Posted on 07/04/2010 8:52:29 AM PDT by martin_fierro
Pacific Gas & Electric informs that it's going to install a "Smart Meter" on my house.
There's no shortage of recent stories on FR about what a potential nightmare this Stimulus-funded boondoggle could be.
So before I go out to celebrate the Fourth I wanted to hear from those FReepers who have already had one of these things put on their homes. Did your utility bills suddenly increase (decrease)? Was your service in any way affected by this new meter?
You know, like the yellow stars that the NAZIs required the Jews to wear in the 1930’s.
Just a harmless little measure, that only a planet hater would object to.
One was just put in at my house, as well.
One of the stories I read said peoples bills are going up. I am not getting that. If PGE cuts your power in peak usage times how does your bill go up?
This is idiotic and unconstitutional. My hope that PGS (others) get their butts kicked in court.
I work for a company that designs the chips that go into the smart meters. Basically it reads your meter and transmits the value back to the Gas/Electric/Water company. This saves them cost as they don’t have to pay a person to go around reading the meters. If there is just a small box on your meter and they didn’t go into your house to do any other wiring to AC compressors etc. then there should be no problems.
No problem at our house...had it 6-8 months.
They’ve been charging me for one of the new meters for months, but fortunately, they never actually installed it.
I’ve got no experience, but it sounds like a crock to me. Having your AC shut down on the hottest days of the year defeats the purpose of having the damn thing. Instead of jerking people around with rolling blackouts, AC shutdowns, and other such crap, the power company needs to take their record profits and upgrade the damn power grid. Instead, their “solution” is to browbeat customers and have the news media scold them that they’re horrible and wasteful. And mysteriously, the local & state govts. are exempt, as well as anybody rich and influential that can cause them problems.
Yes. No problem at all. However, during the next firmware upgrade, you may notice some added “features” that aren’t present today. After all, the frog cannot be boiled if it controls the thermostat to the pot of water.
We don’t have a new meter, but National Grid has started sending us a monthly letter which tells us, yeah right, it is more like it judges us against our neighbors in energy efficiency. They tell us we’re “Good” which is in the middle. Then they go on to do that we’ll shame you into wanting to compete with your more energy efficent neighbor bit by telling us how we could be like them. Personally I would rather they save the money & time spent sending out these letter. Everyone homelife is different, some people on my street may always be at work, have no kids, etc which is why they are highly efficient when saving electricity. We do our best to consume carefully, but not irrationally so. We could do better if we stopped existing is the bottom line. (Sitting here shaking my head and rolling my eyes...)
Our public electricity utility, Pepco (Potomac Electric) made me an offer years ago to allow them to cycle the big compresors off for a few minutes during peak load times. There were two options, one which would cycle the compressor off for only fifteen minutes at a time and the other that would cycle it off for an hour or two. They promised that the first option would cause only a 2- to 4-degree change in the ambient temperature of the house, hardly noticeable.
Since I have two-zone heat and air and two units, I got a big saving on my monthly bill. In addition, I rarely use the air anyway—can’t afford it for a house this big and inefficient, and besides there’s a lot of cross-ventilation—so I was getting a credit for not using something I wasn’t using anyway. It was a great deal. And as they said, they only tried to do it about ten days out of the cooling season anyway.
They discontinued the plan for some reason and then this year came back with it again. I signed up again and got a $160 instant credit plus $32 per month off my monthly bills. I’m pleased. On the truly ghastly-hot days it doesn’t make much difference, though there’s certainly a creep-out factor in the idea of Pepco coming into my house remotely and messing with my stuff.
They do offer to install a remote-controlled thermostat in your house so you can call the thermostat from your office computer and have it push the temperature around a little an hour before you come home from work. I like that (or I would if I had a job).
The main reason these are installed is to remotely meter read.. The secondary reason is that electro-mechanical meters tend to slow slightly as they age.. a new zippy meter means more $$$ for the power company.
The real problem is when then add the capability to shut off your air conditioner or other appliances. Now it might be helpful if they want to shut down a neighborhood's air conditioners rather than having a rolling blackout. But I expect that they will start shutting down residential air conditioners to protect their commercial customers or to keep from having to turn on an expensive auxiliary generator or buy power on the open market, thus keeping their costs down at the expense of letting you get hot.
I have a smart gas meter and I've been happy with it so far, but the only thing it allows is reading by radio rather than remote shut off or (as far as I've seen so far) billing based on time of day. Since my meter is inside my house I used to have to let the gas company in once every six months to let them read the meter instead of using my reported numbers monthly, and I haven't had to see them in a couple years.
I would estimate that my bill went up by approximately one-third when it was changed from a dial meter to the new smart meter, but it’s been so many years now I’d almost forgotten about it.
FWIW Brian Sussman says Smart Meters will allow the utility to reduce your usage remotely during peak periods:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/12/the_real_climate_deniers.html
(You have to scroll down a bit in the article to get to this section.)
I can’t tell any difference. Our A/C totally went out right after this was put in, and we had to have new a/c and furnace.
Our electricity bill better go down because our old system was 30 years old.
So far, nothing strange going on with the smart meter.
I have had the smart meter for five months now. We still have a meter reader that has to come to each house and its respective meter.
Joe Biden’s Smart Meter has a reading of zero.
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