Do these new smart meters measure apparent power or just true power?
I am under the assumption that the old meter style measured true power. Which then means as a customer I don't pay for some energy I consume in the form of reactive loads. For example my well pump pulled 8.6A @ 240v, after installing a power correcting capacitor (motor run cap) it dropped to 5A. I thought that was a substantial decrease and couldn't believe it. That's like 8, 100 watt light bulbs not turning on several times a day. I don't think the power company has me pay for it anyway but still these sorts of things could help lower energy consumption.
I am under the assumption that the old meter style measured true power. Which then means as a customer I don't pay for some energy I consume in the form of reactive loads. For example my well pump pulled 8.6A @ 240v, after installing a power correcting capacitor (motor run cap) it dropped to 5A. I thought that was a substantial decrease and couldn't believe it. That's like 8, 100 watt light bulbs not turning on several times a day. I don't think the power company has me pay for it anyway but still these sorts of things could help lower energy consumption.
They do, but getting approval to activate it is such a horrendously complex process that I doubt it will ever actually work
They do, it's easy, and they use it all the time, no pay bill, power off! The process for turning it back on is more complex, it can be done remotely, but there are issues with safety - read financial liability..... "The cooker was on when they cut the power, I piled my laundry on it, then someone turned the power back on..."
For those worried about the meter safety, most use zigbee, 2.4GHz at 10mW - less than your wifi router - and the backhaul is cellular, so no worse then the phone you already have....
Re solar,wind -- agreed, poor engineering solution. The sensible way is to use tidal power if you want non nuke baseload - it's totally predictable, and with a few power plants spattered around it's 24/7 power. The cost of the spinning reserve to back up wind and solar is horrendous. One of the UK primary energy suppliers frequently makes more money from their wind farms in payments to shut them off than in actual generation. It's mad!
There is a big issue with this for commercial customers. We supply 3 phase 4 quadrant power monitors to big users, so they can argue their energy supply is not what they pay for......
SMETS1 maybe. SMETS2 is a whole new kettle of complexity*.
Oh and up norf not cellular backhaul, something much worse
* To err is human, to really screw things up requires a govt department
So you do charge commercial customers apparent power and not residential? I can imagine a large manufacturing plant being able to save lots of money on energy bills by introducing power correction. Not to mention it's greener.
Modern industrial facilities probably use variable frequency drive equipment and since these are non-linear loads the harmonic distortion gets thrown back into the grid causing other issues. My google search comes up with a <5% THD is acceptable for the grid here. That doesn't seem very clean to me.
The new meters can measure both true and apparent power. Unless you have a really big phase angle and a big disparity in true and reactive power, the power board does not care about reactive power. They care if your phase angle gets too big because it cost them money.
TI where I worked in the 80s was making the early power meters.
According to the local power board they operate a Tanatlus network on 220MHZ with outlying meters forming a mesh at 900MHz (HAN/Zigby) to relay data to the meters within the Tantalus network.
I would worry more about power from a cellphone than the power meter.
As far as noise pollution by the switching power supply in the power meter goes, this is a bunch of nothing by people who don't understand the technology. How many switching power supplies are in each houshold? TV, Wall wart for cell phone, charger for tablet, Charger for laptop, ballasts for florescent lights, CFLs, LED Bulbs, ......
I expect the filtering on the power meters far exceeds that in the cheap Chinese wall chargers people buy.
TI where I worked in the 80s was making the early power meters.
According to the local power board they operate a Tanatlus network on 220MHZ with outlying meters forming a mesh at 900MHz (HAN/Zigby) to relay data to the meters within the Tantalus network.
I would worry more about power from a cellphone than the power meter.
As far as noise pollution by the switching power supply in the power meter goes, this is a bunch of nothing by people who don't understand the technology. How many switching power supplies are in each houshold? TV, Wall wart for cell phone, charger for tablet, Charger for laptop, ballasts for florescent lights, CFLs, LED Bulbs, ......
I expect the filtering on the power meters far exceeds that in the cheap Chinese wall chargers people buy.
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Here, if the electric company cuts power - whether by smart meter or old fashioned way - to get it turned back on, at least in a commercial installation, they require approval from a city electrical inspector. That could be problematic if they wanted it to be.
