Vocal Voices

Do you have one? Have you been offered one?

My answers to both questions are a big NO!

Another question is do you need one? Again it is NO from me.

My Scottish Power meters already give me all the information I need, but I have to go to them and press a button - such hard work. I can already pay my bills online or by phone and if I want to pay cash all I have to do is take the bill to any place with a PayPoint logo. Again, such hard work.

Meanwhile we are all paying a levy for the roll out of these useless "clocks" and the planned installation date for all homes has slipped from 2020 to 2022. Another technology cock-up by our caring, sharing, super efficient masters.

We used to have one at our previous residence, but we didn't think much about it, and won't bother to have another now.

We decided it was completely unnecessary.

Ah but you have to define who our "Caring/Sharing super efficient masters" actually are.

We would never have done this in the UK if it were not for.

DIRECTIVE 2009/72/EC OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL
of 13 July 2009
concerning common rules for the internal market in electricity and repealing Directive 2003/54/EC

I quote from the bottom of the article..

Member States shall ensure the implementation of intelligent metering systems that shall assist the active participation of consumers in the electricity supply market. The implementation of those metering systems may be subject to an economic assessment of all the long-term costs and benefits to the market and the individual consumer or which form of intelligent metering is economically reasonable and cost-effective and which timeframe is feasible for their distribution.

Such assessment shall take place by 3 September 2012.

Subject to that assessment, Member States or any competent authority they designate shall prepare a timetable with a target of up to 10 years for the implementation of intelligent metering systems.

Where roll-out of smart meters is assessed positively, at least 80 % of consumers shall be equipped with intelligent metering systems by 2020.

Don't blame our government, don't blame the companies. They are just doing what they are told... In short, want it or not, if you have an electricity supply then you are going to have a smart meter.

Suck it up!

I did a little digging and found this article which talks about the French smart meter roll out. I wanted to know because I wanted to know when I was likely to see the meter. It will be beneficial for me and for my son as EDF are famous for estimating full winter use in summer, ripping the money out of your bank account then refusing to pay it back, just telling you they will "take it off" future bills. In my son's case they took about 10 years worth of charges in one go at his current consumption.

The article goes on about how France is going to plan where the UK is not.

What the article does not mention, because it is not presenting a fair and balanced picture, is that France has 1 supplier of electricity that is ONE and only ONE supplier of the meters.

The UK, at the last count, has 62 energy suppliers and it is the energy supplier who will implement the smart meters, unlike France where it will be the Grid who implement the smart meters because they are owned by the same entity, namely the Government.

I read the pure BS of the government "assessments" regarding the reduction in use of electricity by smart meters. I can assure the government, with certainty, that a smart meter will not change one kw/h of my usage in a single year. My hot water is on electric, my central heating is wood.

My Electricity usage will go down when I replace my wood burning boiler with a £6,000 pellet burner some time in the next year or two. This is because the pump will then be intelligent whereas it is currently on all winter.

If they had wanted to reduce my electricity usage, they should not have put 50% tariffs on Chinese solar products. But that is an entirely different issue....

Nope, haven't got one, never been offered one. We have separate suppliers for gas and electricity anyway, so I doubt we would be. It's voluntary - they can't force you to have one - and my understanding is that it probably wouldn't work in our 1980's house because we have brick interior walls, and the weak signals from meter to display box don't penetrate brick.

I'm already "contracted" to read the electric meter every quarter and report it to the provider on-line, anyway. I ought to arrange to do the same with the gas, really, as their estimating algorithms can't cope with the fact that our summer months ' consumption is effectively Nil, thanks to our solar thermal panel providing all out hot water needs.

A mate had a smart meter installed about a year ago. A pen-pusher by profession like me, he's always read his own meters and kept a spreadsheet record of his consumption. When he got the smart meter installed, he was horrified to find his usage had apparently spiralled completely out of control . He called the smart meter people back and told them it must be faulty. They came and checked, and told him it was working absolutely fine.

He anguished over this for a number of weeks - and then one day went back over his readings and calculations and found he'd somehow missed a strange metric volume conversion factor or something, and in fact he was wrong, the meter was right, and his actual rate of consumption hadn't changed at all!

I notice a couple of get-out clauses:

The implementation of those metering systems may be subject to an economic assessment of all the long-term costs and benefits to the market and the individual consumer or which form of intelligent metering is economically reasonable and cost-effective and which timeframe is feasible for their distribution.

and

Where roll-out of smart meters is assessed positively....

Not that they matter, the EU is only going with the global flow - some 800 million units installed by 2016 - and the UK was going to install them regardless of whether we were in or out of the EU.

When it comes to value for money you have to wonder, though The roll-out to 30 million consumers is set to cost about £10bn. Latest figures show that the average saving will be just £11 per consumer per year. At those rates the money spent will take about 30 years to recover.

My ex has one. It has replaced the kitchen clock and even has an alarm function. But if she presses a few buttons it tells her all sorts on things about her gas and electricity usage. Most of it is nonsensical piffle when all she wants to know is how much her bill comes to. Even she knows how to turn a light off.

Yeah I saw the get out.

Sweden was estimating high on the savings, France was estimating lower but an independent French body estimated as low as €2 per month. OK over 10 years it more than pays for the meter, but it is pretty thin pickings for such a massive outlay.

The point, essentially, is that governments see smart meters as a cheap way to drive carbon emission losses. So the whole economic assessment is a farce in most countries.

The only possible justification of these meters would be if they were going to double the price of electricity, which would then make it vital to be able to control the use of that electricity.

What annoys me most about the whole thing is the constant refrain of making it our problem. If the governments and utilities invested heavily in renewables and produced predominantly renewable energy to the same amount as fossil fuel based, then what would it matter if we used more energy than we really needed to?