But you KNEW before you got the meter that using the heating less would save you money!
Smart meters?
- Thread starter ross94
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I'll have one last go at this - I got a smart meter to tell me how much energy I'm using not whether I'm using it or not - the latter I can work out myself.
I, like probably most other people, don't know how much gas a CH boiler uses - I know it uses gas when its on but not how much. It seems to me in our house it depends on 1) what type/ age of boiler 2) size of boiler 3) what movements there are in the house/ whether people leave certain doors open 4) outside temperature 5) how high the room stat is left on. Some of these I have no easy control over. So one night everything could be favourable and I use little gas and another night the opposite.
I've just googled "how much does my gas central heating boiler cost to run" - doesnt seem any easy answer there to me! yes I would prefer an easy answer! Now I've got it with a smart meter. I go to bed and set the meter to gas only and at midnight it reads nil. When I get up at 7 on a cold morning it reads "x". When its a not so cold morning, it reads "y". hey presto, I know that having the boiler ticking over at 12 deg has cost me 90p or whatever thus I can then work out an average cost per annum of having the boiler on at night rather than switching it right down.... maybe a saving of £100 a year to be had then (worthwhile) if it was a saving of £15 a year I'd rather have the house warmer at night. The smart meter has made it easy for me to work this out. Before its install, I knew it was costing me money to have the boiler ticking over but not how much money.
Lots of consumers are like me IMO. Smart meters will wake them up to actual energy usage and they will see there is money there for the saving. Clearly most people in the energy business will have an interest and insight into how much energy costs so I am guessing its not for them as they'll have an instinct about their level of usage anyway.
I, like probably most other people, don't know how much gas a CH boiler uses - I know it uses gas when its on but not how much. It seems to me in our house it depends on 1) what type/ age of boiler 2) size of boiler 3) what movements there are in the house/ whether people leave certain doors open 4) outside temperature 5) how high the room stat is left on. Some of these I have no easy control over. So one night everything could be favourable and I use little gas and another night the opposite.
I've just googled "how much does my gas central heating boiler cost to run" - doesnt seem any easy answer there to me! yes I would prefer an easy answer! Now I've got it with a smart meter. I go to bed and set the meter to gas only and at midnight it reads nil. When I get up at 7 on a cold morning it reads "x". When its a not so cold morning, it reads "y". hey presto, I know that having the boiler ticking over at 12 deg has cost me 90p or whatever thus I can then work out an average cost per annum of having the boiler on at night rather than switching it right down.... maybe a saving of £100 a year to be had then (worthwhile) if it was a saving of £15 a year I'd rather have the house warmer at night. The smart meter has made it easy for me to work this out. Before its install, I knew it was costing me money to have the boiler ticking over but not how much money.
Lots of consumers are like me IMO. Smart meters will wake them up to actual energy usage and they will see there is money there for the saving. Clearly most people in the energy business will have an interest and insight into how much energy costs so I am guessing its not for them as they'll have an instinct about their level of usage anyway.
I read the digits on the gas meter and subtract the previous reading. That tells me how much gas was used since the previous reading. The only advantage a smart meter would offer is the ability to read the meter without having to go outisde to read the meter.
Well to be honest, neither do I. I know it's rated around 30kW on "full whack" heating water, but my best guesstimate when it's running the heating is a few kW.
1 you can't change without spending a lot of money, 2 is largely irrelevant*, 3, 4, and 5 basically come down to "you heat the house warmer, or leave doors open to let heat out, then it costs more".
But again, it really comes down to, unless you routinely "waste" heat by deliberately leaving the stat higher than you need to be comfortable, or leaving doors open, then knowing how much the boiler uses won't in itself save a single penny.
* There is a penalty for having a grossly oversized boiler - which is one of the (many) reasons I think combi boilers are horrible. You need something ike a minimum of 30kW before it's any good at heating water, but by that size it's grossly oversized (and hence becomes inefficient) at heating a property with a heating load that may well be below 5kW.
There isn't an easy answer. Well actually there is - if you don't use it** then it won't cost anything to run.
Once you are using it, then it'll use enough gas to provide the heating required. The heating required is a function of the property (not changeable without adding insulation etc) and the temperature you heat it to. It's not exactly rocket science that you can minimise expense by only heating the house to a comfortable level and no more - and of course, not leaving all the doors open
Any further savings have to come from reductions in comfort/lifestyle, which leads on to ...The PRIMARY function of smart meters is rationing<period>. Saving energy is simply a load of male bovine manure and the same results could be achieved with much less cost and complexity, without the invasion of privacy, without the security issues, ...
Rationing is the primary function, and it's more or less admitted without using that word. Read up anything but the outright dishonest carp aimed at consumers, and it's clear that they are there to allow for "flexible tariffs" - which basically means that when you get home on a cold December evening, "frozen to the bone" and ready for a nice hot meal - you'll find that your lecky (and probably gas) price has been hiked tenfold because strangely enough, most people like to cook and eat their tea at teatime. And in December, the sun has gone down so all those solar PV panels are doing SFA, and there's a good chance we've got one of those widespread (and long lasting) high pressure calm spells so the windmills are doing SFA, so we're reliant on what's left of the coal and nuclear stations that we haven't shut down yet***.
