Smart meters: 'Dog's breakfast' that'll only save you 'a tenner' – report Smart meters will cost each British household £420 and save people just “a tenner a year”, according to reports. Cost-benefit estimates for the British smart meter programme vary hugely, with figures ranging from modest savings of around £26 a year (as we reported last year) to the Mail on Sunday’s latest guess coming from …
Economy n Tariffs haven't gone away, but tend to be confined to large "traditional" suppliers. I've got Economy 10 (it adds a cheap period in the afternoon) principally for heating hot water from the ground source heat pump. It makes less difference with the heating itself as that's running at a constant temperature.
Worked for the Economy 7 tariff... was cheaper to use the washer/drier in the evenings.
E7 was always a solution for the (state owned) energy industry's problems, not yours. The very nature of any time of use tariff means that if you get cheaper than standard off peak power, you have to have more expensive peak power (otherwise somebody's taking a big loss, or you've invented some form of perpetual motion machine).
The consequence of higher peak and lower off-peak rates is that there is a magic proportion of power you have to use off peak to be better off. And depending on the tariffs, that's somewhere around 35-45% of your total demand, which is quite a lot to use between 12:00 and 07:00.
When I worked for an energy supplier, we reckoned that at least one third (possibly more) E7 customers were paying more than they would be on a flat rate tariff. As a rough guide, you have to have time controlled electric storage heaters set around the E7 period as a minimum. North of Leeds that might be enough on its own, south of Leeds you probably need to run all your dishwashers, tumble dryers and washing machines in the E7 period as well. Obviously, if you'rte on night shifts, or have some non-standard use pattern, things will be different.
>>The consequence of higher peak and lower off-peak rates is that there is a magic proportion of power you have to use off peak to be better off.
I had a flat *in* Leeds, which had E7 with the original big chunky storage rads, the real deal. There was no gas, I was out all day, so the arrangement worked pretty well. I sold it, and later was shown around by the proud new owner. He demonstrated his 'app', which allowed him to monitor the consumption of his funky new standard convector panel heaters... no storage in sight and still on E7. I didn't have the heart to explain.
In theory it could save money if it allows companies to charge a different rate for every hour of the day. Don't put your washing machine on between 5 and 8, say.
That's what they did in Ontario, Canada a few years back when I was living there: you had the cheap tariff during the night, the peak rates during the day, and an intermediate pricing at a few other times. However, both the "peak" and the "intermediate" rates were substantially higher than the old time-average rate, while the "cheap" rate was only slightly below. They've also added a special, non-optional surcharge for having the smart meter installed, and upped the fixed costs.
At the same time this was happening, I've put in LED lighting throughout. I also religiously followed the "cheap" times for everything I could (dishwasher, washer, drier - and that's basically it; there is no real way to "defer" cooking, or watching the telly, or running the A/C or the furnace; sitting in the dark also gets a bit boring after a while). The net result was that our household's electricity consumption more or less halved over the next two years. During the same time, our electricity bill (again more or less) doubled. Then it dropped again for a while - but only because the government, eager to be re-elected, introduced an "electricity rebate" scheme - ie upped the taxes (which we notice only once a year, when it's time to pay up) to subside the electricity bill (which is an annoyance every month).
I suppose there must have been some people who ended up saving money with the smart-meter program in Ontario, but I have never met them.
I'm in the process of switching to a tariff that's smart-meter based that charges 4.99p (per kWh) overnight, 11.99p most of the rest of the time, with the exception of 4-7pm on weekdays when it jumps up to 24.99p.
The reason being? I've just bought a Plug-In Hybrid car. So I can schedule it to start charging at 11pm and it'll be fully charged by 8am for a third of the price that I'd have to pay my current supplier. Or to put it another way, I'll be able to commute to work for less than 50p (whereas it was costing me £3 in diesel each way).
On top of that, I already have a smart meter, and was able to download usage from my current supplier at half-hour resolution as a CSV file. Whack it into Excel, couple of formulae, and worked out that with my current (non car-charging) use, plus proposed car charging use, I'd be over £200/year better off. Win.
So yes, they will save some people money - and as electric cars become more and more prevelant, it'll add even greater flexibility.
These tariffs are available elsewhere in Europe. Suppliers offer different "day-ahead market price + margin" tariffs, for example.
It works as long as a minority uses those tariffs, and as long as demand isn't too flexible (everyone choosing to use all their power at 3am to charge Tesla powerwall when it's cheapest).
"[...] the energy companies would use it to further confuse pricing to the point where you wouldn't have a clue which was the cheapest."
I am confused enough already. On my last gas bill British Gas showed my annual consumption was the same as the year before. It also raised my monthly budget payments from £28 to £41. A couple of weeks later another letter arrived raising that to £45.
