To ask why the hell energy companies keep desperately trying to push SMART METERS?

[Peekaboo3]

Just that.

Why?

Hell will freeze over before I have them.

My energy provider has sent me a letter saying ...

'We are now ready to install your smart meters. Just one phone call, and we will install the meters at your convenience yada yada.'

With the way they've worded it, it sounds almost like you have no choice.

We do have a choice of course. And my choice is no.

It is NOT compulsory. So they can piss off bugging me.

But WHY do they keep pushing these bloody things?

WHY?

A few reasons why I don't want one

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/06/smart-energy-meters-giving-readings-seven-times-high-study-finds/

www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/six-reasons-say-no-smart-meter/

This is literally at the end of the first article, though:

Update: Since the publication of this article BEAMA, the trade association which represents manufacturers of smart meters, has been in touch to say that none the smart meters tested in the study are part of the UK's official smart meter roll out.

The cynic in me thinks it's a new mass surveillance tool for MI5 and GCHQ. I believe they'll definitely have access to this data and they can figure out an awful lot about you. When you go to work, when you're awake and when you're asleep, when you eat dinner, how many people you live with, some clues about how you spend your free time, and other stuff I won't have thought of.

That'll be fed into the computer algorithms that combine it with your internet, mobile phone, and other records. And when that algorithm decides you "fit the profile" of a drug dealer or a terrorist, that's when you get pulled over on the motorway or your house gets bugged.

safariboot a smart meter wouldn't tell anyone exactly when you left/arrived home!
They measure when you energy use only - so if you've got a washing machine/slow cooker on a timer during the day, that could indicate you were home if they were daft enough to assume high energy use = at home. There is no way for smart meters to determine which appliance you are using, or how you are using your energy - just what your consumption is.

Theoretically, I suppose, they could indicate that you were mass growing weed if you used incredibly high amounts of electricity for lights etc. That's the only crime I can think of that smart meters could solve,and it would probably be easier just to scan residential areas with thermal imaging.

Phones and sat navs on the other hand give out far more useful info on your movements-why the hell would mi5 bother with smart meters when the existing alternatives are so much more informative?

I work for an energy company - it's a government initiative (that customers are ultimately paying for!) that 95% of homes need to have them installed by 2020

In theory, they can reduce energy usage by making you aware of what you're using. They also automatically send data to your supplier, again to be able to analyse and understand your own usage

Works on a SIM card similar to mobile phones and you can choose whether to send readings daily or half hourly

Has ZERO impact on whether you can switch away. You're absolutely not tied in but some of the older meters won't work with other suppliers and will go back to a "dumb" meter ie you read it yourself. The newer ones are fully compatible with most suppliers though.

Sorry guys, no MI5 shenanigans with smart meters 😂 some suppliers are using it to promote usage in periods of low demand to ease pressure on the grid e.g. free energy on weekends etc.

Any questions I'm happy to help!

"Real-Time Recognition and Profiling of Appliances through a Single Electricity Sensor"
pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0942/175c428dd19c73eed99923e1fd1b3f176567.pdf

The recent momentum for Smart Grid meters, visible in a number of government driven large-scale pilot deployments such as in Italy [11] and in the US [12], intends to accelerate their introduction into households.
Within this context, embedded sensor networks and actu- ating systems are expected to play a key role in monitoring and reducing building’s overall energy consumption.
[...]
Figure 1 shows typical domestic energy consumption over a time period with some appliance activity annotations. The main aim of this work is to develop a low-cost system that can attribute names to appliances contributing to each of the energy spikes in real time with a single energy monitor
[...]
In contrast, RECAP aims at achieving appliance recognition by deploying a single energy monitor clipped around the live wire of the main electrical unit.

So yeah, appliance recognition (from the signature of noise on the power line) isn't yet embedded in Smart Meters, but it's a field people are working on and hoping to introduce.

The half-hourly data points are what will be used for billing. However it will be perfectly possible for Smart Meters to take much more finely grained readings if the manufacturers desire.

I can't find the ref just now, but IIRC some of the early Smart Meters in another country were taking readings at intervals of 2 mins.

