In our last house the provider came to fit a smart meter. He had to abandon it as the phone signal was very poor. I asked him about a signal booster. He just gave me a confused blank look. At the time I was looking for one but they were apparently only legal for business/company use. The frequencies were not available to non business. I am sure one would have worked as the signal upstairs was better so the receiver aerial placed up high should have been ok, no joy though. The fitter did replace the old meter with a newer one though.
At the moment we don’t have a smart meter as we are currently ( no pun intended) on the best tariff with Octopus for our usage profile. It’s no big deal to do the monthly meter reading and send it online .
Curiously, a few years ago we were with SSE and they sent a leaflet about going to a meter. Their estimate for our cost was higher on a smart meter than old type.
Since the energy price increases we have managed a 20% drop in kWh use, so reducing the effect of price hikes. I use a spreadsheet to log and monitor utilities usage/cost.
Will I switch to smart? Yes when a money saving tariff is available.
Water meter......no problems and usage better than average. Only downside is it’s on a neighbour’s property right beside his. No access problems but their system ( if there is one !) for maintenance is outsourced and coordination rubbish. When they replaced our meters for newer last year the contractors doing it were poor. Hole digger /plumber did ok. Then another party came to relay the block paving. Crap job! It took weeks to get them back. Apparently if the date to do the job was missed they deleted the whole job so it had to be set up again from scratch. All fixed now but a real PIA.
