Smart meter

[Ex contributorParticipant @mgnbuk]

I think it's only a matter of time before Smart Meters start offering different tariffs.

All ready happening & has been for some time.

EV owners have had the option with some suppliers of a very reduced rate between midnight & 5am – some have been paying around 4.5p per KWh in that time period. With a 7KW home connection point that would put 35 KWh into your car for around £1.60 – good for around 120 miles in a car doing 3.5 miles per KW & good enough to cover my 100 mile per day commute. Sounds a lot better than £11 or so per day for diesel that I am paying at the moment !

Sadly, such low tariffs are not available at the moment, but when they wer having a Smart meter was a condition of getting the tariff.

Nigel B.

[Former MemberParticipant @formermember12892]

[This posting has been removed]

[KWILParticipant @kwil]

Posted by SillyOldDuffer on 21/01/2022 16:39:46:

Posted by Gray62 on 21/01/2022 15:21:54:

1. Smart meters are currently not compulsory.

…

I think it's only a matter of time before Smart Meters start offering different tariffs. Technically not difficult.

Dave

My daughter lives in Ontario, Canada, she has different Tarifffs at different times of the day.

[SamsarandaParticipant @samsaranda]

Kwil

It is coming here, the busiest times of the day when you can’t dodge using electricity will be charged at very high premium rates, offset by very low charges when virtually no one is using energy. I have solar panels and batteries, during the winter when there will be very little sun to charge my batteries I set them to charge up during the economy seven period in the early hours, this means that I can use energy at off peak prices during the day, every little helps as they say. Dave W

[Howard LewisParticipant @howardlewis46836]

Am I control freak, or a cynic?

Don't like the thought of a supplier being able to change tarriffs as and when they feel lik e it with no warning.

Suspect very strongly that a smart meter allows the supplier to save by not paying meter readers and supplying them with van and equipment, and the ability to change tarriff instantly, before the buyer has any chance to take any economy measures.

Although in longer terms they do anyway

The only way to save costs on energy is to use as little as possible.

With gas for cooking and heating the only way is minimise use.

We have a monitor for electricity anyway, so try to remember to switch off anything not needed Amazing how much is used by devices on standby

Needless to say, we have not got them

Howard

[Clive FosterParticipant @clivefoster55965]

Dave

Bit off topic but what battery set up do you use?

I have panels and am mimbling over whether or not to add batteries. Few firms offering turnkey products now but I'm wondering if the market has matured enough yet.

Clive

[Martin ConnellyParticipant @martinconnelly55370]

I've had two dates to fit a smart meter. No one turned up for either of them but I did get a £30 credit each time as it was their failure to appear. I couldn't mind a few more appointments like that.

I've also seen news reports that before they get smart meters installed everywhere they will have to start modifying or replacing all the ones that have been fitted already as the signals they use are scheduled to be turned off by 2030.

Martin C

[SteviegtrParticipant @steviegtr]

At least you can see where you can save energy. We have had one for 2 years now & can only say it is handy to have.

Steve.

[Chris Evans 6Participant @chrisevans6]

All this talk about solar panels can not apply to all houses, mine is a listed building and there is no way I would want anything installed on a 170 year old roof. Guess I will just have to dig deeper in the pockets to pay the bills. We are all able to restrict our usage with common sense.

[SamsarandaParticipant @samsaranda]

Chris

you don’t only have to fit solar panels to a roof, plenty of people have ground level installations. Dave W

[Paul LParticipant @paull58212]

I have smart meters for gas and electricity. My supplier is (after Peoples Energy went bust), British Gas.

To be honest I cant see any downside. I can see a graphical representation of how much energy I'm using at any given time. This can help if you save money by prompting you to check what you have left switched on inadvertently. We had an electric heater in our conservatory that our cleaner had switched on by mistake. It was apparent that something was amiss and, as we don't use the conservatory in winter, could have been left on for weeks!

With reference to the energy companies using variable tariffs, I'm not sure that the meters are 'Smart' enough. On the British Gas meter, the sampling rate can be set to 30 mins, daily or monthly. This, I think, makes it a pretty blunt tool from a monitoring point of view.

