Electricity meter "lifespan" before replacement due

Yeltep

I'm nearly 70 and cannot recall a single instance of an electricity meter needing to be replaced. I have been pestered to get a smart meter - about which i hear bad things to do with functionality, reliability and dodgy practices - and have now been told my meter is "due" for replacement with a smart meter, the current meter having reached to end of its life. I am suspicious, the energy companies do not have a good reputation for honesty or integrity.??????

EssexHebridean

Yeltep said:

I'm nearly 70 and cannot recall a single instance of an electricity meter needing to be replaced. I have been pestered to get a smart meter - about which i hear bad things to do with functionality, reliability and dodgy practices - and have now been told my meter is "due" for replacement with a smart meter, the current meter having reached to end of its life. I am suspicious, the energy companies do not have a good reputation for honesty or integrity.??????

Have a bit of a browse around on here and you will see plenty of instances where meters have required replacing - they can fail for various reasons, and they can also start over-reading, at which point clearly it's very much in the customer's interest to fight for a replacement.

Generally speaking, as I understand it the current-day thinking is that the older a meter gets, the more likely it is to fail/develop faults etc, and therefore it makes sense to try to prioritise replacing the earlier ones. 

As for Smart Meters - mostly when you hear things about them suggesting that they are as standard unreliable, or that they open you up to "dodgy practices" by which you presumably mean the risk of it being hacked (absolutely minute, by the way) this comes from the sort of people who have very little knowledge on the subject and simply want to promote their own agenda. Often it comes hand in hand with suggestions that we are all being "controlled" from above somehow, and these people might also be the ones who were previously trying to tell you that the covid vaccines all come with a little tracker so that Bill Gates can track your every movement...frequently it will also be accompanied by a link or two to a Daily Fail-type article.   Genuinely - best ignored! As for the functionality - for most people that improves, meaning no need to continue to do monthly meter readings, and an ability to keep an eye on their consumption on a day to day basis. In a few cases the "smart" functions might not work immediately - in which case the majority of folk would be no worse off, simply continuing to read the meter as they do currently. 

Edit - there is also no reason why you would pay more for your energy just by having a smart meter installed - indeed, it's possible that you would be able to access cheaper tariffs as a result, and if nothing else, the IHD might alert you to power-hungry appliances you'd never considered, and cutting down use of those could even save you some cash!

Gerry1

EssexHebridean said:

Yeltep said:

I'm nearly 70 and cannot recall a single instance of an electricity meter needing to be replaced. I have been pestered to get a smart meter - about which i hear bad things to do with functionality, reliability and dodgy practices - and have now been told my meter is "due" for replacement with a smart meter, the current meter having reached to end of its life. I am suspicious, the energy companies do not have a good reputation for honesty or integrity.??????

As for Smart Meters - mostly when you hear things about them suggesting that they are as standard unreliable, or that they open you up to "dodgy practices" by which you presumably mean the risk of it being hacked (absolutely minute, by the way) this comes from the sort of people who have very little knowledge on the subject and simply want to promote their own agenda. Often it comes hand in hand with suggestions that we are all being "controlled" from above somehow, and these people might also be the ones who were previously trying to tell you that the covid vaccines all come with a little tracker so that Bill Gates can track your every movement...frequently it will also be accompanied by a link or two to a Daily Fail-type article.   Genuinely - best ignored!

If you care to read the Smart Meter Specification, you'll find the unpublicised facts are that all smart electricity meters can ration your supply (Load Limiting) and cut you off (Load Shedding).  They also support surge pricing (prohibitively expensive at times when you want to use electricity) and block tariffs with rates that get more expensive as you use more.  Gas meters can ration you and cut you off in much the same way.  Smart meters can certainly control your energy usage: the official term for this is Demand Side Response.

Smart meters are often very difficult to read (umpteen strange registers, complicated series of buttons to press, 1-pixel decimal points that are almost invisible, completely different meters with the same make and model number, the list just goes on.

And no, I'm not an anti-vaxxer, I'm fully jabbed.

BooJewels

I still have an old Landis & Gyr spinning disc electricity meter - at least 35 years old, as that's how long I've lived here.  It's installed in the cellar below a solid stone house and as there's no mobile signal down there (it's not that good in the rest of the house), I don't think a smart meter would work - in that it wouldn't transmit data.  So I'm in no hurry to have it replaced.   

I think my old one is recording okay as it shows plausible results - I.e. I can tell the days I wash my hair, or the day I popped a fan heater on in my unheated work area, from the usage amount.

EssexHebridean

They CAN - but the question is in reality whether they WILL IMO. This one's been thrashed out here many times hasn't it - those that fear the possibility of load limiting and remote disconnection maintain it's a significant risk, and those in the opposite camp usually argue in response that in reality - any government allowing this to happen would make themselves unelectable for the future.  You only have to loo at the appalling press the energy companies are getting currently over the reported "wave" of people being remotely switched to pre-payment via smart meters. Often this isn't based on any fact at all, and sometimes it occurs because of a failure to engage on the part of the customer, but the fearmongering game is strong within the media!

And yes - there can be issues with reading them, for sure - which is why when I posted I said 

 the majority of folk would be no worse off, simply continuing to read the meter as they do currently. 