My ham radio installation does not seem to impact the smart meter at our house. I don't think it is contributing anything at HF - I think the noise floor has actually gone down some over the last decade.
Win W5JAG
SMETS1 maybe. SMETS2 is a whole new kettle of complexity*.
Oh and up norf not cellular backhaul, something much worse
* To err is human, to really screw things up requires a govt department
Yeah.... SMETS2... I'll set my alarm clock..
And that would be "down norf" from here...
Re * ... One of the PESs has a policy on the current scheme of things: do no credit checks on new customers (costs money....) - connect them, if they fail to pay, chop 'em off immediately. Lowest cost solution... Compassionate capitalism, eh?
A few years back, I was in a manufacturer's meeting at DECC, one of the cellular providers was in a meeting elsewhere in the building.
We compared notes later -- we were given totally different strategic info, etc... Kafka would have been impressed...
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Not a well-ordered essay because I am snowblowing and fretting about possible power outage in this blizzard.
> mechanical ones can rev CCW
Bad and good. Without contacting the company, you can offset your use with production, even-steven, as long as you use juice every month. (If you have a negative month, they know you are feeding-back, which opens new issues.)
For a decade, public policy in many US states has been to buy-back (homeowner sells to PSE&G) at above market rate. Where I sit (in the shade), this costs me some to support solar out on the island. IMHO, not a big deal.
This does require meters which count both ways ("count back") separately. They do not have to be real smart. But there are a couple mega-companies promoting high-feature meters at quite reasonable prices, so that is what is usually used.
But the distribution system will be significantly upset if we could actually transition from central generation to on-my-street generation. So there is a "1%" clause in Maine's law, and small generation recently reached 1% of the total. So the fight is on again. Arguably homeowner excess might be worth *less* than big-plant power, because it is not coordinated and reliable, and often offered when the big plants are running light. But you can't cut-off the subsidy on people who already invested on that basis (they will riot). Gonna be a long fight.
There is "no" useful energy storage. When loads happen, you have to already have your boiler hot. Yes, dam storage is possible but all the good sites are at capacity already. Tesla et al are building battery bunkers which may power a house or a small town for a few hours.
I don't see any use for small solar except air conditioning. Which does cover many peak-loads, even up here in Maine. (The tourist-island near here has three oil turbines which fire-up only on the hottest day of summer to relieve load on the too-long mostly-idle power line from the mainland.) But even then, A/C often runs well past sunset. So you can't shut-down a fuel boiler. In sunny areas the AC peak is early afternoon and may slack in evening. Major office projects find it effective to solar their roofs to offset A/C. In northeast US we run A/C well past dark to control the humidity. You can predict the amount of solar offered (and thereby schedule your fuel burners) by weather, since solar is generally 100% of the sunshine.
Wind has zero connection to electric loads. Today we have too much wind, would even shut-down a large mill to avoid over-speed. OTOH we have weeks at a time when a windmill hardly turns, certainly not against a load. Wind needs opportunistic loading (make hay, or Aluminum, or pump cattle-water, mostly while the wind blows), or massive storage. We can get 10% of the load (a few factories) to drop load for a day, but not for weeks, and not the other 90% users who expect the lights and stereos to work 24/7.
My town is spread-out. Long wires from the dam (which is now only peaking, base energy comes from burners 30 miles inland). I have thought about putting a truck engine at every "corner". Peak load would be 20 engines each feeding less than a mile of line. Dip load would be two engines feeding many miles of line but quite gently. Could use 1/4 of the Aluminum we now have (and already investor-funded). Would not change the number of poles or pole transformers. The efficiency of truck engines and the cost to have Ollie's Oil drive around putting diesel oil in all those tanks overwhelms any possible wire savings. Even magic cheap wind solar storage instead of engines doesn't look a whole lot better.
My remote-read meter looks like a plain old mechanical meter. Whatever "smart" it has must be a small module inside. Distance between house here would discourage a p-2-p link, so I have assumed low RF back out the power wire. I do not see the type of contacts which would allow remote cut-off. As said, the utility company can't cut you off on a whim. If you don't pay your bill for months, and don't file for hardship, eventually they have enuff paperwork and come to your house, pull the meter.