[Clive FosterParticipant @clivefoster55965]

Chris

My panels are on my workshop roof.

OK big workshop so room for the the full 4 kW set so it was a no-brainer really. No way was I letting the panel fitters loose on my new roof after having an extension made. None of the companies I talked to seemed to have any idea of how to handle a properly tiled roof using old style Marley tiles with full overlap where the upper tile has a small overlap relative to the next +1 tile down with one tile in between.

Clive

[SamsarandaParticipant @samsaranda]

Clive

The solar batteries that I purchased are made by Sofar Solar Technology, Chinese of course, I fitted three batteries that give me 7.4 kWh storage capacity, you need an inverter with them as the batteries are DC, my PV panels are fitted with individual microinverters so their output is AC but they feed into the distribution board so any energy fed to the batteries will need an inverter. The Sofar Technology Inverter is rated highly in tests and is one of the most efficient with an efficiency rating of 98.7%. The most efficient solar battery systems are made by Tesla but the prices are very high, I researched before buying mine and my criteria was a balance between price and effiency, there are so many to choose from and some of the cheaper ones you need to steer clear of. I only have the three batteries at the moment until I can afford to expand, I started with two and added another one after 12 months, ideally I would like to expand to five. With electricity costs rising there isn’t much prospect of it ever coming down in the future so any power that you can store rather than sending it to the grid is a definite bonus. Dave W

[Clive FosterParticipant @clivefoster55965]

Dave

Thanks for the information on your battery system. I've copied the text and popped it into my mulling over file.

Great to have information from real users.

The Solar Sofar prices are very attractive when compared to Tesla. Order of £3,000 against £8,000. So payback time is getting into the region where it makes sense.

But the Tesla Energy plan is an attractive concept if it actually works to ensure I can use all my solar panel output.

Back to mulling!

Clive

[Henry BrownParticipant @henrybrown95529]

Interesting topic, thank you to Gray62 for his factual input.

We have had solar panels for about 5 years now and they are close to paying for themselves. They came with a small display that has a "free power" light so we tend to use electricity when what is on, it came as part of the installation.

We have always been very conscious of not wasting energy as we have no mains gas here and use LPG for haot water and background heating to support a log burner. I was chatting to our plumber about the possibility of going for a ground source system when he came to service our LPG boiler last month and he felt that there would be no advantage for us, mainly due to the fact that the warmest water it would provide would be around 50 degrees, the top up to the 63 degrees the boiler is set at would have to be made by using an electric heater. So, despite the claims that method isn't viable in a well insulated mid 1960's bungalow.

Our electricity supplier only checks our meter once a year for both usage and generation, I have chosen to submit my usage monthly and the generation quarterly, I can't really see any advantage to us having a smart meter. We were asked if we'd like one but have declined. Our electricity dealer is Green Energy (UK) plc.

[Clive SteerParticipant @clivesteer55943]

I'm not sure why people appear to be so resistant to the fitting of a smart meter given that they are not that smart but only allows more detailed information about your energy usage and the more good information you have the better you are able to make good decisions. The user can use the info to reduce their bills, if they have a mind to, and the supplier gets a better understanding of domestic usage. They could provide more flexible charging providing finer granularity and hopefully persuade people to spread the load more evenly which helps both user and supplier.

CS

[pgk pgkParticipant @pgkpgk17461]

I was told that fixed ground based systems PV require planning consent and that one requires the consent of DNO for the size of system? Presumably for local load balancing reasons? Quite apart from my agri fields I have a 3acre curtilage so adding to rooftop solar would be easy enough – assuming I ever find a company prepared to install one (having been let down by four so far that surveyed and never returned)…

[SamsarandaParticipant @samsaranda]

Clive

I think the problem of acceptance of smart meters is the future intended use by suppliers, firstly a smart meter can disconnect the customer any time that the supplier wishes to reduce the loading on the supply circuit to balance the usage against energy fed into the supply system, one can speculate that suppliers will delay the capital costs of upgrading supply by limiting how much power a circuit will supply, a benefit for the supplier and definitely not a customer benefit.