So people who aren't rolling in cash will turn off their heating, have a cold meal, etc, for the simple reason that they can't afford to heat the house and have a hot meal. Some poor people will die because of it - and I bet there's been no studies to see if this number will be more or less than normally die due to cold and the cost of heating and cooking.
THAT is the one and only function of smart meters - all the rest is greenwash to make them sound useful and acceptable to the proles.
Oh yes, and if it doesn't give enough reduction, there's the means to turn people off remotely - all the smart meters have to have remote turn off capability.
Rationing in all but name.
** Assuming it doesn't have a pilot light, or an energy wasting "keep warm to hide how carp combis are" mode running.
***Last year I wrote to my MP asking him to ask the relevant department why NETA was predicting a shortfall in generating capacity of up to (IIRC) something like 3GW or more during this January (that's something like a 7-8% shortfall against peak demand). I never got an answer, but I did note that more than one coal fired plant was announced to not be closing down (having been paid to stay available). AFter these announcements, the NETA forecast suddenly stopped showing such a large deficit
Which does not require a smart meter - it only needs a meter that's easier to read.
For a couple of weeks. There have been studies that demonstrate that hardly anyone saves anything after that - the novelty has worn off, the display gets to the back of a drawer, and there' no long term saving.
BUT the consumer has been conned into having the energy rationing device installed ready for when it's needed
But because by then there will be very very few people still having a working display, the first they'll know that they've been using expensive "rationed" energy will be when they get "bill shock" and any savings they made over the preceding years will be well and truly wiped out.Sponsored Links
I'll have one last go at this.
If you are already using as little energy as you can without it adversely impacting your lifestyle then a smart meter will not help you use any less.
If you are not already using as little energy as you can without it adversely impacting your lifestyle, i.e. there are things which you can do, like turn the thermostat down, spend less time standing idly in the shower, turning off lights in empty rooms etc, then you do not need a smart meter to tell you that you could turn the thermostat down, spend less time standing idly in the shower, turn off lights in empty rooms etc.
It's like having a trip computer in a car - we all know that if we drive along the motorway at 50mph we'll get better fuel consumption than if we drive at 70mph, and we can see the impact of our decision in how often we have to fill up, we don't need a display on the instrument panel of our car telling us what consumption we have averaged over the last X miles.
I'll have one last go at this.
If you don't know the cost (in electricity/money) then you can't make an informed decision on whether the benefit exceeds it.
For example, the cost of leaving an LED lamp on overnight to illuminate your stairs is so insignificant, that the occasional benefit of not falling to your doom outweighs it.
The cost of running your washing machine seven times a week rather than accumulating a full load might be big enough to outweigh the convenience.
The cost of leaving an electric heater running in your conservatory to keep the dog warm might exceed the cost of buying him a nest and blanket.
If you don't care what the actual cost is, and want to be an ignorant Rigsby, turning off lights and extractor fans, and shivering because you have turned off the heating, nobody will make you buy or look at a meter.
If you don't know the cost (in electricity/money) then you can't make an informed decision on whether the benefit exceeds it.
For example, the cost of leaving an LED lamp on overnight to illuminate your stairs is so insignificant, that the occasional benefit of not falling to your doom outweighs it.
The cost of running your washing machine seven times a week rather than accumulating a full load might be big enough to outweigh the convenience.
The cost of leaving an electric heater running in your conservatory to keep the dog warm might exceed the cost of buying him a nest and blanket.
If you don't care what the actual cost is, and want to be an ignorant Rigsby, turning off lights and extractor fans, and shivering because you have turned off the heating, nobody will make you buy or look at a meter.
so you compare usage in, say February and March, having decided to only run the washer once a week. The electricity usage is lower by 25kWh.
How much of it is due to the washer, how much of it is due to the warmer weather, and how much of it is due to your niece going on holiday for a week and not using the electric shower?
Nobody knows.
However, by looking at my usage chart, I can see that the washer uses 0.6kWh per cycle, almost all of it during the heating period, so I can determine that by doing 20 fewer washes in the month, I have saved £1.20 in electricity. I can correct my ignorant neighbour, who tells me that the machine is rated at 3kW and runs for 2 hours per cycle, therefore he thinks it must use 6kWh per cycle.
I can then decide if saving £1.20 a month is worth it to me.
If my neighbour wants to spend his time ranting at me and criticising me for looking at my usage record, I shall ignore the daft old codger. It's no skin off his nose what I choose to do.
You don't have to wait for a bill. There's this thing called a meter that will tell you how much you have used simply by looking at the dials. And you can do that as often as you like.
And providing a remote display showing (near) "real time" data can be done for a lot less than the cost of all the stuff that goes with "smart" meters.
To re-iterate - NOTHING you have described as a benefit of smart meters is actually in any way related to smart meters. All you need is a means of getting (near enough) real time usage information. You can get this from "dumb" meters simply by counting disc revolutions or light flashes and there are gadgets to do this.
The other thing I'd ask - do you think you actually save something like £40/year from the smart meters ? If not, then you aren't even going to cover the cost* of having them fitted.
* They are not free - one way or another we are all paying for them through our bills.
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