Apart from anything else, the smart meter has a digital display on it that you can go outside and read. For instance, it shows how many watts you are currently drawing. Useful for measuring devices that you can’t easily plug into one of those “kill a watt” things. For instance, I had a whole house fan installed. I got an idea of how much it was drawing by going outside, looking at the meter, going back inside, turning the thing on, and looking again.
There are some reports of interference with wireless routers and other household electronics:
The ones PG&E installed here operate on the 900 MHz band to report usage, but the meter contains a second 2.4 GHz band transmitter intended to allow the meter to talk to a home area network that the user may have installed. PG&E claims that they haven’t activated the 2.4 GHz transmitters, and I have no reason to believe otherwise.
(I wonder how many bloggers reporting on the dangerous RF emanating from their smart meters type it in while sitting next to their wireless router.)
In most places, the meter is required to be outside. Your house may be old enough that the meter was installed before the rules changed.
Currently, you have to let someone into your house to read the meter. If you get the smart meter, you won’t have to let anyone into your house any more.
At some point the power company may require you to move the meter outside. If so, this will probably have to be done at your expense. It may require other work to be done, since basically the national electric code says you can replace anything you have with the same thing even if it’s not up to current code, but if you change anything, the parts that you change all have to be brought up to current code.
Around here, power company employees, and only power company employees, install meters. The rules may be different where you are. In either case, assuming your existing meter isn’t from say the 1920s or so, installing the smart meter basically means cutting the old security tag off, pulling out the old meter, shoving the new meter in, and installing a new security tag. That’s it. No re-wiring is necessary. There are standard bases for meters to sit in, and the smart meters are designed to fit these bases. They don’t need to install a new base.
You should note that in most areas, the power company owns the line coming in and the meter, and the home owner owns the base it sits in and the wiring from there on in into the house. If they pull the old meter and see that the base is old and corroded and needs replaced, it’s on your nickel. It is entirely possible that they could find a problem and require you to fix it. On the other hand, if you really do have a problem, it’s better to find it now than to have the base corrode to the point where it melts or catches fire and burns your house down.
Since your meter is inside, they will probably take a look at whatever wiring they can see. If they find any problems they may require you to fix it.
So if there is a problem, not getting the meter installed will save you money. And it may cause your house to burn down. If there aren’t any major problems, then it doesn’t matter.
(note - bolding mine)
Right here is how it will save you money (the part of your quote I bolded). You do your laundry at night, currently using a meter that doesn’t record the time of day of use. So you get charged a flat rate for your electricity, whether you use it during the day or night. If your area has less expensive off peak rates (most do) then you will be charged less than you are now for the electricity that you use while doing your laundry at night.
Basically, right now the power company can’t tell when you are using your electricity, so they have to charge you the higher rate all the time. If they install a smart meter, they can figure out when you are using electricity during off peak time when they have extra capacity in their system, so they can charge you a discounted rate for that to encourage you to keep doing it (or start doing it for those who aren’t doing their laundry at night).
Note that in some areas the price difference between peak and off peak usage is rather dramatic, and in other areas it is much less dramatic, or may not even have a difference. It depends on your local power company.
Yep, it certainly does, but that power is drawn from the non-metered side of the meter so you don’t get charged for it. It’s an extremely small amount of power anyway.
It is of little benefit to you, but the power company can use the information in the smart meters to see exactly where the power dropped out, so they can get a truck to that area quickly. It’s not always a car smacking into a pole. Sometimes a tree limb will fall, which isn’t so obvious to find.
Even if the power company does contract out, the contract will specify that the work has to be done by someone who is licensed and insured. The power company isn’t going to allow some flunky out of high school with no training or experience to even bid on the job.
As I said in my last post, it’s rather silly to expect that they would be UL tested.
I was wondering where you were getting your view of smart meters from. I took a quick look down through that site.
Here are the first few, in order.
