Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms UK Climate cooling ?

An alternative explanation for 2019:

antartic weather in 2019

2019

Yes, but they would say that wouldn't they! 😆

K

Re my utilities monitoring.
It's a basic kwh usage with notes to show when something that influences it has occured. New boiler, for example but not in my case. Service dates....yes.New water meter is included as that was a replacement for an old one.It's not a laboratory style set-up with rigidly controlled conditions. I've done many of those in the past. This is more akin to what I did with QA in work, monitoring a process to find the range of variability about an average and target and then instigate changes to reduce the variability, (basically increase control of variables). Then use proven techniques to spot when something was changing, and introduce changes to correct it. SPC type of monitoring. It stabilised the product's key attributes and prevented incorrect interference of the natural variation present. Great for live management with long term sensible tightening of that variation as well. In my case the end product being targetted is kwh usage.
It is easy to overthink a problem and try to over control with marginally reducing benefits as the changes become smaller with increased cost, effort. Replace an item for a more fuel efficient one? Yes if replacement is needed anyway, looking at the cost as part of it.
Spend £££ on latest tech or equipment for small benefits with a long pay back period. Simple, cheap, effective changes are easy.

Although I don't go as far as graphs, I have closely monitored energy usage at our last 3 homes, mainly to prove the worth of better insulation / upgraded boilers / low energy bulbs...etc

I have a black book that contains weekly reads of each meter (monthly on water) that go back to October 1988

I added a new 'book' in June last year to monitor the solar PV readings and the generation meter, because I'm still not convinced with the reliability of all this smart shite

From limited discussions I have had on the new smart meters, it would appear that they are more accurate at reading consumption than the old style meters, which generally under read consumption. Hence in part the push to get them installed everywhere. Everyone I spoken to has seen their consumption rise post a smart meter being installed, usually somewhere around 5 to 10% increase in a domestic situation. The local carpenter workshop saw a 50% increase in consumption post having a smart meter installed. He keep a log of his machine use etc., and basically he was consuming the electricity, that the old meter under recorded.

It's certainly true that smart meters are more accurate than the old ones, but it's not always the case that the old ones under-read, at least not without outside interference. The big problem with the old meters were that they couldn't provide readings with the frequency necessary to enable suppliers to offer time of use tariffs, and also because the old meters were easily nobbled either magnetically or physically.

The core strategy of the electricity industry is to try and get people to shift their electricity consumption to even out demands on the grid, with some suppliers offering negative electricity pricing (ie they pay you to use it) at certain times in return for higher costs at peak times. Nearly everyone offers an EV owners tariff giving ultra-cheap charging between midnight and 5:00AM.

Resistance to having a smart meter is quite widespread in some demographics and I wonder sometimes if people are aware that they are condemning themselves to higher electricity prices than they might otherwise be able to get away with.

My recently installed smart meter in home display, refuses to show gas consumption &. EDF say they are getting readings. Ok so no fix. Basically they don’t work as promised which makes me wonder if the consumption recorded is also suspect.

We have the smart meters in a our basement, which has massively thick walls and even the latest updated smart meters can't transmit a signal thru the walls to allow remote readings so each month, its a trip into the basement for manual meter readings

.So I'm not quite sure what that may mean for variable rate schemes, unless the meter has separate readouts for each rate banding usage....

This is down to communication between display and meter, it doesn't affect communication between meter and data collection. This is your responsibility rather than the supplier or data collector. Bit of an annoyance I agree, mine doesn't work very well either but then I've got a SolarEdge invertor which provides much better data than just the Smart Meter so I can't be arsed to do anything about it.


This is bad, your installer should not have sited it there. Unless it gets sorted (ie the meters are relocated) then you're buggered for variable ToU tariffs as they need half hourly metering. I'd get on to the installer and raise a formal complaint with your supplier (and th eOmbudsman if they don't respond with the time limit) to get them relocated, this should never have been signed off, especially if it's a SMETS2 meter. They should have checked metering comms on installation, the meters need a cell phone signal to work. It doesn't have to be very strong or even very reliable, as the encrypted data packets are very small and sent asynchronously, but it does need to be present.