[gambiting]

I don't understand your point - these meters only report your overal usage, not what is using the energy/water. It's letting you skip the step where you manually upload the reads every couple months or whatever, or worse, where the energy company employee has to visit your house to read them in person. Why does it matter if I upload my meter reads to my provider every month or if the device reports it automatically? The end result is the same.

(At least that's how it works in the UK - the "smart" meters don't report live usage back to providers, they just submit kWh reads, the live readout is local device only)

[CaptainMarvel]

That’s not quite right. All new smart meters have the ability to report electricity usage minute-by-minute.

You _currently_ have the choice to only report month-by-month, by kindly asking them to only do that. However, I agree with verisimi, and I believe that it’s only a matter of time before the government via energy suppliers can monitor your real time electricity usage.

It’ll be dressed up, of course, as being in your best interest, but you won’t have a choice. Smart meters were sold as being beneficial for customers, but in reality they take power away from people and consolidate it in energy suppliers.

At the most basic level this is a history of when you are at home or not.

[gambiting]

>>but in reality they take power away from people and consolidate it in energy suppliers.

What kind of power did you have before the introduction of smart meters, exactly?

[lazide]

The power to not have someone know if you’re at home and how much electricity you’re using at any given moment - and for any given moment over an arbitrary period in the past I guess?

[userbinator]

the "smart" meters don't report live usage back to providers

Either they can be easily upgraded to do that, or they already are and the energy company merely gives you the total every month to maintain the impression that they aren't.

If the meter-reader needs to visit periodically, you know with much greater certainty that they aren't gathering live data.

[gambiting]

>>Either they can be easily upgraded to do that

I mean no offence, but you are literally just guessing and not talking about technologies that people have in their houses. The smart meters here in UK, the latest SMET2 standard ones, cannot broadcast live data back to the grid because they simply don't have the bandwidth to do so, they use low frequency communication back to the area controller and they can barely report the kWh number roughly every hour or so. The live communication with the display you have in your house is done over ZigBee and unless the energy company parks the van outside of your house to get those reads, they aren't getting them.

Like, your points about surveilance are true, sure - but they address an imaginary situation you built in your head, not the actual technical solution that exists in the real world.

>>If the meter-reader needs to visit periodically, you know with much greater certainty that they aren't gathering live data.

Yeah and I need to let them into my house, which to me personally is a far greater invasion of my privacy than my meter automatically uploading kWh numbers to the grid.

Also just as a general remark - on HN I think people are likely to divide into two groups - nerds who want ALL the data and they would gladly upload live data to an online system if they could just so they could monitor it live, and people who think any IoT functionality is a massive invasion of privacy and that it's some greater ploy by government to control you. The truth - as always - is somewhere in the middle.

[michaelt]

Maybe your installation is different, but usually the electricity meter uses normal GPRS to talk to the electricity company. They literally have SIM cards inside.

The low energy 'HAN' stuff is used for the gas meter, so it can run for 10 years on a battery, allowing it to be installed without installing wired power. The electricity meter has plenty of electricity available, so it acts as a bridge. The portable screen thingy also uses the 'HAN'.

However, it's pretty clear the policy intent isn't only to let people monitor their usage. If that was all that was needed, there are much cheaper options designed for consumer self-install. Why did they go for the much more expensive and inconvenient smart meter+gprs option, if not to enable time-of-use tariffs?

[sofixa]

> Maybe your installation is different, but usually the electricity meter uses normal GPRS to talk to the electricity company. They literally have SIM cards inside.

Where? In France the devices, called Linky and manufactured to a common standard by a few different companies, and mandatory, communicate via the grid itself over the CPL protocol. There are no SIM cards inside, and thankfully, lunatics have been suing to refuse to get their meter upgraded to Linky "BECAUSE WAVES 5G COVID CHIPS" bullshit which doesn't have any basis in reality.

[didntcheck]

> BECAUSE WAVES 5G COVID CHIPS

Is that really the main line, or is that just the media smear being used against a majority who have fair concerns, such as privacy or a move to phase out fixed-rate tariffs? This Wikipedia article has a good summary, and while the "Health" section is bullshit, the rest is mostly valid points https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_meter#Opposition_and_con...

[sofixa]

Yes, that has been the main line in public discourse and court actions, people screaming that the electromagnetic waves are disturbing them (again, the meter communicates with the operator via the grid's own electric cables, so there are no more 'waves' than before). Flat-rate tariffs still exist and are the default option here in France.

[gambiting]

Is that in the UK or somewhere else?

>>However, it's pretty clear the policy intent isn't only to let people monitor their usage.

Of course - but I contest OP's claim that it has enough granularity to tell you that you're showering too much or that your tool shed uses too much energy - it doesn't allow that in the slightest.

[michaelt]

In the UK, yes.

You can see a UK smart meter being taken apart here [1] with the GPRS module shown at around the 2 minute mark. And you can look at meter datasheets [2] which list GPRS WAN as a feature.

Smart meters often send a reading every 30 minutes. Some energy companies will then show a breakdown on their website that purports to show how much you're spending on lighting, fridges, appliances and things like that [3].

I suspect they use a lot of guesswork to arrive at that breakdown, given the limited input data. Although it's probably fairly easy to recognise certain multi-hour-and-distinctively-large loads, like EV charging and heat pumps.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G32NYQpvy8Q [2] https://www.securemeters.com/sea/wp-content/uploads/sites/15... [3] https://imgur.com/a/L0xwWEo

[CaptainMarvel]

I mean no offence, but you are literally just guessing and not talking about technologies that people have in their houses.

Hilarious that I’m sending your own words back to you.

I worked at an energy supplier. I saw minutely energy readings from customers with my own eyes. It was a lot of data!

[gambiting]

>>Hilarious that I’m sending your own words back to you.

I don't know if it's hilarious, more like unhelpful at best, rude at worst .

>>I saw minutely energy readings from customers with my own eyes. It was a lot of data

It wasn't "live" data though, was it? Just a breakdown of usage per-minute, but uploaded in batches, right? And which energy supplier was that? Because with Octopus you can only get live data by installing an extra(and optional) device called Octopus mini, their SMET2 meters have no such capability.