A guy here "fixed" that with jumper cables. Four times! Hauled into court and slapped with charges including endangering workers and a whopping bill for unmetered power.
If they need to shed load to protect network stability, house-by-house may be nice, but they can yank the breaker at the end of the street or the town center.
It isn't the meters or the generators which bothers me. The investor-owned power companies know their stuff. The regulators are under public pressure. This is not a fair fight. Powering a town, city, county is not like plugging-in your workbench. California's energy "crisis" is a century old (see attached), but look at the early history of ENRON out-gaming a PUC trying to keep the lights on.
> mechanical ones can rev CCW
Bad and good. Without contacting the company, you can offset your use with production, even-steven, as long as you use juice every month. (If you have a negative month, they know you are feeding-back, which opens new issues.)
For a decade, public policy in many US states has been to buy-back (homeowner sells to PSE&G) at above market rate. Where I sit (in the shade), this costs me some to support solar out on the island. IMHO, not a big deal.
This does require meters which count both ways ("count back") separately. They do not have to be real smart. But there are a couple mega-companies promoting high-feature meters at quite reasonable prices, so that is what is usually used.
But the distribution system will be significantly upset if we could actually transition from central generation to on-my-street generation. So there is a "1%" clause in Maine's law, and small generation recently reached 1% of the total. So the fight is on again. Arguably homeowner excess might be worth *less* than big-plant power, because it is not coordinated and reliable, and often offered when the big plants are running light. But you can't cut-off the subsidy on people who already invested on that basis (they will riot). Gonna be a long fight.
There is "no" useful energy storage. When loads happen, you have to already have your boiler hot. Yes, dam storage is possible but all the good sites are at capacity already. Tesla et al are building battery bunkers which may power a house or a small town for a few hours.
I don't see any use for small solar except air conditioning. Which does cover many peak-loads, even up here in Maine. (The tourist-island near here has three oil turbines which fire-up only on the hottest day of summer to relieve load on the too-long mostly-idle power line from the mainland.) But even then, A/C often runs well past sunset. So you can't shut-down a fuel boiler. In sunny areas the AC peak is early afternoon and may slack in evening. Major office projects find it effective to solar their roofs to offset A/C. In northeast US we run A/C well past dark to control the humidity. You can predict the amount of solar offered (and thereby schedule your fuel burners) by weather, since solar is generally 100% of the sunshine.
Wind has zero connection to electric loads. Today we have too much wind, would even shut-down a large mill to avoid over-speed. OTOH we have weeks at a time when a windmill hardly turns, certainly not against a load. Wind needs opportunistic loading (make hay, or Aluminum, or pump cattle-water, mostly while the wind blows), or massive storage. We can get 10% of the load (a few factories) to drop load for a day, but not for weeks, and not the other 90% users who expect the lights and stereos to work 24/7.
My town is spread-out. Long wires from the dam (which is now only peaking, base energy comes from burners 30 miles inland). I have thought about putting a truck engine at every "corner". Peak load would be 20 engines each feeding less than a mile of line. Dip load would be two engines feeding many miles of line but quite gently. Could use 1/4 of the Aluminum we now have (and already investor-funded). Would not change the number of poles or pole transformers. The efficiency of truck engines and the cost to have Ollie's Oil drive around putting diesel oil in all those tanks overwhelms any possible wire savings. Even magic cheap wind solar storage instead of engines doesn't look a whole lot better.
My remote-read meter looks like a plain old mechanical meter. Whatever "smart" it has must be a small module inside. Distance between house here would discourage a p-2-p link, so I have assumed low RF back out the power wire. I do not see the type of contacts which would allow remote cut-off. As said, the utility company can't cut you off on a whim. If you don't pay your bill for months, and don't file for hardship, eventually they have enuff paperwork and come to your house, pull the meter.
A guy here "fixed" that with jumper cables. Four times! Hauled into court and slapped with charges including endangering workers and a whopping bill for unmetered power.
If they need to shed load to protect network stability, house-by-house may be nice, but they can yank the breaker at the end of the street or the town center.
