Thank you Gordon - most interesting and informative as always.
At the risk of descending into the semi-trivial, I can report from the last decade of what I laughingly refer to as a career, spent as a self-employed domestic gas service engineer. The law (Gas Safety, Installation and Use Regulations) states that after any work is carried out on a gas appliance such as a boiler, the burner pressure or gas rate must be measured. On modern boilers, burner pressure is a thing of the past, leaving gas rate as the only option. The change in meter reading is taken over a period of two minutes and the result of calculation is the input power in kilowatts.
This is generally, but not always, an exercise in humdrum routine: in one case I found the boiler grossly under-running since the day it was installed, causing the household to have been inadequately heated for years. In another, following a manufacturer's own repair, I found a boiler running at twice its rated power - an unsafe condition - their engineer hadn't followed the law.
On the traditional gas meter, the exercise was easy. On the fortunately relatively rare cases of encountering a smart meter, my heart sank. Lack of standardisation and inadequate memory meant time was wasted rummaging around for the magic button presses.
More importantly, I only came across one customer who felt any benefit from having a smart meter.
A meter should be a really simple device. All it does is record a cumulative flow and report it via an analogue or digital display. I have been astonished at how badly a simple replacement of our old electricity meter by a smart meter has gone. After 12 months and three visits it is still impossible to get a digital display of consumption even when the display unit is sitting on top of the meter. None of the help information is accurate and the contractors responsible change at each visit and plainly don't know what they are doing.
We could not possibly run our broadband system in this way. That is part of the reason why I am so critical of the way the smart meter program has been managed. If the DNOs had been responsible, then there is standardisation within an area. Instead, as you note, every service engineer has to learn anew about tens or hundreds of different meter types and functions. Ultimately it is the consumer who bears the cost.
Thank you Gordon - most interesting and informative as always.
At the risk of descending into the semi-trivial, I can report from the last decade of what I laughingly refer to as a career, spent as a self-employed domestic gas service engineer. The law (Gas Safety, Installation and Use Regulations) states that after any work is carried out on a gas appliance such as a boiler, the burner pressure or gas rate must be measured. On modern boilers, burner pressure is a thing of the past, leaving gas rate as the only option. The change in meter reading is taken over a period of two minutes and the result of calculation is the input power in kilowatts.
This is generally, but not always, an exercise in humdrum routine: in one case I found the boiler grossly under-running since the day it was installed, causing the household to have been inadequately heated for years. In another, following a manufacturer's own repair, I found a boiler running at twice its rated power - an unsafe condition - their engineer hadn't followed the law.
On the traditional gas meter, the exercise was easy. On the fortunately relatively rare cases of encountering a smart meter, my heart sank. Lack of standardisation and inadequate memory meant time was wasted rummaging around for the magic button presses.
More importantly, I only came across one customer who felt any benefit from having a smart meter.
A meter should be a really simple device. All it does is record a cumulative flow and report it via an analogue or digital display. I have been astonished at how badly a simple replacement of our old electricity meter by a smart meter has gone. After 12 months and three visits it is still impossible to get a digital display of consumption even when the display unit is sitting on top of the meter. None of the help information is accurate and the contractors responsible change at each visit and plainly don't know what they are doing.
We could not possibly run our broadband system in this way. That is part of the reason why I am so critical of the way the smart meter program has been managed. If the DNOs had been responsible, then there is standardisation within an area. Instead, as you note, every service engineer has to learn anew about tens or hundreds of different meter types and functions. Ultimately it is the consumer who bears the cost.