Smart meters are not compulsory

[Deleted User]

my electricity cost for the whole year is £340, my wood pellets cost £260 for the year and that is my sum total energy bill, 4 bed detached house. My fit payment is £1200 a year and my rhi payment is £1000 a year. I have to laugh at some of the ignorant comments above. People need to get their facts right and not make suppositions.

FOREVER21

Nothing against smart meters and I would/ will have one, but I am going to wait until a meter that is standard to all suppliers comes along.

At present you could have a smart meter provided by x company, then want to change supplier only to find the smart meter you have is not compatible with the new suppliers system and your meter becomes a dumb meter again!

DevCoder

GingerBob wrote: »

Wrong.

BTW, some useful info here:

http://www.zdnet.com/smart-meter-hacking-tool-released-7000001338/

It uses an optical interface so you are going to be kind of noticeable when you are "hacking" the meter.

Also, having had a brief look at the code that this "hack" uses, its just using common C12.x connection protocol handshaking. I'd imagine most smart meter vendors would have secured this down with either a SSL / certificated challenge&response connection or md5 hashed passwords.

GingerBob_3

krisdorey wrote: »

It uses an optical interface so you are going to be kind of noticeable when you are "hacking" the meter.

Also, having had a brief look at the code that this "hack" uses, its just using common C12.x connection protocol handshaking. I'd imagine most smart meter vendors would have secured this down with either a SSL / certificated challenge&response connection or md5 hashed passwords.

They haven't. C12.18 / C12.21 are the standards.

MD5 is now known to be a weak algorithm and is being superseded by others.

Smiley_Dan

Hey Kris, fancy seeing you here