It isn't the meters or the generators which bothers me. The investor-owned power companies know their stuff. The regulators are under public pressure. This is not a fair fight. Powering a town, city, county is not like plugging-in your workbench. California's energy "crisis" is a century old (see attached), but look at the early history of ENRON out-gaming a PUC trying to keep the lights on.
Attachments
> Do these new smart meters measure apparent power or just true power?
This should be in your Tariff. Have you read it?
Traditionally, houses were resistors: incandescent lamps, irons, stoves. Refrigerator and well pump are usually quite minor loads. I *believe* domestic meters are traditionally Power meters, and don't think it makes a lot of difference. (More now that we use far less incandescents, more switchers including CFL/LED, and well-pump motors are less lossy.)
Explaining "imaginary power" is hard enough with educated factory electricians. I can see why they don't want to deal with it in domestic supply.
Reactive power was a killer in early factories full of motors. Immature design and poor loading could throw VAR far higher than Watts. After some basic improvements you still have a lot of induction motors pulling large lagging current. Capacitors existed, but in older days it was often effective to have a few Synchronous motors with the fields adjusted to pull leading current. Nowadays big (closet size) VAR caps are a standard part of any many-motor electric supply design.
My 1934 book on electric supply metering is mostly about reactive power metering which was clearly a mature field at the time. With mostly mechanical methods, it took some cleverness to bill appropriately. A VAR meter can set a flag for peak VAR, but the system won't blow-up on a start-up peak. VAR was (is) mostly billed by the peak 15 minute average. This often meant pen-chart and manual interpretation. "Smart" meters could be tariffed differently: say higher of 5 minute peak VAR or 4-hour high VAR average, etc. Or just a sliding scale for every 0.1PF over the basic Watts.
There is also extensive coverage of the too many ways 3-phase meters can be connected wrong.
FWIW: a few decades back I read a tariff or contract which said I could not have my own electric meter! I guess to eliminate dispute who-was-right? At the time the cost of metering made such a thing unlikely. (I am sure large customers could negotiate this.) Today you can buy a package with phone-app for a few hundred bucks. I installed V&A metering for under $50. No Hours, but that is now cheap also. (I am more interested in sag than bill.)
This should be in your Tariff. Have you read it?
Traditionally, houses were resistors: incandescent lamps, irons, stoves. Refrigerator and well pump are usually quite minor loads. I *believe* domestic meters are traditionally Power meters, and don't think it makes a lot of difference. (More now that we use far less incandescents, more switchers including CFL/LED, and well-pump motors are less lossy.)
Explaining "imaginary power" is hard enough with educated factory electricians. I can see why they don't want to deal with it in domestic supply.
Reactive power was a killer in early factories full of motors. Immature design and poor loading could throw VAR far higher than Watts. After some basic improvements you still have a lot of induction motors pulling large lagging current. Capacitors existed, but in older days it was often effective to have a few Synchronous motors with the fields adjusted to pull leading current. Nowadays big (closet size) VAR caps are a standard part of any many-motor electric supply design.
My 1934 book on electric supply metering is mostly about reactive power metering which was clearly a mature field at the time. With mostly mechanical methods, it took some cleverness to bill appropriately. A VAR meter can set a flag for peak VAR, but the system won't blow-up on a start-up peak. VAR was (is) mostly billed by the peak 15 minute average. This often meant pen-chart and manual interpretation. "Smart" meters could be tariffed differently: say higher of 5 minute peak VAR or 4-hour high VAR average, etc. Or just a sliding scale for every 0.1PF over the basic Watts.
There is also extensive coverage of the too many ways 3-phase meters can be connected wrong.
FWIW: a few decades back I read a tariff or contract which said I could not have my own electric meter! I guess to eliminate dispute who-was-right? At the time the cost of metering made such a thing unlikely. (I am sure large customers could negotiate this.) Today you can buy a package with phone-app for a few hundred bucks. I installed V&A metering for under $50. No Hours, but that is now cheap also. (I am more interested in sag than bill.)
Great info!! Thanks to all.
I wasn't too worried about any health risks or anything, I just get some glitches with my home wi-fi network once in a while and it always seems to be the router at the end of the house right near the smart meter. Changing channels on the network or powering down and back up seems to fix it for a week or so.
