What is the point of ………Smart Meters?

Over the summer our energy supplier called us to see about having Smart Meters installed for gas and electricity. As it was free of charge we agreed and had them installed.
We also got a small display unit that displays an analogue meter which appears to be based on daily spend figure. It does not show individual use of either gas or electricity so I don’t know where the ‘expense’ is so I am not able to ‘save money’ as they keep plugging in the adverts.
When the supplier put the standing charge up from 14p/day to 21p/day for each service presumably to cover the cost of SM2 I switched to a new supplier 15p/day standing charge for each service but they are unable to collect smart meter information so I have to read my own smart meter and send it to them just like before – plus ca change as they say.
Is there some master plan behind the SM programme or is it just another government sponsored money making scheme for some of their mates?

Is there some master plan behind the SM programme

You know that guy who used to knock your door and look in the cupboard under the stairs with a torch?

Turns out that as well as demanding money for doing it, he also wanted paid holidays, got sick , made mistakes and could only read about 100 meters a day.

Terribly inefficient.

I , for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

Tell me about sMArT MeteRS

Somewhat the above, somewhat an attempt to monitor the grid in a more granular way and potentially in the future allow for more localised load shedding in high demand periods (although i don’t think there’s a legal basis for that yet and it throws up more problems than you can shake a stick at).

Edit: DezB, i really dislike that on forums, do you think people see every thread that’s ever been written?

No master plan at all. You can also quote me on that when you’re expected to pay virtually nothing through the night, a moderate amount during the day and through the nose evenings and weekends.

Not much at the moment, especially if you’ve had to revert to manual readings! I’d not entertain having a SMETS 1 version installed, they are the ones that aren’t cross compatible between suppliers, I’m surprised they are still fitted. Any other marginal benefit would depend on you wanting to change your energy use behaviour and the in house display being capable of sufficient detail to help that, and it sounds like it’s not.

There may be a better argument for them in future when/if dynamic pricing is introduced and your meter can help you use higher loads at low demand periods. This has started AFAIK, Octopus for example have tariffs aimed at electric car owners with cost benefits for overnight charging.

It does not show individual use of either gas or electricity

Are you sure you can’t switch it to do so? Every one that I’ve seen allows you to switch between electricity, gas, or combined. All of them have fairly horrible interfaces, though.

When we built an annex for my Mum we needed an additional supply, it came with a ‘smart’ meter and once it was installed the Scottish Power bloke was showing Mum how it worked, with the display etc.

Bloke “When you switch on the light, it shows that you’re using electricity”
Mum “I can see that, the lights on”

She said thanks, opened the kitchen drawer and slung it in. Not moved since.

Points for providers:

Allows them to better judge usage, which in turn allows them to produce more efficiently now and better structure for future needs.

Also, reduced the costs of sending people out to read meters. When I worked in BG 20+ years ago there were meters out in the wild that had NEVER been read since the day they’d been installed.

Points for consumers:

You don’t need to climb under the stairs once a month to read the meter, or invite someone into your home to do so.

You don’t get a nasty shock when EDF suddenly increase your monthly DD by 125% as they just did ours, because they’d been under charging your for 6 months.

You can switch to different, differential tariffs like the old ‘Economy 7’ if for example you’ve got a EV you watch to charge at night when it’s cheaper, without needing a new meter.

You can, with a minimal amount of work, better understand your own energy usage and reduce costs and consumption by making changes. Knowledge is power, some people do need to be shown that running a tumble dryer twice a day does cost a lot of money and perhaps they might be arse to spend a few mins hanging clothes on the line.

Frankly I’m amazed much of that needs to be explained.

To force people into a direct debt and targets only those with difficulty paying a quarterly bill, usually the most vulnerable in our society.

Those on them apparently pay a higher rate..

Keep hearing about how much energy is supplied by renewables like wind, which is free to produce, and yet no bill has been lowered by it.

renewables like wind, which is free

But the infrastructure isn’t. That needs paying for and maintained

Edit: DezB, i really dislike that on forums, do you think people see every thread that’s ever been written?

You really dislike when someone directs a poster to an existing thread which answers their question?

Why?

I don’t have strong opinions on them but when I looked into it them recently* it told me that I couldn’t have them as my elec and gas meters are on different floors (my elec meter is in the cellar) – is that definitely a showstopper or just “computer says no”?

*looked into it = pressed few buttons in my providers app

Smart Meters + Internet of Things + Dynamic Pricing is where we need to get to.