Secondly the intention is already stated and the meters have the technology to vary the price being charged at any time when the supplier sees that there is a high demand for power, conversely when demand is low then the supplier will reduce the pricing to encourage more usage, a big advantage for the supplier and only a limited advantage for customers.

Smart meters are great for displaying how much energy is being consumed at any one time but that is incidental to their real purpose which is the benefit for suppliers in manipulating supply and maximising their income, we haven’t seen smart meters being used in that way yet, but it is coming, sorry for being so cynical but you are at the mercy of big business, and they take no prisoners. As customers we have no effective representation against the energy businesses, the current statutory body is a sham and has no real teeth, I won’t mention any government responsibilities to customers as I don’t want this posting being classed as political and being taken down. The energy market is going through major changes with the advent of electric home heating and electric vehicles and energy suppliers will become very powerful businesses, how will they be regulated?

In respect of smart meters, I feel particularly aggrieved that as a consumer I am expected to fund the provision of meters that are for the benefit of the energy suppliers, they should be funding the roll out of this technology from the huge profits that they have made in the past by overcharging customers in times gone by. I am glad that I took the plunge a few years ago to install solar panels and batteries, if I could, I would supplement that with a wind turbine in my garden, any means to reduce how much electricity I have to purchase is welcome, as electricity prices continue to rise then solar generation will make more financial sense. Dave W

[Speedy Builder5Participant @speedybuilder5]

here in France, we have LINKY "smart meters". You access the data by your "smart" phone, but you can only see historic data so as far as I can see, they are of little practical use to the user. To see actual live usage, you have to be at the meter and as our is by the front gate, it aint going to happen. I can't find any reference to a remote reading device however there are some user accessible contacts that could be used to see the consumed energy pulses.

I keep looking for an Arduino app that might do this.

Bob

[BazyleParticipant @bazyle]

I have the display in my living room and can see what is being used but mostly i can't do much about it. I do occasionally decide to turn off a dehumidifier if I'm using my bigger power hungry PC to bring the instantaneous consumption down. It also alerts me if my daily consumption has been above the long term average.
Occasionally I get a shock when I see it hitting 2kw and panic, then remember I have just turned the kettle on. If I didn't do the washing during cheap rate at night I could use it to notice when the cycle had ended. I haven't got so intense, yet, that I work out the cost of washing my shirts but maybe after the winter bills come in I will be seen in historical re-enactment of the 18th century villagers down at the river.

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Posted by Samsaranda on 22/01/2022 11:50:22:

…

Smart meters are great for displaying how much energy is being consumed at any one time but that is incidental to their real purpose which is the benefit for suppliers in manipulating supply and maximising their income, we haven’t seen smart meters being used in that way yet, but it is coming, sorry for being so cynical but you are at the mercy of big business, and they take no prisoners.

…

The history of Smart Meters doesn't support the idea that they are fo0r the benefit of suppliers. They've been forced on suppliers by governments.

Government Energy Policy has to plan 50 years ahead and they are very concerned about the future of energy supply. The way electricity is made and used is changing. About 30% of UK energy is renewable, and the proportion is rising. Wind is the main contributor, but unfortunately it depends on the weather. That means supply and demand have to be managed in new ways, and the best way is by changing the price.

The existing system has effective ways of dealing with excessive demand:

• Mains frequency and/or voltage is reduced slightly so less energy is transferred per second. This only works up to a point, then
• The load is reduced by disconnecting whole areas and certain industrial users.

Which is least painful, consumers cutting back when their meter tells them that electricity is extra expensive, or the the whole district blacking out without warning?

Dave

[Former MemberParticipant @formermember12892]

[This posting has been removed]

[SamsarandaParticipant @samsaranda]

I think the posting by BR reinforces my cynical view, the current smart meters have the ability to disconnect the consumer but as yet the meters do not have the facility to disconnect EV chargers and individual electric heating systems but the will to do so exists within the future plans of the energy suppliers. Dave W

[Former MemberParticipant @formermember12892]

[This posting has been removed]

[Mike PooleParticipant @mikepoole82104]

It seems that the latest generation of EV chargers will be managed to share the load, part of the charging procedure will be to specify when the vehicle will be required so charging can be managed to balance the load across the charging window.

Mike

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