Smart meters - what is the catch?

House_Martin wrote: »

The current Tory government, or one of its Ministers, has deemed it suitable for the citizens of the UK to refuse a smart meter if they fancy.
So that follows that all these dodgy solar power and old analogue meter users will want to keep the status quo for as long as possible and of course they will refuse a smart meter and make it very hard for their meters to be updated.
A typical conversation took place the other week with one happy customer with a reversing meter ( thief ), who made it clear that not only would he refuse a smart meter he was nt going to open the door to any meter fitters who come to change the meter to a digital meter which will not reverse.
When this sort of thing happens the suppliers will use the meter fitter to attempt a visit and just file it and come back in three months for another try , and another, and another etc and the years will tick by because no supplier will deem it appropriate to take out a warrant of entry merely to update a meter. No Magistrate would sign this warrant.
Suppliers like Scottish Power and EDF are loath to spend money on warrants (at least £250 with a locksmith costs ) on straight bypassing and tampering of meters so a backward spinning meter will just be forgotten.This is how the "easy touch " UK operates.
Suppliers are lax and stupid, and so is the Tory minister who bowed to the public and said "if you don t want a smart meter and want to keep tampering your electric and gas and retain your reversing meter thats fine by me.

Hi

If the meter reverses then it has been deemed as unsuitable for connection to the grid by Ofgem (see earlier reference) & in allowing the continuance of connection the supplier is in breach of it's operating requirements. Upon discovering a new meter type which breaches requirements, the industry should have this added to the list of unapproved meters (see previous reference).

In a case of occupier refusal to have a non-compliant meter replaced, the supplier would be obliged, if for nothing other than safety/conformance reasons, to disconnect the supply to that meter by any means and then, if necessary, recover the cost through court action later.

Over 13 years have passed since the industry was made aware of the issue & 7 years have passed since the first microgeneration systems were installed under the FiT scheme, therefore regulatory obligations dictate that the oldest systems should have been inspected by the industry at least 3 times over that period & each time the industry had the obligation to replace the meters which they knew would reverse or were reversing .....

As such this has absolutely no relation to the question of smart-metering ... the industry is and has always been obliged to replace meters which do not conform and have failed in that obligation. The only logical explanation for this course of action (or lack of) would be that a decision has been made to save the cost of replacing a reversing analogue meter with an analogue or digital meter which doesn't reverse (for which the supplier is already charging within the bill and is responsible for the cost) in anticipation of installing a smart-meter which will boost their revenue by a project allowable additional charge of around £500 over time ... that's effectively almost £500 of pure additional profit to distribute to the shareholder base ...

Oh, by the way ... the legislation to enable FiT microgeneration within the UK was drawn-up and consultation concluded prior to the 2010 general election which saw the change of UK government from Labour to a Conservative/Liberal coalition ... if there is a political point to be scored, then as it looks like everyone has had their fingers in this crock-pot, all political parties need to receive an equal level of abuse ..

Now then, there are a number of reasons why people don't want smart-meters - mine is based on the technology not offering the information that I need and what would be classified as being 'smart' ... import, export, generation, diversion, net, accessibility, EMS, etc ... and, of course, being charged £12bn to £15bn extra for a project which the industry is obliged by license and charges for within the current tariffs anyway ... as such I believe the project borders on being an official scam ... then again there's the loss of tariff transparency which HHM registers and HHB/TOU tariffs creates ... how on earth can I look at a competitive offer and calculate how that would likely apply in my household with it's unique usage pattern without trawling through shedloads of data or trusting the 'industry' to guess the results for me ? ...

As stated, my meter doesn't reverse & I actually doubt that a significant percentage do either ... even if they did, the likelihood of the industry publishing data on how many would be affected would be pretty low considering that it would be admitting that they had been failing in their obligations in open view of the regulator ....

If there is an issue, it's one of greed and of the industry's own making ... If I was running Ofgem I'd certainly have recovered at least a couple of years of departmental running costs through issuing fines for failing to meet stipulated obligations.

HTH
Z

Hengus wrote: »

From the 2003 Ofgem consultation: ...

....ISKRA
There is no impact on the register under reverse flow conditions ...

...I have PVSolar and an ISKRA meter which doesn't run backwards when energy is being generated.

Hi

Same make as ours then ... (model E89E2) ... to the right of the wording "1 Phase 2 Wire" the first symbol (above '20-80A') represents that a ratchet based non-reversing mechanism is installed !

Note: I've just checked a random supplier on-line & they're £11.99/unit in non-volume sales .... so where does a £12-£15billion smart-meter replacement budget cost come from ? ... I suppose that's technically possible if each meter took around 3 man-days to install ... but the thing is - they don't !!

HTH
Z

Hi all

We now have a dedicated Smart Meters guide that may be of use.