You tell your system how warm you want the house and when, when you want dry clothes to put on and when you need to use the car and leave them all to discuss overnight with your supplier how best to do that, including renting out your car’s battery for an hour to help someone else’s peak demand etc.

Not next week.

I’d not entertain having a SMETS 1 version installed, they are the ones that aren’t cross compatible between suppliers, I’m surprised they are still fitted.

I’m surprised they were ever fitted. Show complete lack of planning that new suppliers couldn’t be compatible with them.

I want a new smart meter as we have a day meter a night meter and a telebox. The night meter only runs some circuits so we can’t fully take advantage of the cheap electric. The three boxes take up load of room and we need a rewire but the lack of room for a new CU is the issue.

Bloke “When you switch on the light, it shows that you’re using electricity”
Mum “I can see that, the lights on”

If your Mum was that clever she’d be able to appreciate that most people don’t know how much their choices cost them in electricity, such as choosing to tumble dry rather than air dry.

Also smart meters provide a level of grid monitoring to the suppliers, so they can pinpoint outages and the like.

I’ve been working on and off in smart metering since 2009

Immediate benefits
-Removal of pedestrian meter reading, granular consumption info, no more estimated bills, meters can be switched to prepay without a site visit or new meter.

Medium term benefits
-More granular tariffs (up to 48 different prices per day) to incentivise consumption outside peak hours
-Half hourly settlement, the full value of shifting consumption can be passed on to those who move consumption out of the peak, generate and store their own energy or use an EV.
-Switching – switch supplier faster with an accurate reading

Longer term benefits
-DNO can manage load at EV charge points etc by providing turn up/down signals

renewables like wind, which is free

Off you go and catch some turn into electricity.

Got an electric car being built this month, new smart meter gives me access to the sweet sweet 5p kwh rates overnight, hell I might switch over to the agile tariff which differs daily, and often goes negative. Nothing better than getting paid by the electric company to charge!

They are even testing out true on demand usage, they sent a mail the other day saying if I halved my usage in the afternoon peak that day when supply was going to be low, they would give it to me free.

Pure evil – My energy bills have been reduced twice since having one. Don’t trust them, something, something conspiracy.

I’d always assumed it was so the company could see when you use the most electricity and thus raise the prices for those times.

I don’t understand why they think we’re interested in micro-managing our power consumption. As if we’ve nothing better to do. I had to formally write to OVI energy as I was having to converse with them more frequently than my girlfriend of the time. Just leave me alone and send me a bill every quarter. I don’t give a toss what something costs to run, if I need it to run it will have to run regardless of the price.

On the subject of Agile, we’re trying it and while in the first 4 weeks we’ve had 2 nights where the prices has gone negative it’s only been something in the order of -2p. Overnight is significantly cheaper and the EV charger has been working well with syncing it all up.

However, The cost during that 4-7 peak period is astro-freaking-nomical for instance today it’s 29.74p between 4:30 & 5pm, between 4 & 7 it’s always above 22p so it’s proving quite tricky for us to avoid using our electric oven during that period.

We’re waiting to see if it’s all balanced out by the cheaper car charging but I suspect we don’t do enough car miles (especially right now) to make Agile worth it.

The company I work for is providing a lot of the backend IT infrastructure for it, there’s even a dummies guide if you want to read more :p https://www.cgi-group.co.uk/en-gb/utilities/smart-metering

Not involved with that project myself though so purely from a consumer perspective I think SMETS1 was a mistake & largely a waste of money. There’s little consumer benefit and incompatibility issues when switching providers means they’re already out dated.

SMETS2 has more possibilities as some others have mentioned but we’re still in the roll-out phase really rather than adding functionality.

We got one so we could use octopus go, which shaved about £15-20 a month off our bill.

That’s all well and good, but the thing I’m happiest about with that is that it shifted most of our electricity use to a time of day where the overall UK grid CO2 is lower so it’s also saved a polar bears life.

Had one fitted by one supplier, but since changing supplier twice since neither supplier seems interested in supplying another and just ask for monthly meter readings.

You really dislike when someone directs a poster to an existing thread which answers their question?

Why?

🙊🍿

On the subject of Agile,

Yes, I think you have to be prepared to make it work and for some people it possibly won’t (mostly families I’d expect who can’t shift usage). Altho I think if you have an EV charging at night, the weighting of that means you can run some stuff at 4-7pm and still be quids in. You can easily swap between Agile and Go (altho with some timing rules now I believe, as some people were constantly switching).
This guy claims he wasn’t making much effort on Agile but has an Ohme charger to cherry pick the cheapest 1/2hrs for charging the car. 8.42ppkwh isn’t bad. It would be interesting to know the average price on Go

Had one fitted by one supplier, but since changing supplier twice since neither supplier seems interested in supplying another and just ask for monthly meter readings.

