To be fair, my smart meter for electricity and gas has been accurate...so far.

However, I am not sure how they can be called smart, when they have to be constantly plugged in, and therefore waste electricity to view them.

Just had one of these forced at me exactly two months ago in the U.S. with no opt-out provision. The handout said this was due to a legislative decision, but upon further research it was a closed-door decision made by an appointed commission.

I have read this meter daily at the same time because I did not trust their billing tactics. The first month I received an estimated bill with a fake "reading" nearly 3x what it should have been. Now this month they did an "actual" reading, read by a person, and they have to offer a credit. In other words, they *still* do estimated readings to harvest an arbitrary amount of cash but will correct it every so many months, whenever they decide to actually come out and read it.

Up the street the transmitter/receiver box has an electric meter hanging from it, which shows a steady 16 kwh use DAILY. If they are microwaving the air that much, at the expense of our health, with these located every 300m or so, then this is clearly NOT about saving energy.

This is solely a Facebook tactic of stealing as much information about people and selling it. But that's not uprising. These days, the services that most businesses claim to provide, and the principles and innovation upon which they were founded generations ago, are now secondary to their main purpose.

1 in 2 American homes rely on smart meters which are wireless devices that relay data about the homes power usage to companies for surveillence and billing. But like all networked devices, smart meters are vulnerable to cyber attacks. The surveillence part of smart meters is that they can detect exact voltages coming out and thus one can infer what devices in the house are in use. If that doesnt constitue use for solar power than I dont know what does. If it makes you feel better though BAE Systems (A U.K. defense contractor) plans to to protect smart meters from hackers via encrypting them and having authentication checks.

Smart meters are a Scam!

1) 2) 3) 4) 5) Hey look, a more informative flyer for you to print out and distribute to their customers.

Shut off any single device at any time, from anywhere in the world.

"Nurse's station? Mr. Lancombe's vitals monitor just shut off."

"Did you check the plug?"

"Yes, I plugged in a second unit, it seems to be working."

"Ok, send in the faulty unit."

"Wait, the second unit just shut off too."

Methinks that "smart" as a synonym for "computer controlled" is not an appropriate term.

As an aside, my refrigerator needed a repair several years ago.

It needed a new motherboard, which cost $300.00.

Why a fridge needs a $300.00 motherboard to do what two dollar relays and temperature sensors have done successfully for years continues to escape me.

One more time, unless you are a 15-year-old boy, "because you can" is not in and of itself a sufficient reason for doing something.

wow.
this is not a thing in the country i live. companies do not use them by default (not at all, to my knowledge).

I thought a rollout was mandated for all EU member states. If they're not in your area it is just a matter of time. They only appear to save 1% or less of energy use: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegDat...9568318_EN.pdf

So the main reason looks like it would be for supplemental, surveillance-based business plans. Either that or to allow bored teenagers driving by a platform from which gives them a foothold inside the house from which to move laterally to other devices and computers.

It sounds like the same security concerns as IoT devices, or lack of security. I think really, and what it sounds like to me, the utility companies don't want to pay for someone to physically come out and read your meter. So basically everything is going on the Internet whether we like it or not. This is a good reason to get off the grid and produce your own power, although that's difficult in terms of gas though.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-cy...0HW15E20141007

More than a few years ago there was major pushback from groups of knowledgable people to design the meters in a sensible manner. It was the fodder for a lot of conference presentations. The researchers were routinely ignored and even threatened with retribution and the meters mandated over their objections and filled with so many holes from bad design that you'd think they were from Adobe or M$. They're worse than a scam, since the software component is actively malevolent.

Yeah well, that's the other thing too; they can cut your power off without having to send anyone out to do it. The other benefit for them is that they don't have to wait for that person to arrive at your place either, the power company can cut your power off straight away.

Paid you power bill Turbo? Just kidding.

(I wasn't kidding about the power company using it to cut your power in the event you didn't pay the bill tho)

Why would any company want to know about the power consumption of any house (for surveillance purposes, that is)? Apart from measuring the power consumption for billing purposes, I don't see how power consumption data could help them surveil people.

I guess there are both sides.


One side is an easy way to look at your electric usage. Also the electric company has a fantastic way to monitor loads and prepare circuits in response to such minimal changes. In many cases it solves the issue of some person walking up to the home to read meter. I used to have to go out each month and print in my usage. At the end of the year they'd walk up to verify. The local electric coop has put in a smart grid. They knew about my big circuit breaker on my road being hit by lightning about the same time I called them in a storm. The guy was like we knew something happened when all the downstream (smart meters) devices weren't responding. Nice to know they could dispatch service crews to areas hit by nature or texting drivers.

The down side is that others could take this information and use it against the user. People growing reefer have been caught this way however a monthly total usually is enough to get a warrant. Would anyone want other than some legal use have any desire for this information? Well I would assume with all things there is someone out there trying to figure out a way to make a quick buck on it. Be it for profit or for some political gain or what not.

As an example, law enforcement could use it to find illegal marajuana growers..

Edit: I just read Jefro's post, he beat me to it..

interesting read.
the terminology is sneaky.
it talks about "smart (electricity) grids" (something i fully agree with at least in theory) and "smart (end consumer) meters".
my initial comment was only about the latter (and wireless).
but then the article also talks about "smart metering" a lot; this could be applied to both the smart grids and the home meters - it's unclear.

it's also notable that the article does not specifically mention wireless meters for end consumers.

i live in one of the countries that is furthest advanced in the deployment of this technology, yet i never lived in a house that had a smart meter inside my living space. i guess i'm just lucky.

what i took away from the article is that even the EU realises that

• there are valid security concerns
• the benefit (for consumer devices, not the grids!) is much smaller than predicted

and so there isn't much urgency to drive this into every household.

otoh the article is 3.5 years old.

that said i now remember that my electricity provider offers some sort of smart metering as a contract "upgrade"; i never even looked at this closer but i guess that

• either the metering happens before the electricity even reaches me
• or i can opt in, and a technician would then install one of these devices?

idk.