A smart meter is a type of gas and electricity meter that can digitally send meter readings to your energy supplier for more accurate energy bills. Smart meters come with an 'in home' display so you can better understand your energy usage. Every home in Britain should have been offered a smart meter from their supplier by 2024.
A lot of hype has surrounded the smart meter roll-out in the UK, with huge claims about big potential energy savings. In reality though, a smart meter simply provides you with numbers.
To make any energy savings from smart meters you need to do the following:
We are particularly interested in smart meters because one of the key benefits of the contextual smart home is that it can help enforce the required behavioural changes and intelligently take action to save energy. And it will do this for all people in the household.
A fundamental flaw of the UK smart meter roll-out programme is the assumption that by simply monitoring how much energy is being used, you are are going to save money. This is simply not true! Whilst some people will look at the numbers and be able to make some sense of them, few will take any kind of direct action to reduce their energy usage.
Perhaps the most useful thing they achieve it to make people aware of just how much energy they are using and this might then encourage them to swap to a cheaper energy provider. This has been made much easier in recent times with many switching companies and services available, to help compare energy providers.
The main challenges are:
The biggest flaw with the UK roll-out of smart meters is that the chosen solution doesn't provide you with access to your own data in any way that allows you to monitor it in real-time or log the data over time. There is no data feed or interface available to acheive this, just a dumb 'in home' display. This is because the Government and energy providers never though of it as your data and saw it purely as a way to lower the costs of billing your for your energy usage :-(
Smart meters are claimed to be the "next generation meter" for both gas and electricity usage. They are a replacement for the standard meters, which use technology created decades ago and require households to track their own readings and submit them to suppliers if they want accurate bills. Smart meters use a secure national communication network (called the DCC) to automatically and wirelessly send your actual energy usage to your supplier. In theory, this means households with a smart meter don't need to rely on estimated energy bills or have to provide their own regular readings. In pracice, they don't work reliably and there are many examples of incorrect billing.
Smart meters also come with a 'dumb' in-home display. This display gives the household real-time usage info, including kWh use and cost but, no way to get this data out of the display unit other than to read it manually.
One of the biggest cons with the UK smart meter roll-out, is that they are claimed to be free for consumers. Whilst you don't get charged a fee for their installation, each consumer is actually paying around £300 for each smart meter installed. This is simply lost in cost of gas and electricity that we all pay over time. As a consumer we are most definately paying for these smart meters!
And to compound things, the first generation of smart meters installed will all need to be replaced, especially when you change energy provider. In many cases we end up paying for two smart meters to be installed in each household!
According to Smart Energy GB, there are several benefits to smart meters:
The first generation of smart meters (called SMETS1) that have been installed to date can stop working when you switch energy supplier. Households with SMETS1 smart meters can still switch, it just means they have to revert back to providing meter readings until thier meter is upgraded or replaced.
Second-generation meters started to be rolled out in 2018 and are fully compatible with the DCC (the secure network that the meters are connected with). This means households with SMETS2 meters should have no issues with energy switching.
Most energy providers will regularly hound you to have a smart meter installed. You are under no obligation to have one installed in your home. We were waiting for the next generation, that enables us to gain access to our own usage data but, there are cheaper and better ways to do this now.
The fundamental flaw with smart meters is that they don't transmit data that often. This means you don't get real-time views of energy usage data. Smart Meters typically send bursts of data, lasting a fraction of a second, at intervals of minutes or hours. This is because they have been designed primarily with remote billing in mind.
The flow of data to the IHD (In Home Display) is more frequent though and this is the best route to getting accurate and timely usage data. Your IHD will be updated by your electricity meter about every 10 seconds and by your gas meter about every 30 minutes. The gas meter updates less often in order to preserve its battery life.