Me too, gen 1 smart meters are pointless if you switch.

Yes, but compare that to the bill for coal. How much of that do you think they used per day, every day 😕
OK, upkeep, but the actual ‘fuel’ is free’ or are we now paying maintenance engineers £1000/hour 😕

I had one installed recently and the answer to “what’s the point” is “to be genuinely scared by how much energy our toaster and kettle use”!

If your Mum was that clever she’d be able to appreciate that most people don’t know how much their choices cost them in electricity, such as choosing to tumble dry rather than air dry.

Even the simplest of us know that one is free while the other costs money…

What DJGLover said up there ^^

+ Ability for the supplier to see more granular usage data is really important. Pre-Smart, domestic properties were allocated a 48/7/365 profile to allocate costs to. Now suppliers can cost and price (and procure/hedge) more accurately based on much more accurate consumption data and network operators can consider / plan local capacity better too (broad brush but this includes everything from over-stretched substations & availability of suitable generation from day-2-day, minute-2-minute).
**The cost to supply electricity is massively influenced by time of use (and season). I work in the Industrial and Commercial energy sector so even more emphasis on real time cost of use and price-driven flexibility

OK, upkeep, but the actual ‘fuel’ is free’ or are we now paying maintenance engineers £1000/hour

Upkeep?

Building the turbines, installing them, installing the infrastructure and installing the infrastructure that allows them to run on the grid without buggering everything up also costs money.

£1000 an hour is probably cheap, you may laugh but if we trip we lose £1m a day per unit (530MW each). They may not be paying them that much but various crews and their associated kit add up.

My meters are easily accessible outside; take 2 minutes to read plus a further 1 minute to submit meter readings every month through the supplier app. As my tariff only provides a ‘bill’ twice a year it means I have the ‘inconvenience’ of spending 1.5 minutes requesting a manual bill to be produced, via Whatsapp, every month. I reckon my bills etc must be pretty accurate??

So, my question is, and I’m genuinely interested on the saving money front, what would be the immediate benefit to me taking up my suppliers offer of a smart meter? (Other than saving me 4.5 minutes of my life per month)

I haven’t read all the replies, but the benefit for me is I can charge my car off peak for a third of the price it would be otherwise.

As above, I’m really surprised that SMETS1 meters were installed this summer, absolute madness. We had the EON SMETS1 meters installed in 2017. They are getting ripped out and put in the bin in a couple of weeks when we’re getting SMETS2 put in to take advantage of Octopus Go and the cheap overnight rate for EV charging. Crazy that a load of kit only installed 3 years ago is now defunct.

I hadn’t realised the Agile tariff was so high at peak times. 30p per kwh is expensive! I’d be hiding the kettle, unplugging the oven and all sorts in our house if that happened!

Overall I think smart meters are a good thing. Some people just don’t have the awareness that simple behaviour changes can save a significant amount of energy and money. One member of my extended family literally brims the kettle to make 1 cup of tea.. can barely lift the thing after they’ve had a go on it it’s that full!

One of my mates is the opposite.. he pours the water into his mug from the cold tap and then into a completely empty kettle. Boils in about 40 seconds!

Thanks to a smart meter, octopus energy agile tariff and a Tesla power wall battery Ive saved £400 in electricity costs this year, electricity gets stored in the Tesla battery during the night when it costs pennies per kWh, or even free and I power my house during the day from the battery.

Edit: DezB, i really dislike that on forums, do you think people see every thread that’s ever been written?

No, that’s why I posted a link to it, so you could see the info previously posted. Jeez, what a **** I am.

I don’t give a toss what something costs to run, if I need it to run it will have to run regardless of the price.

But what about the things you could if you felt like it but don’t actually need to?

Even the simplest of us know that one is free while the other costs money…

Yes, but how much actual money does it cost to tumble dry a load?

How much does it cost to do a casserole in the oven vs on the hob or in a slow cooker?

So, my question is, and I’m genuinely interested on the saving money front, what would be the immediate benefit to me taking up my suppliers offer of a smart meter? (Other than saving me 4.5 minutes of my life per month)

Because you can charge an electric car for virtually nothing which saves you money when you get one. You can also contribute towards the introduction of a balanced grid that reduces CO2 per kwh and provides a sustainable power supply for everyone.

If you don’t care about these things then you should.