I just didn't know about how big this controversy was until I watched a film last night about it. Apparently this is a big deal in some places and the way the authorities handled it piqued my interest. Basically they were forcing people to install them but wouldn't really admit if they were legally bound to do so or not. Some people were claiming some really extreme health issues from said devices.
I wasn't too worried about any health risks or anything, I just get some glitches with my home wi-fi network once in a while and it always seems to be the router at the end of the house right near the smart meter. Changing channels on the network or powering down and back up seems to fix it for a week or so.
I just didn't know about how big this controversy was until I watched a film last night about it. Apparently this is a big deal in some places and the way the authorities handled it piqued my interest. Basically they were forcing people to install them but wouldn't really admit if they were legally bound to do so or not. Some people were claiming some really extreme health issues from said devices.
Some people do suffer when they think there are EM waves about. Sadly we don't seem to have a good way of healing them yet. And try to explain to people that in the shadow of a cell tower is safer than 100 yards away! Highest signal level I ever recorded was at heathrow airport and that flatlined the engineering SW on my phone!
@Gpauk: Arqiva are doing Scotland as well as Northern England, so you are doomed
@Gpauk: Arqiva are doing Scotland as well as Northern England, so you are doomed
> some glitches with my home wi-fi network
Most home wi-fi just sucks. And worse every year. Race to the bottom.
Not just the wi-fi, my wired connection goes out a lot. 10 years ago the standard blue-box home router stayed up for years. My 5 year old job quit, and the new one has to be rebooted every week or so.
> I watched a film
There's no market for a film which says how smooth and pain-free the process is. (It isn't, as the UK members above hint; but hardly a disaster. Or not yet.)
There ARE people who seem to be sensitive to something. I read one article which suggested the sufferer could sense a remote-read meter in a blind test, though no real detail was given. I do wonder what the power companies could have found which is worse than all our wi-fi, cell-fones, and radar-ranges.
Most home wi-fi just sucks. And worse every year. Race to the bottom.
Not just the wi-fi, my wired connection goes out a lot. 10 years ago the standard blue-box home router stayed up for years. My 5 year old job quit, and the new one has to be rebooted every week or so.
> I watched a film
There's no market for a film which says how smooth and pain-free the process is. (It isn't, as the UK members above hint; but hardly a disaster. Or not yet.)
There ARE people who seem to be sensitive to something. I read one article which suggested the sufferer could sense a remote-read meter in a blind test, though no real detail was given. I do wonder what the power companies could have found which is worse than all our wi-fi, cell-fones, and radar-ranges.
famousmockingbird, People complain about extreme health issues from all kinds of things, most of which are foundless. I don't see that people have a choice. You want electricity, you get a meter installed.
"I'm sorry we don't support analog mechanical meters any more. This is all we install. You don't want one, you don't get power."
When I moved in this house 12 years ago it had a traditional meter. I just went and checked. I now has a "Tantalus" digital meter. I have no idea when they switched, and really don't care.
"I'm sorry we don't support analog mechanical meters any more. This is all we install. You don't want one, you don't get power."
When I moved in this house 12 years ago it had a traditional meter. I just went and checked. I now has a "Tantalus" digital meter. I have no idea when they switched, and really don't care.
Home wi-fi is failing because too many people now have it. There is only room in the 2.4GHz band used for wi-fi (in Europe) for three interference-free channels; any more channels involve overlapping which is only OK at a sufficient distance.PRR said:
In the UK BT make it worse by using two channels per router: one for the customer, the other for roaming BT customers. As a result there can be over 50% more channels in use than needed, even though most of these extra ones rarely if ever have a user attached.
The one solution I can think of is emigration.
There is an area in the US (Appalachian Mountains I think) where they have a radio telescope using certain frequencies and consequently there is no mobile/cellphone service for a number of miles surrounding it and there will be no wireless services of any kind as long as the telescope exists.
Other than that one probably would have to move into a desert.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Quiet_Zone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivity . Note this is not a totally unbiased wikipedia article, but not sure you can be on this topic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivity . Note this is not a totally unbiased wikipedia article, but not sure you can be on this topic
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