This is an important paper by Ross Anderson, Prof of Security Engineering at Cambridge University Computer Laboratory.
www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/meters-offswitch.pdf

Another good paper:
"Classification of Household Appliance Operation Cycles: A Case-Study Approach"
Energies 2015, 8, 10522-10536; doi:10.3390/en80910522
www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/8/9/10522/pdf

However, applying Smart Grid for smart control of each consumer’s, for example, operation status recognition, operation control optimization, fault detection, etc., is challenging owing to uncertainty in usage conditions of household [4].
[...]
In recent years, the research community has used the concept of load signatures for appliance load monitoring. The load signature corresponds to the specific electrical behavior of an individual appliance/piece of equipment when it is in operation [9]. A load signature could use multiple attributes such as active power, reactive power, switching transient current, and waveform to describe the transient and steady-state behaviors of an appliance. In fact, as each appliance has a unique load signature, many research studies focused on using load signature to classify household appliances. Huang et al. developed a household appliance classification method by using appliance power signature and harmonic features [10]. Xu and Dong formulated an appliance signature vector which comprises of different load signatures to identify household appliances [11]. Chui et al. used four appliance features namely, active power, reactive power, total harmonic distortion, and maximum transient current for household appliance classification and identification [7].

Or just google "data signature on power line appliance recognition".

OK, UK standard for Smart Meters is apparently to sample your power usage at 10-second intervals.

"An electrical load measurements dataset of United Kingdom households from a two-year longitudinal study"
Scientific Data volume 4, Article number: 160122 (2017)
doi:10.1038/sdata.2016.122
www.nature.com/articles/sdata2016122

The IHDs and communications connectivity of the new meters enable new types of services, such as:
energy feedback via non-intrusive appliance load monitoring, i.e., the ability to extract consumption of individual appliances from the household aggregate5,6,7;
[...]
The REFIT (Personalised Retrofit Decision Support Tools For UK Homes Using Smart Home Technology) Project Electrical Load Measurements Dataset, presented in this paper, stands apart from other available datasets, as it closely mimics the data that will be available via the SMETS2 smart meter standard2 which will provide active power data at a sample rate of 10 s

And here's the DECC paper SMETS2 which that Nature article is referring to:
"Smart Metering Equipment Technical Specifications Version 2"
www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/68898/smart_meters_equipment_technical_spec_version_2.pdf

Don't worry there are several companies that will still be employed to call you on the phone or visit your property to take readings and of course comply with the law for gas safety testing.
The company I work for are really busy for requests and I know some providers have waiting lists.
I don't want one either, but seems like plenty do.

I just can't understand with the drive nowadays to get people to change supplier each year, they would want to install something that only worked for such a short amount of time. Mine was smart for 3 months!

I wouldn't worry about everyone having to have them, the providers haven't got their acts together even if smart metres become widespread.
I'm talking to people about their providers and sometimes the info given by the supplier is over 10 years old, I often ask to speak to dead people and it's upsetting for their families.
It's become more apparent in my work since booking appointments for smart metre installations.
A lady tonight hadn't lived in our recorded address for 5 years and had had several providers since then.
I really wouldn't worry.
In addition they are only just employing engineers and training them up on installing. Some are already doing it of course, but they'll need thousands to keep up with demand if everyone wants them

And why would anyone want one when they do this...

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4737864/Are-smart-meter-blame-house-fires.html

www.kcet.org/redefine/are-california-smart-meters-causing-fires

I'm sick and tired of it. I CAN'T have a smart meter installed because of the way my house is set up - I live in a flat in an old building. I actually did arrange to have one fitted and the guy said he couldn't install one.

Also, if they're an EU thing, does that mean that because of Brexit, they're not going to be mandatory now?

They were never an EU thing.

"If they're so desperate for advertising them, it makes a certain amount of sense to them. But they announce them in a way that will save you money. I find that hard to believe. There's almost no information on the Internet about it. They won't tell you that. Yes, I know a website where you can find any renewable energy provider and compare prices and success rates of various other companies. www.simplyswitch.com/energy/guides/best-and-worst-energy-companies-2021/ has information on all the companies that do renewable electricity. "