it costs as much to standby as it does to run (little fuel is used but debt and personnel overhead cost constantly). Hydro and wind is use it or lose it.

The utilities fire up their higher running cost plants to meet seasonal and variable (time of day) demand. For these the cost of producing energy is largely the cost of fuel (oil, coal, natural gas) and the cost of delivering it.

I have very little power I could switch to lower demand pricing hours (time of use rate). Lights and cooking are on schedule of the day, air conditioning is heavily used and cannot be time shifted by more than a few minutes or we'll have much larger swings in termperature which is not comfortable. About the only things that might be switched is clothes washing and dish washing and I'm guessing they're a small part of my total bill. Most heat uses (central heat, dryer and water heaters) are all gas powered.

I don't have an hybrid plug-in vehicle, that could be recharged on cheaper night-time power.
In Houston, air conditioning runs a bit less at night, but humidity runs high and it can be in the 90's way late into early morning some days... our A/C will cycle on and off all night long, maybe not as much on but still a lot.

Besides I'm not aware that our supplier offers time-varying rates. However, the smart meter (okay yes, Jack, its an unintelligent meter but with with memory and communication ability) can remember how much was used, and when, so time varying rates can be applied at some point if wanted... unlike the old meters which just kept a cumulative total.

[LCHIEN]

Nope, not using it here. There has been a movement toward this lately, with RF transmission of the information. The RF has driven the vocal citizenry crazy.

JR

The smart meters here use Zigbee, a low power, low bandwidth protocol with about 1 mw of power and its located 30 feet away from the nearest point of the house.

Compare to 1-2W for cell phones, 100mw for Wifi and 1-100 mw for Bluetooth., many of which are right next to you. If I were worried about RF and health, I'd ditch the cell phone right away.

[jackellis]

If you're worried about the RF radiation coming from your new electric meter, watch this. If you're still worried, take Loring's advice and get rid of your cell phone.

Riding a bike without a helmet, talking on your cell phone while driving, packing on too many pounds, fast food and smoking are all far bigger health threats than RF radiation.

[cabinetman]

If you're worried about the RF radiation coming from your new electric meter, watch this. If you're still worried, take Loring's advice and get rid of your cell phone.

Riding a bike without a helmet, talking on your cell phone while driving, packing on too many pounds, fast food and smoking are all far bigger health threats than RF radiation.

I remember the "media scare" back in the late 80's when I first got a cell phone. The "brick" was the choice at first, and there were warnings of possible brain damage. I don't know how real the threat was, but in an effort to minimize (I guess) the threat and to streamline the phone, they made the antennas shorter, and finally wound up with just a stub of one.

.

[cabinetman]

I've got a 'smart' electrical meter, and water meter. I would have to have nothing to do and be in a state of complete boredom to have an interest and do any analysis of the data they provide.

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[cabinetman]

We've been on the "averaging" billing for a few years now. At first it seemed like a rip off, but in the end it actually saves us money. When the utilities went to the 'smart' meters, that likely saved them some money in the costs of reading the meter. It also seems to be a limiter of human error.

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[wardprobst]

We have had them for a little over a year. Other than one month it's been fine. We have two meters and I can monitor the one that is not used as much to make sure things are turned off pretty easily. Only hiccup was when the installer told me they would never have to read it again. One of the meters cannot be seen unless you go on the property. One month they got a crazy reading and wanted to check but were locked out so we paid too much. They credited our other account and it was okay. All in all it's helped us as we are able to keep all the gates locked now. Before we had to leave one open so they could check the meter.
As to the monthly charge- we were told it was to pay for the meter but of course they charged us before and after installation. Maybe it's a lease fee on the meter like the old phone system?
DP

[dbhost]

There was something in the Houston Chronicle a while back about some state rep working to have the installation of Smart Meters stopped until they can be verified for accuracy. It seems a large number of consumers in the Dallas area had their electric bills spike pretty badly after they had Smart meters installed...

I somewhat wonder what the issues were, but suspect it was probably not a meter issue, but perhaps an accounting software type issue with the electric providers... Who knows...

If they are accurate, I wouldn't mind having one, but I don't see why I should pay extra to the power company for them to install a device that in theory saves them time, money, and effort. Honestly, they should give me a discount on my bill for doing that!

It would be interesting to see my power usage over time. I suspect I would have a nauseous reaction to the usage graph when the weather gets hot...

[pelligrini]

We've had one for a while now. I'll get weekly emails from our service provider (reseller) with some nice graphs showing the last weeks usage on top of the previous week. The best thing is them not having to read the meter.

I got into it with TXU a few times for not reading it and billing my on some BS previous average. The meter is located in the backyard and many readers wouldn't mess with my dogs. Some didn't read it when they were in the neighbors yard, some did. They overbilled me over $1000 once. It took months to get it ironed out. At one point they demanded that I pay the full amount and that I would later get a credit if I was supposed to. I mentioned something about defying the laws of physics, a rope, and urination...

[jackellis]

The old mechanical meters tended to be more unreliable than anyone realized. A number of consumers (in California, the investor-owned power companies have exactly five customers located at 505 Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco, aka the Public Utilities Commission) reported spikes in their bills when the new meters were installed. A third party hired to test the meters found they were, indeed, accurate.

I wish I could say whether the new meters are worth the cost. There's a vocal minority that thinks electricity ought to be an entitlement and it should be cheap. I think it needs to be available and affordable, but as I pointed out earlier, keeping standby capacity around to deal with the hottest days is expensive and wasteful. For that reason, I think it makes sense to charge a higher price on the hottest days just like airlines charge higher fares on peak travel days. Spread out the demand and get folks to think about alternatives (putting on my bulletproof vest now ), or at least load more of the cost of that spare capacity on the people who cause it to be needed and reduce prices the rest of the time.