Well, the whole thing sounds crazy to me. What a smart meter does is tell the company how much power you used that month, so they don’t have to send a meter reader around to read them all manually—at considerable expense. It certainly is more efficient.
The complaint is not a privacy violation, since it doesn’t tell them anything they couldn’t find out by sending people around to read the meters—except that it’s easier to read the meters often instead of monthly. Big deal.
The complaint is that it’s a medical problem. People with illnesses or pacemakers might be harmed by the wireless signals back to the company.
Well, I’ll let a real scientist answer that one, if real scientists can still be found in California. But I strongly doubt whether there is any real health risk. I think this is just one more instance of liberal insanity.
The power company installed the meters because, once in place, it’s far more efficient. And if you don’t like it, it’s reasonable that they should charge you to have some guy drive over, climb out of the car, and read your meter. Since he’s not going down the street reading meters, but just driving out to read yours, that would be quite costly.
There is a whole lot more to smart meters than you have in your comment. If it were only long distance meter reading, the issues would be far less, However it does put people out of work, and the initial expense of changing to new meters isn’t cheap.
My electric company (technically a co-op) went to these a couple of years ago. Seems to be more efficient to me, and I kind of like that it gives them a real-time view of any outages and exactly who’s still affected.
I was under the impression that it communicates right back up their own power lines, though. I’ve never heard of the wireless part. Seems unnecessary, since they’ve already got a readily usable wire connection to every meter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_meter
They want to charge you a higher rate based WHEN you use electricity..not HOW MUCH YOU USE...and remotely load shed (shut your stuff off)...
It's about control...not convenience...
If you wont voluntarily conserve..you'll be “helped” to conserve...
I didn’t know that, I thought it was the health problems when you opened your bill to discover that you owe millions for power due to their buggy meters.
*IF* the power company would fire the meter readers and lower the cost of the service they provide, then that makes sense.
However, they won’t. Additionally, it can be used to remotely shut off your power, without anyone ever coming out - just at the touch of a keystroke.
Really? They installed radios on a copper interface with your house that delivers power? A clever grasshopper could have used the already available copper path to transmit the telemetry back to the Mother Ship without using radio frequencies. No messing with the FCC for reserving free transmission bandwidth and limits on transmitter power to boot. Instead they are making available to anyone interested their customer’s data never know the data has been compromised.
Good plan!
The NappyOne