Smart meters – will you use yours?

I had an energy monitor and for a while it was fascinating watching how it would spike when certain appliances went on. However, the novelty soon wore off (particularly over a cold and wet winter when drying clothes outside isnt an option) – and then it ran out of batteries. I’m more interested in having appliances that are more economical to run – but with the latest increase due in VAT that’s putting up those costs as well…

If you look at the experience of the water industry, you can clearly see that households with water meters use significantly less water (about 30% less?) than those without. And this is happening despite the fact that you don’t get a monitor in the house telling you how much water you have actually used day-to-day.

I find it hard to believe that the introduction of energy meters would not prompt a similar cut back in energy use.

The only one to benefit from smart meters will be the utility company itself,who will of course pass on the savings to us…??? and legions of meter readers will pay the price.
Oh..and guess who will end up paying for these devices to be installed.?

Smart meters. You’v got one and want to switch.
Alternative suppliers may not accept the one you’ve got. So getting in early with something non standard may not have been a great idea.

I am sorry but the cost of doing something I want to do anyway & the cost of doing it does not worry me in the slightest as I will do it anyway what ever it costs otherwise we shall never do anything in our lives . So people will not turn on the tv or radio , cooker , The elderly will not turn on heating in winter because the meter tells them that you are using ££££ , I think it better we do not know & just pay the bill when it arrives as we have always done , we never have had problems with the old system so I will not even look at THE THING even if it is fitted , What a waste of money on a brainless idea .What Will Be The Next Brainstorm To Be Pushed On To Us As , So many people will sit for hours after turning on an appliance just to see the cost Baaa .

Smart Meters will be useful in one respect: ending estimated bills (as mentioned above) which are due to the infuriating habit that the Meter Readers have of coming to the door and posting a card saying "sorry you were out" without even ringing the bell.
I have watched this happen at least 6 times at my own home and my mum has experienced it countless times as have many people I work with. If you dash to the door fast enough and catch them most of these readers are very offhand (not to say offensive) about actually having to come in and read the meter, some even refuse to do so. Some of the colleagues who have had this experience even have meters in boxes outside the front of their houses, so it’s clearly a "can’t be bothered" rather than a "tried but could not" issue.
On the other side of the coin, using an energy monitor has helped me to prove to Trading Standards that a new washer, rated A++ for energy efficiency, actually used around 4 times as much power as the 23 year old one that it replaced. Needless to say the new one very soon found itself traded in for a 20 year old one which not only uses less power again (same energy monitor to check this) but also works better. In the same way I have monitored power use of other appliances and found that my old kettle uses less power than my new one (not a lower wattage but boils faster so using less electricity). This has heightened my awareness of how new appliances often use more than old ones, even when they are hailed to be "energy efficient" and, after a protracted exchange of correspondence with an officer at EST I did get a written confirmation that the vast majority of new appliances DO use more energy than their old counter-parts, but are ranked only against EACH OTHER for efficiency.
So, Smart Meters are welcome to ensure correct billing, but I don’t see why on earth the consumers should be expected to pay for them and I can’t see how in themselves they will make the slightest difference to the energy we use. Energy monitors, on the other hand, are very useful but might well give some unexpected and possibly (if you have just spent loads on supposedly "green" appliances) unwelcome results!
Caveat Emptor?

My mother-in-law is 90 and a leaseholder from a social landlord.

She likes to keep man eye on utility expenses but we have recently discovered that the landlord has allowed (grossly-over)estimated bills for communal electricity to run an-and-on with spasmodic refunds. This makes it impossible to work out what exactly has been consumed.

With smart meters available, there should be penalties on landlords who allow this to happen

Is it really true that many new appliances use more electricity than some of the older ones ?
I have a very old. but completely reliable fridge, which suits my needs exactly, but Which? seems to always be insisting that old appliances like this are very wasteful on electricity compared to new ones. This has made me wonder if I should ditch my old ‘friend’ for a new one to save on electricity uses. Is there any way of finding out more details about the energy uses of new machines before one buys one. Relying on A & A++ does not seem very satisfactory

It was only after fitting a free energy monitor that I realised just how much power was being used by a b****y teenager running her electric heater totally needlessly in her bedroom, even going out to college without switching it off.
A Godsend!

Jennifer (Harrison) above makes a good point: I bought an energy monitor a little while ago (I wish I had waited until the energy company gave them away as they are doing now, but that is beside the point).