A few weeks later a letter said that a mistake had been made on my billing and a new bill would be sent within 7 days. That was 20 days ago - no letter yet. Ringing the number provided gave a long spiel on how to claim "poverty" benefits etc before going to the whack-a-digit system. Finally getting the "speak to human" option - "We are very busy - current waiting time is 30 minutes". My cordless phone only lasts about that long before needing a recharge.
"On my last gas bill British Gas showed ..."
British Ghasp couldn't find its arse with both hands tied behind its back.
I kicked them into touch after they tried to charge me eight grand for three days when the meter went wrong.
I wouldn't use British Ghasp again if they were the only supplier on the planet.
I've never seen any of them on the first page of comparison results.
Get your annual totals and plug them into a meerkat, Welsh opera singer, dancing skeleton etc.
Use your real annuals, the standing charge/unit cost variation is very important.
I change supplier every year, and every time I get around 10-15% refunded due to overcharging.
Seems that all the energy companies do the "oh, turns out you do use less than average energy, sorry we charged you too much for six months" - despite providing the annual total use for the previous year and regular meter readings.
I don't think I'm that relatively efficient, everyone uses LED lighting these days.
"savings would be from not having to send engineers out to read meters"
You don't need an engineer to read a meter. I can get someone to drive to my house, pick up a parcel, transport it half way across the country where it is driven to someone else's house and delivered for less than 3 quid.
Just how much do you think it ought to cost to have someone read a meter a couple of times a year? Especially if they got their shit together tried to read them all at the same time.
Savings could come from dynamic electricity pricing to reduce peak demand and better match demand to supply but I am not convinced the current generation of meters are capable of supporting that and we don't have smart appliances and the rest of the infrastructure required to implement it painlessly.
There is no such saving possible for gas supply and that they are trying to force smart gas meters on people tells you it was never about efficiency or saving. It was always about forcing consumers to install real time guilt displays (at their own expense).
Just how much do you think it ought to cost to have someone read a meter a couple of times a year?
How many meters can a meter reader do in an hour? Working very slowly, and with a lot of "no answers" I'd reckon they should still do an average of five an hour. There's no skill involved, so this can be "living wage" work, at say £7.50. Add half as much again for the overheads (NI, pension, van, fuel, hand held device), and we're up to £11.25. Divide by five, and it costs around £2.25 per meter reading. As you note, better planning will get the number of reads up per hour, but in the grand scheme of things the cost of manual meter reading is peanuts (and it gives somebody a job, somebody who will spend most of their income and thus a good benefit to the economy).
Is this projected saving just based on usage?
It's not about savings - there are practically none! It's about forcing a change of behaviour through differential pricing as there is no longer enough generating capacity to allow further increase in peak demand.
Old and polluting capacity reached end of life with replacement green generating capacity too small and variable to properly replace the base load loss. That variability also distorts the market making it difficult for your energy supplier, who is in essence a big hedging company, by increasing risk. It's an ages old problem that successive governments all saw coming and all chose to kick the can down the road.
Also, Hinkley Point C. Also, legislative commitment to electric vehicles and the massive load they'll present. We have no energy security, that is the sort of thing we used to fight military battles over and I think we're about to find out why.
Successive Government hand-wringing, dilly-dallying and time wasting increased the price, but it's still the cheapest way to get that amount of non-fossil-fuel energy.
If we want electric cars to be something other than rich people's playthings, then we need a D, E, F, G and possibly H as well.
Transport uses more energy than you think.
that these things were, at best a white elephant and at worst a cynical move by the energy companies.
I said that the government would not halt the progress to save face. With its disastrous record in expensive, failed IT projects it daren't.
So, 6 years later, here we all are, still discussing what a fucking waste of money these things are.
God, I hate being right all the time.
The side effect was to give two fingers to having a smart meter fitted to my home.
Smart meters were never mandated for people, they were an obligation on energy companies. You could and still can say no. But bear in mind that the SMETS2 smart meters that will shortly be introduced can cope with electricity exports, so there's no technical reason why your can't have one.
A country of households outfitted with "smart" meters can be selectively shut down whenever the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining. Of course, this may incentivise the install of small and highly polluting generators, but the geniuses who decided we needed to buy more diesels will doubtless spend lots of money trying to subsidise Tesla's bottom line anyway.
Simple – if you *need* to use energy then use it, if you don’t then don’t. Boiling a full kettle will take more energy than boiling for 1 cup, a hot long shower will cost more than a short warm one, an eco wash cycle will cost less than a 60deg wash. I really don’t need a gadget to teach me common sense.
Flatmate: "How comes your laundry comes out smelling alright and actually looks clean?"