That is clearly a problem with the base, and not the meter. Most likely the electrical contacts got old and wore out and weren’t making good contact, causing the poor connection to overheat. Just from this short description I can tell that this isn’t really a meter problem. This type of failure can occur with old fashioned dumb meters too. In fact, it happened in my house. I had to pay for a new base to be installed. Fortunately I caught mine before it actually started a fire.
Makes it seem like the smart meter is to blame, but then you read the linked article and it says this:
So that’s not a smart meter problem either.
That links to a nice picture of a melted meter. There is no information at all as to whether it is a meter malfunction or a base problem. So that’s basically just a picture of something that melted and we don’t have a clue why.
Even that web page says the smart meter wasn’t the problem.
Old fashioned “dumb” meters work by measuring the electricity with two coils. One coil is hooked up in such a way that the current coming out of this coil is proportional to the voltage on the line. the other coil is hooked up in such a way that the current coming out of the coil is proportional to the current on the line. The magnetic flux from these coils is used to spin a disk, which is tied through gears to other disks, which are attached to the dials you see.
A smart meter works by measuring the electricity with two coils. One coil is hooked up in such a way that the current coming out of this coil is proportional to the voltage on the line. the other coil is hooked up in such a way that the current coming out of the coil is proportional to the current on the line. Sound familiar? It’s the same thing I typed above for a mechanical meter. The difference is that the current from these two coils is fed into an analog to digital converter and is processed by a microcontroller, which does a more exact multiplication to get the power result and does some fancier logging.
The important thing is that at the heart of either meter type, all you’ve got are two coils.
There is no possible incompatibility between smart meters and old wiring. If the old meter works, the smart meter will work. They both do the same thing in the same way. The only difference is the device that actually records the power usage. In the old meter it’s a clunky mechanical device. In the new meter, it’s a fancy microprocessor. The parts that actually touch your wiring are identical.
So the first two paragraphs in that quote are a TV reporter’s thoughts on a subject that he or she does not understand. There’s nothing of substance there. It basically boils down to “people are worried”. There is no justification in that article that says they have any real reason to be worried.
The last paragraph mashes concerns over smart meter fires with general advice that if you have dimming lights and such you could have a power problem. There’s no actual connection between the former and the latter.
In short, this article implies something that it doesn’t support just to create fear. Bad reporting, if you ask me.
Again, no information at all about a real meter problem.
Um, ok, they launched an investigation. Again, no information at all about a real meter problem.
Wow! That sounds like a real meter problem! But then we look at the linked article and it has this:
So it’s a wiring problem, not a meter problem. And the home owner is wrong. You can very easily have a wiring problem that makes a fire and burns down your house and the lights may still be on (until the fire gets to the light bulbs at least).
Yay! Finally we have a meter problem!
Well, actually we don’t. We have a base problem. The meter has four tabs on it, which go into clips in the base. One of the clips in the base broke. Stuff gets old, metal wears out. Doesn’t matter if it was a smart meter or a dumb meter installed. Either way, the base was shot.
Smart meters attach to the line coming in. They don’t contain a transformer or any other sort of device that can possibly affect the voltage coming in. They can’t possibly cause a surge.
There very well may have been a surge, but if there was, it wasn’t caused by the meter. Meters can’t do that.
When you install a meter, you don’t typically touch the wiring. All you do is pull the old meter and put in the new meter. If this was what was done here, then the home owner is wrong. The installation of the meter did not cause their problem.
If the meter base had to be replaced, then the home owner may be right, and the fault may have been caused by the power company. This is an installation problem though, and could happen with a dumb meter too.
There’s no smart meter problem here.
FINALLY!
It took that long to finally reach what may be a real smart meter problem. I’m actually going to have to do some reading on this one. I’ll get back to you.
This may cause nuisance trips with your AFCI breakers (if your house is new enough to have them), but I don’t see how it could cause a fire.
I’m not going to comment further no that web page, but as I scan down the list, all of the fires I see are base or home owner wiring problems. I didn’t read through everything on that page, but they are clearly implying a problem exists with smart meters and are mostly using other problems to support their claim, which is flat out deceitful.
In other words, that web site is complete and utter crap. There is absolutely nothing there that I saw to indicate that smart meters cause fires.