I was lucky and had no trouble setting it up at all, but then some work colleagues started asking about it and saying that they could not work out how to fit one and I discovered, from their experiences, that a) there are many different types of meter so (as Jennifer says) it’s hard to know what you are looking for on some meters and b) some meters, especially as far as I can see the ones in the cabinets outside your house, have all the wires completely concealed inside sealed up plastic and bakelite covers, so you cannot attach the sensor at all.

They certainly don’t make it easy to be green!

Energy monitors, as commonly supplied for monitoring whole house electricity consumption, are not accurate for a large range of appliances that are commonly found in the home. The monitors normally measure the current (amps) being supplied to the house using a clamp-on current transformer that is fitted around one wire of the supply near the household electricity meter. The amps reading is then multiplied, within the monitor, by an assumed supply voltage to obtain the product amps times volts which is then displayed on the monitor as watts. However, for alternating current, like our mains electricity supply, the power in watts is volts times amps times power factor and this last item, “power factor” is not measured by these monitors. Instead, they assume the power factor has the value one. This is only correct for heating loads like ovens, irons, toasters, kettles, incandescent filament lamps. Appliances with motors and/or electronics in them can have power factors much less than one. On some devices like phone chargers, it could be as low as 0.2. On some fridges it is as low as 0.6. If the power factor of a particular appliance were say 0.5, then these energy monitors would display its power consumption as twice the correct value.
In addition, the assumed supply voltage may well be somewhat different from the actual supply voltage which will in any case vary from time to time.
Thus using an energy monitor can give misleading information. The household electricity supply meter, whether smart or not, measures and displays the true power consumed, i,e. it correctly measures and accounts for power factor and supply voltage as well as current.
As more people use energy monitors within their homes, it is only a matter of time before the discrepancy in measurement of power between an energy monitor and a household supply meter leads to confusion and disputes.
I am writing this detailed lengthy technical comment because I have been amazed that such a fundamental problem with these simple energy monitors has not been aired in public by “Which” or anyone else. The public need to be warned of the limitations of such monitors.
Note, I am NOT saying such monitors are useless, merely that they have limitations which people need to take into consideration.

John Fitz-Hugh’s point is a very good one indeed, and one which I must say I was partially aware of and yet failed to take into account in my own experimentation with appliances which seemed to be green but in fact were not.
However, the saving in energy between my last quarterly bill and the one before that came from the Electricity companies bills and accurate readings and covered a time span where my overall consumption on items other than the washer I got Trading Standards involved with went up rather than down (for example with the onset of summer my garden water features were switched on after winter dormancy and with the long summer holiday starting I have run the dishwasher most days rather than once a week) so I am confident altho although my energy monitor may not be completely accurate, it was giving a reasonably good indication.
John’s amazement that Which? or some other group has not started to alert everyone to this issue is a very important point though – perhaps Which? could do an in-depth report into Monitors and ensure that the issues raised by John are prominent within that?

I notice that “Which” has tested energy monitors. When you tested them, what was the power factor of the load(s) that you used? Did you test them using loads with a range of power factors? If so, what was this range and did you find that the accuracy of the monitor varied with the power factor of the load used? If you did not test them over a range of power factors, was there any reason why you did not do so?

I’m not sure that it is worth mentioning power factor on a non-technical forum, especially since there is not much users can do to change the electrical load characteristics of their washing machine. All that the average user needs to know is the how the cost of running different washing machines compare, and hopefully the ratings on new appliances reflect the cost.

What concerns me more is that gas price is now shown in kWh. Electric heaters can be nearly 100% efficient but that’s certainly not the case with gas. Fortunately, most of the general public are well aware that electric heating is relatively expensive.

Last year my energy supplier sent me free of charge the energy monitor rated by Which? as their Best Buy. Being a bit of an anorak I decided to find out the consumption of every appliance and electric light circuit in my house and started by switching everything off and pulling all the fuses in my consumer unit.
I was therefore very surprised to find a large usage of electricity when I plugged back in one of the fuses associated with my lights, because none of them were switched on. I eventually traced the problem to an old strip light in the garage which had no lamp fitted. The fitting was drawing so much electricity I calculated the annual cost to be £210. An energy efficient light was fitted in it’s place immediately.
Informing my friend Harry of this he used a similar energy monitor at his house and had a very similar experience. Also in his garage he had a separate spur consumer unit. With everything in his garage switched off the garage was drawing a huge amount of electricity. He looked at this unit during the dark and the rear of it was glowing red which could easily have caused a fire if it had not been discovered. This led to a new consumer unit being fitted. We estimated the annual electricity being wasted to cost £1200.
I would therefore recommend to anyone to obtain the energy monitor recommended by Which? and carry out a thorough audit of their energy consumption. In both mine and Harry’s case it has saved us a fortune.

