Smart Meter not so smart?
 

Our new SECO Smart Meter was installed last month. Already they are telling me how my electricity was used. Cooling was the big one, $41, and cooking I can understand as we have an electric stove and SWMBO likes to bake, $16; But water heating at $18? We have a gas water heater. We also have a gas dryer, so laundry at $6 might be suspicious.

Give it a couple of months to learn your usage patterns. But also, make sure to build your home profile where it might ask whether you have gas appliances.

What? They don't include a person who is secretly hiding in your closet making notes about how you're using their electricity?

These are just "place holders", not even estimates.
The website wants you to input your actual data and then it spits out a better estimate.
Hopefully.

:wave:

New meter and monthly price jumped by over $250?????
 

New meter installed and monthly price jumped by over $250?

Price (aka your bill)??

As long as I got and get electricity I don’t care how smart or dumb the meter calculations are. Not going change my usage one bit. Some thing you got have regardless of price. IMO in another 4 years you can almost double monthly bill now.

I just went on site and completed my pofile. Quite a few questions. Let's see what that does on analysis

Unless electricity rates are cheaper after hours, when usage would even possibly make a difference, who cares? Like others have said, you use what you use.

Need electricity to agitate washer and turn the dryer drum.

Sensors
 

Are there any type of sensors on each appliance? If not, it's just a guess on their part. Gimick at best.

That wouldn't bother me as long as the meter is accurate. The meter can't possible actually know where the power is used - hence the water heater guess.

What should really bother you is this: that meter knows (and reports) how much electricity you are using in real time, every day, every hour, every minute. For billing purposes, all they need is one reading per month to calculate the bill. Realize that with these smart meters, a computer hacker (or malicious employee) may be able to see your usage in real time. Translation: a nefarious actor can easily "see" when your usage drops indicating that you are away from home which is a good time for a burglary.

Still worried about their gas water heater guess?

A bit more than a gimmick.
- A regularly occurring high load that tracks temperature is likely a heat pump
- A regularly occurring smaller load that doesn't track temperature is likely a refrigerator
- A small load that aligns with sunset could be lighting
- A small load that occurs in the morning could be a water heater
- A continuous load is the "always on"

At the very least the "always on" is useful. There are a number of chargers and things that I leave plugged in because they can't use that much electricity. Seeing the "always on" number has made me reconsider some of that.

The smart meter uses estimates for time of day usages based upon the equipment specified in the house usage. The meter just records time and energy consumption, and the algorithm breaks the usage down with estimates. Its a typical financial allocation of a total into components using some historical assumptions and some real time data, like appliance energy consumption assumption and daily temperature ranges real time data.

The hours from like 10-11PM to 5-6 AM is assumed to be the always on appliances, adjusted for temperature.
the hours from like 4 PM to 7PM is assumed to be dinner prep and cooking.
The hours from 7AM to 7 PM is considered daylight hours and the opposite are night time lighting hours.
Daylight hours have certain characteristics, night time lighting hours have other characteristics,.

Consultants' data and purchased data for appliance energy consumption is entered into your algorithm and the estimates come out.

The always on energy consumption is base load assumption.
The variations by hour is split by estimate assumptions . . .

I entered our house personalized data, and the questionnaire doesn't make a distinction between an electric golf cart and an electric car for estimates. I did email them they should consider that assumption split given the high number of electric golf carts unique to the villages.

Unless you manage your money by expense minimization, its all relative to how you want to use the data to estimated information to change anything. The interesting part is that historically, non renewable power generation was maximized during the day and minimized at night. With solar energy, the additional power generation is during the day coinciding with peak demand, so the non renewable power daylight generation increase can be reduced, and the non renewable generation can be more stablized throughout the day. Theoretically, that should reduce the cost of high demand energy usage, but not sure if legacy standardized messaging now takes that into consideration or not, or why change legacy messaging when cloudy stormy days are still happening

YMMV

IMHO that depends entirely on how our electricity is created and distributed. Nuclear, coal/oil, hydro power best and probably cheapest given the right federal support. Let’s just see what the elections bring and what if any effect it has on our national strategy for power generation. You can forget windmill and solar farms - impractical and expensive to install and maintain.

Of course, should the cost of producing and distributing electricity comes down for whatever reason, some level of “control” may be needed if price increases cannot be justified beyond simple greed and a desire to increase profits.