- in fact I was thinking of another regular poster here who has previously said that they could have issues if one of their meters was changed for a smart one and subsequently required manual readings. They acknowledge themselves though that they are almost certainly in the minority.

I'm categorically not saying that SM's are perfect - after all few things are - but we have seen recently here that often those who bang the drum most loudly have their own reasons for doing so, and it also leads to others then developing the same - often irrational - fears. 

FWIW, I never for a moment thought you were an anti-vaxxer type, and similarly, while I'm aware of your own reservations around SMs, I've also never seen you post misinformation around them, or claim that they emit harmful waves, or any of the other random and false arguments that the conspiracy theory types tend to use! Offering an alternative viewpoint in a balanced way is an entirely different scenario IMO. Indeed - the very section of my post you've quoted underlines exactly the sort of behaviour that the level-headed contributors here like yourself  DON'T post. 

Gerry1

EssexHebridean said:

They CAN - but the question is in reality whether they WILL IMO. This one's been thrashed out here many times hasn't it - those that fear the possibility of load limiting and remote disconnection maintain it's a significant risk, and those in the opposite camp usually argue in response that in reality - any government allowing this to happen would make themselves unelectable for the future.  You only have to loo at the appalling press the energy companies are getting currently over the reported "wave" of people being remotely switched to pre-payment via smart meters. Often this isn't based on any fact at all, and sometimes it occurs because of a failure to engage on the part of the customer, but the fearmongering game is strong within the media!

There's no way that those unpublicised features won't be activated in due course.  No government would splurge £15 billion or whatever just for the fun of it, Demand Side Response is the raison d'être for the smart meter rollout.  A £30 energy monitor would have provided most of the largely trivial benefits that are being promoted, and the savings would have paid for meter readers to have kept visiting until long after limitless energy from nuclear fusion had made meters redundant...

Similarly, EV owners will soon find out why smart connectivity is now mandatory.  They will be allowed to charge at times and speeds when it suits the grid, not those that suit the EV user.

Qyburn

Gerry1 said:

If you care to read the Smart Meter Specification, you'll find the unpublicised facts are that all smart electricity meters can ration your supply (Load Limiting) and cut you off (Load Shedding).

How does that work, at a technical level? I can see how it could cut off your supply, if it had 100A rated relay inside (do they?). I can't see how it could limit your supply as in prevent you drawing more than a certain amount. Does any of your unpublished information cover that?

Regarding EV chargers my understanding is that a smart EV charger would reduce its own load, not be reduced by some sort of (probably technically impossible) restriction on the supply itself.

To be honest it sounds like scare mongering, or conspiracy theory.

EssexHebridean

I suspect that's right about EV owners - and rightly so IMO. It's all well and good insisting that everyone needs to switch to electric, but right now, realistically, if they did, the grid couldn't cope, could it? I think it's almost certain that at some stage, the model is going to change to offering people contracted times to charge at their best price, with charging outside of that being far more expensive, simply as a way of ensuring that everything balances. 

SnakePlissken

It does not have to be the energy companies willingly cutting off users power supplies.
To hackers energy  utilities and NHS systems etc are big targets.

What remote shut off does is allow hackers to do this on a large scale.
The sort of hackers interested in this are state actors such as those from Russia, China or North Korea, though Iran is also catching up.

The only safe network is one not connected to any external network.

And as has been seen in Ukraine power companies are not immune from attacks, especially with other  devices used by companies still having hard coded passwords. This applies to all organisations not just electricity companies, with NHS medical devices also having a similar flaw.

Hackers only need to get lucky once, IT staff have to be lucky every single time.

A lot people dont understand that hacks can be initiated via IOT devices, which provide a means to gain access to a network. And if the Domain servers are breached, hackers have keys to the castle.

Though as ever the weakest link in any network is the human being who clicks on email links or downloads a package to their PC from a compromised website.
(chrome on a windows pc is particularly vulnerable to this as it allows users to install malware⅙ without requiring admin rights to their user profile  and even create new services that can be date/time  scheduled on the PC .)

 Worryingly some in IT who should know better have  been guilty of this and by using same credentials on PC as they use on a server the domain servers are breached. Which is a major weak link.

The link below has an interesting read on the subject and on electric companies vulnerabilities.
Though its not just energy companies who have vulnerabilities.

Tripwire recently surveyed 150 IT professionals in the energy industry and found that the number of attacks on their infrastructure and that 77% of recent attacks had been successful in some way. Overall 68% said that rate of success in the attacks had increased by 25% as opposed to the previous month. For the source of the attack, 78% reported attacks from external sources, and 30% reported the attacks related to an insider (either someone working in the company or an ex-employee).
In conclusion, 83% of them thought that their companies were not confident in coping with a cyber attack

https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/smets-2-a-step-forward-in-energy-saving-or-a-backdoor-to-bring-down-a-country-2c37b9f893ac

Rodders53

Yeltep said:

I'm nearly 70 and cannot recall a single instance of an electricity meter needing to be replaced. 

Same age as you and my electric meter failed about 2-4 weeks ago... Not registering the electric I'm consuming on its register...

Awaiting a replacement having informed my supplier, who can't seem to book an appointment to do that.