Concerning the comments made by a few people above regarding power factoring I fell foul of this when using the energy monitor recommended by Which? as their Best Buy. It is the type which has a transmitter that wraps around your house’s main power cable and sends readings to a display you carry around with you.
I had my house fitted with energy efficient LED bulbs which the manufacturer claimed to use only 4 watts of power per bulb. But when I turned a bank of these lights on my energy monitor told me the bulbs used an average of 8 watts each. I brought this to the attention of my supplier who kindly went back to the manufacturer for an answer. The answer was that the lamps have a power factor of 0.5 which I wasn’t taking into account.
I believed I was being spun a yarn to get rid of me. But at the same time I was given the type of energy monitor that plugs into a wall socket and directly monitors the power consumption of an appliance plugged into it. I wired up some LED bulbs to a 13amp plug and this monitor correctly gave me the power consumption of 4 watts per bulb and is in fact accurate to 0.1watt.
If you really want to measure accurately the consumption of an individual appliance I suggest this is the more accurate type of energy monitor and will in fact tell you the total amount of energy used by a washing machine or dishwasher over the complete wash cycle.
However I agree with Which? that their Best Buy monitor is ideal in that it is fully portable and you can see in real time what effect switching an appliance on or off has from anywhere around your house.

Smart Meter Roll-Out, Questions to Chris Huhne, DECC 18 January 2012, 14.30 hours

1.What are the true costs of the smart meter roll-out programme?

2. Two years ago I looked at DECC data and figures of £10-billion for 2010 and £10.75-billion for 2011 were quoted. This clearly didn’t happen and now a figure of £11.1-billion is being quoted which is just over half the original quotation. Is this lower cost of roll-out because any additional connections to appliances in the home will become their own responsibility. Surely, the total cost of smart meters will in the end fall on the electricity consumers.

3. How can a figure of £11.1-billion be charged to consumers with no perceived or stated benefits?, apart from more accurate meter readings.

4. You say benefits of £18.1-billion will accrue from the roll-out of smart meters over time. What benefits are these? Can they be defined and evaluated in an unbiased way.

5. Do such benefits actually exist?

6. Are the £18.1 billion of benefits derived as a result of demonstrating that you are saving on the capacity costs of building new power stations and infrastructure at the margin? If so security of supply is being compromised.

7. Are you intending these smart meters to be switchable?

8. If you are intending to use smart meters for switching loads in homes, offices and manufacturing to avoid the marginal capacity costs, then it should be classed as a demand disconnection plan to stop the lights going out.

9. Please state your purpose for the massive £18-billion savings roles that you quote.

10. Would it not be better to invest £11.1-billion in new CCGT power stations that can ensure the countries security of supply is met?

I think smart meters are a really great idea.

Smart meters will cost around £20-billion to roll-out across the UK, as a whole.

That’s £600 per household. All though originally DECC initially listed about £15-billion for the whole country. Its a bit like HS2, smart meters are being foisted upon us without the facts being spealt out to us and then voted upon.

There is no real cost-benefit, all though DECC claims that we will save £17-billion. Yes DECC claims we will all be better off from having them. Well you will be charged $600 per household for the privilege hrough your electricity bill over time.

This is all pie in the sky as the real benefit to each and everyone of us is miniscule. But we are all being hoodwinked into believing we need a smart meter.

Make no mistake this is all linked to the ‘Energy Market Reform’ where the market will eventually stir the capacity cost of generation into the instantaneous half-hourly market price. Do you really want to be frightened into switching your electricity off just when you need it the most, on a cold dark winters night at about 17.30 hours towards the end of January?. Well thats what the outcome is being planned to bee!!!

The market will say the price is approaching £100/kW through your smart meter and you will panic and switch off all electrical appliances and sit in the dark. The people that wise up before the event will buy a little standby petrol or diesel generator for about £500 and switch over to that instead of taking electricity from the mains when the price starts rising, even above £1.00/kWh.

This is the way most of the major power companies are envisaging the ‘Energy Market Reform’ to take.

So now you need a £500 standby Generator and yet you will still be lumbered at paying for your smart meter at an average of £600 per household.

This is what is termed ‘free market enterprise’. Now do you really want that gimmicky ‘smart meter’ because this is what is being channelled as the eventual outcome.

George Wood