They're moderately useful, but it's more important to just get a sense of what you're actually consuming. If you really don't want to do any maths, then just remember the rule of thumb that all electricity ultimately gets converted to heat - if an appliance doesn't get warm, it isn't using much energy. If you don't mind doing a bit of maths, then read on.
A typical LED light bulb uses about five watts. A phone charger uses about 10 watts when the phone is actually charging and less than 0.1 watts when it's switched off. A laptop uses about 25 watts and a modern desktop PC will use about 80 watts for web browsing up to about 350 watts for gaming. A typical TV uses about 65 watts. A tumble dryer uses about 1,500 watts. A fan heater uses about 1,800 watts. A power shower uses about 7,500 watts.
You're charged for electricity in kilowatt hours - one thousand watts for one hour. The current price cap for electricity is 28p per kWh.
With these basic facts, it's then straightforward to calculate what daily activities are actually costing you. Charging your phone costs about 6p a week. Leaving a lightbulb switched on all week will cost you about 22p. Eight hours of TV costs about 15p. Tumble drying a load of laundry costs about 63p. A ten minute shower costs about 35p. Running a fan heater costs about 50p per hour.
The label on the back of an appliance will tell you the maximum power consumption, but that's not necessarily representative of the actual consumption in use. You can buy a plug-in power meter for less than £20 that will give you both real-time and average consumption figures for individual appliances.
I don't have a smart meter, but I have been actively discouraged from getting one by someone who has one. Her bills went up massively when she got one. Also, apparently they can just switch your electricity off remotely if you don't pay your bills, which they can't do if you haven't got a smart meter.
I was actually going to get one a few years ago, and the man showed up with it to install it, and it was the size of a shoebox and would not fit where my current postcard-sized NON-smart meter is for fuck's sake please delete my wrong post, so he just replaced the old one for something to do and then he left. But that could have been a first-generation one.
>I don't have a smart meter, but I have been actively discouraged from getting one by someone who has one. Her bills went up massively when she got one.
Smart meters are more accurate than traditional meters, so either she was previously benefiting from an incredibly poorly-calibrated meter or (more likely) she hadn't given a meter reading for ages and her estimated consumption was much lower than her actual consumption.
>apparently they can just switch your electricity off remotely if you don't pay your bills
Smart meters have the technical capability to do that, but suppliers aren't allowed to do it under OFGEM rules - any disconnection requires a welfare check to ensure that the customer isn't vulnerable.
>>28144 They may not be allowed to do remote disconnects, but I'm not sure that'll stop some of them. Plus if that fails they can also put your meter onto pre-payment remotely. At least if you're in a house with a traditional meter, they'd need to actually gain physical access, which is something you can make very difficult for them by simply not letting them in.
OP here. My energy provider is offering a 7.5p per KW tariff for charging my EV between 12 am - 4am so I'm really tempted to doing it. I do regular meter readings and pay my bills on time so not really bothered about remote disconnections or overcharging. Only snag is, I need a smart meter.
As well as the remote disconnection/pre-payment issue the other thing a lot of people aren't aware of is that a lot of smart meters are capable of logging your power usage and power factor with enough temporal resolution to be a massive privacy issue.
There's some research on this which demonstrated a proof of concept algorithm which was able to determine which individual appliances were being used in real time based on the kind of data smart meters can collect. I'd link the paper but I'm at work right now.
I think you can request that the power company only takes a reading once a week or whatever at the moment but I wouldn't be surprised if that option goes away once most of the country has been switched over and they no longer need to make concessions to convince people to let them install one.
>>28145 This. Once they have the capability all it takes is the government changing the rules. It actually sounds like exactly the sort of thing the Tories would do if that "don't pay" protest ever gets big enough to seriously inconvenience the energy companies.
The main problem with smart meters is that they have great potential for abuse and only provide minimal benefit to the customer.
If you want real-time power monitoring whole house power monitors aren't too expensive these days and give you much more control over where the data goes.
Your supplier has the right to install their choice of approved metering equipment under Schedule 7 of the Electricity Act 1989. If they were so inclined, they could give you the choice between a smart meter and disconnection. They're not particularly inclined to do so, because it's just a faff.
Practically everyone will have a smart meter by 2030 at the latest, because we need dynamic load management to keep the lights on. We need the ability to change prices in real-time (for both consumption and supply) to manage the volatile nature of renewable generation. Most of that grid management is currently provided by gas-fired power stations, which we're keen to phase out as quickly as possible for very obvious reasons.
Smart meters aren't a convenience for the customer or some kind of weird power grab, they're a basic technological necessity for managing an increasingly complex and unstable grid. If you've got a problem with that, I'd suggest investing in solar panels and a Powerwall.
>Smart meters aren't a convenience for the customer or some kind of weird power grab, they're a basic technological necessity for managing an increasingly complex and unstable grid. If you've got a problem with that, I'd suggest investing in solar panels and a Powerwall.
They're definitely marketed to the customer as a convenience. While they were probably never intended as a "weird power grab" as you put it it's yet another case of new technology being introduced without taking into account how bad actors will abuse it.
The smart meter specification could have included safeguards from the outset to prevent any of these issues form coming up. No remote disconnect capability and limiting the maximum frequency of remote readings in the meter's firmware to something like one data point per tariff per week would have addressed most people's concerns.
Presumably someone on the design committee thought it would be great for grid management to be able to monitor household level power usage with sub-hourly resolution and either didn't think about or didn't care about the consequences of potentially creating what is effectively a national log of every household's comings and goings.
>didn't think about or didn't care about the consequences of potentially creating what is effectively a national log of every household's comings and goings.
We already have access to that data in half a dozen different forms. Mobile phone operators can locate your phone down to a few metres in real-time. Maxar's satellite constellation provides multiple daily updates at 50cm resolution. An off-the-shelf Software Defined Radio receiver array can triangulate the arc emissions from a light switch from several miles away. You know those airport scanners that can see through your clothes? Several companies now make handheld versions.
A "smart meter" that can't actually do anything smart is pointless. The entire point of the exercise is to provide highly granular data on consumption and open up opportunities for bidirectional communication between appliances and the grid. Real-time power consumption data is only meaningfully useful to power companies in order to run dynamic pricing, dynamic load management and vehicle-to-grid. If you don't trust them with that data and don't trust the ICO to regulate the people that hold it, then you've got much bigger issues than someone at SSE knowing when you put the kettle on.