Me: "Because I put mine on twice a week at the weekends, separated into colours and whites, for the full-on-dirty-person 4-hour long bastard-cycle with prewash, extended wash, vigorous action, extra rinsing and 60 minute drying cycle, at 60°C and I use a traditional non-bio powder, Vanish in-wash, stain catchers and fabric conditioner whereas you throw all your clothes in with your uniform, regardless of colour, along with a liquid all-in-one capsule in the hour before you have to leave for work, you set it to the ultra-quick wash'n'wear 15 minute cycle with 30 minutes of drying, which means (a) the capsule takes about 5 minutes before it breaks so the detergent is only acting for 5 minutes, (b) the wash is automatically limited to 40°C max and it barely has time to reach that temperature before it needs to start rinsing with cold anyway and (c) the rest of the stuff in the wash which you haven't grabbed and ironed quickly before you head off to work remains sitting, slightly damp, in the washing machine for days on end getting musty until I eventually have to put a load on and pull it all out for you and leave it in a basket in the kitchen until you get sick and tired of tripping over it and decide to move it somewhere, God-knows-where, never to be seen again."
Flatmate: "Ah. That'll be it then."
and I use a traditional non-bio powder
Seems to be at odds with the rest of your mission for clean clothes? "Biological" washing powders/liquids were one of the biggest advances in cleaning technology since synthetic detergents.
Of course, if there's a health reason, then fair-dos.
Yeah, it does my skin in. And wearing anything with more than about 40% synthetic fibres drives me up the wall by the end of the day.
I dispute that enzymatic washing products are actually any better than synthetic detergents, or even old fashioned oil and lye based soap flakes.
"I dispute that enzymatic washing products are actually any better than synthetic detergents, or even old fashioned oil and lye based soap flakes."
Take the environmental approach. Murder a fat person (or just find one dead of natural causes) put them in the washing machine with your washing and a good cupful of sodium hydroxide. Voila! Natural soap, clean clothes, and one less salad dodger.
> I dispute that enzymatic washing products are actually any better than synthetic detergents, or even old fashioned oil and lye based soap flakes.
Useful (but possibly little known) fact: biological washing powder is quite good as a paint stripper. Ideal for something that you don't want to risk more powerful solvents on, e.g. painted plastic. Just leave it to soak for a day or two.
Common sense may be free, but it is far from freely available.
Take 'er-in-doors as an example, always turning off the 7W LED hallway light to save energy while wandering around chatting on the phone leaving the 2KW iron on the ironing board heating up the utility room.
I have one of them too (an indoors type, not an iron).
Fills kettle to 90%. Gets bored of waiting for it to boil. Wanders away to do somethng else. Comes back 10 minutes later to find kettle has boiled, switched off, and partly cooled down. Swicthes kettle back on to reboil. Wanders away again........
Ultimately this wasn't really to benefit consumers it was to reduce overall energy consumption across the country. Not only that it paves the way for electricity companies to turn your smart appliances like your fridge or freezer (when they become widely used) down a notch when power demand is high. It also makes the army of meter readers mostly redundant. Saving money for consumers is the last thing on the energy companies' mind and £10 a year is throwing a small bone at them to make it look as if it's a benefit to them.
Except that none of those use smart meters.
The smart meter dewign spec has the following features.
100A contactor for remote disconnection.
Radio system for remote reading and configuration.
Radio system for remote real-time display.
To me, that looks like a way to shed load, or to draw a cock'n'balls visible from the ISS.
"Of course that was with a twenty quid CurrentCost clamp on meter and a short perl script I knocked up. No way for the government's chums to monetise that."
I don't wish to seem harsh, but couldn't you have twitched the curtain and seen the light? If you need metering and a computer interface, I'd suggest it wasn't providing much security, either.
I'm surprised it saves anyone anything. The kind of people that leave stuff on when they aren't using it aren't the kind of people who will look at a smart meter anyway.
And anyone with First Utility at least won't benefit because their stupid Siemens meter won't stay on the 'current usage' display for more than a minute or two. At least if the meter is continuously showing a usage - perhaps a graph of the last hour - there's a chance you might spot something odd like a cooker ring left on. But no, the FU meter switches back to showing your next estimated bill if you don't touch it.
Oh and it's a small (size of a pack of cigarettes), low-res, monochrome unit as well. Something that most people would probably rather leave in a drawer out of sight. I have done.
I had a smart meter fitted for electric and gas under one supplier, changed to another supplier and they needed to fit a new one. That's a bit daft from a saving the planet perspective.
Plus the new gas one doesn't read anything. Another engineer is now probably coming out to pull out some isolation tab to make it read something.
changed to another supplier and they needed to fit a new one
Chances are that the meter currently fitted is a SMETS1 specification. Only SMETS2 counts towards the government targets, so unless you're one of the 1% with SMETS2 meters, or they can do a OTA upgrade, there's a very good chance you'll need these meters ripping out and replacing.
<Pitifully, with sympathy and sadnesss>Why did you agree to have them fitted? The Commentariat have had near universal agreement that smart meters are a POS, so it isn't as though we didn't warn you.
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