But the possible AFCI issue did spark my interest (no pun intended). I’ll get back to you on that one.
To save yourself money.
To help the power company make their system more efficient, which helps the environment and helps ease the loads on strained power systems in certain areas (the last part may not apply to you if you aren’t in the northeast or southwest US).
OK, I poked around on the net for a bit. I don’t recommend searching for AFCI and smart meter problems unless you have the technical knowledge to sort out the whacko woo stuff from the real stuff. There’s lots of woo out there. Smart meters apparently trigger an awful lot of paranoia.
It seemed plausible to me that the RF from a smart meter could theoretically cause an AFCI to trip, and from poking around, it looks like it does actually happen out in the real world on occasion. It doesn’t seem to be very common. I wouldn’t expect it to be.
AFCIs are usually built into the breakers in your breaker box, and the breaker box itself should filter off any radiated RF just because it’s an enclosed metal box. Leaving the door open would make the AFCIs much more susceptible to false trips from RF. As long as the door is closed, the only problem should be RF that is conducted down the main power feed into your house.
I think it would be much more likely to be a problem if the meter is physically close to your breaker box. Your main power wires aren’t exactly ideal for the conduction of radio frequency signals, so any RF noise from the smart meter will be attenuated more and more the further you get away from the meter. In most homes, the meter will be outside and the breaker box will be inside, with a fair amount of distance between the two, so you probably won’t see a problem.
If you did have a problem, an electrician could install an RF filter on your main feed to block out any noise from the smart meter. It is more likely to be a problem with older smart meters, since newer ones are designed with AFCIs in mind. If you do have a problem, the power company may be able to just swap out the meter for a newer one or a different model and make the problem go away. If all else fails, they could just throw an old fashioned mechanical meter in there to eliminate the problem.
If the power company is forcing you to switch to a smart meter and you do have nuisance AFCI trips, then I would expect the power company to fix the problem on their nickel. You may have to fight with them a bit to get them to pay for it.
For those who don’t know what an AFCI is, it’s an Arc Fault Circuit Interrupter. A regular breaker only trips when too much current (typically 15 amps or more) flows through it. It will protect you from a dead short, but a regular old fashioned breaker often won’t trip if there is a ground fault (like you drop your hair dryer into a sink full of water) and it won’t trip if you’ve got a bad connection somewhere, like a frayed extension cord. A GFCI (Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter) protects you from ground faults (like dropping your hair dryer) and an AFCI protects you from bad connections like a frayed extension cord. GFCIs started being required in homes in the late 70s and early 80s. These days, they are required in your kitchen and bathroom and a few other places. AFCIs are much newer, and have only been required for about a decade.
Both GFCIs and AFCIs are good things to have. If you have an older home, you may want to consider spending the money to have them installed.
Older homes like the OPs may have old fashioned knob and tube wiring. Technically knob and tube wiring is OK as long as it is properly maintained, but it gives me the willies, and if I had it in my house I would have it ripped out ASAP. A smart meter will work with old fashioned knob and tube wiring, though if the wiring is that old, the meter base may need to be replaced to fit a modern standard meter. Even a newer dumb meter would require the same base replacement.
Aluminum wire is also technically perfectly acceptable as long as it is properly maintained, but it also gives me the willies. I might not rip it out right away like I would with knob and tube, but I would be very vigilant about checking the connections, and I would double check that if any outlets or switches have been replaced that the proper pigtail to connect to the aluminum has been installed. You typically find aluminum wiring in homes from the late 60s and early 70s. I wouldn’t expect to see it in wiring as old as the OP’s house.
One last note - an AFCI nuisance trip is just that. The breaker trips. That’s it. It won’t cause a fire. All that happens is that the RF from the smart meter causes the AFCI to get tricked into thinking there is an arc fault somewhere on the line so the AFCI shuts off power to your bedroom (or whatever circuit the AFCI is on). Then you have to go down to the breaker box and flip the breaker back on. It’s a nuisance (and an unacceptable one at that, IMHO), but it won’t burn your house down.