Author Topic: Electricity Smart Meter  (Read 57176 times)

Kim

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Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #100 on: 11 October, 2020, 12:15:32 pm »
Can you please explain how you extracted that information from the meter? What hardware / software / anabaric magic was needed?

I'm getting it from Octopus's API:  https://developer.octopus.energy/docs/api/

(Interestingly, it's returning the same data that it did last night.  Not sure if I jinxed it, or it only updates at midnight or something.)

I already have have finer-grained monitoring of the electricity meter by means of a phototransistor attached to the blinkenlight on the front with blu-tac and an Arduino, but that's only good for monitoring consumption, rather than accurate billing.

Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #101 on: 11 October, 2020, 01:11:31 pm »
Can you please explain how you extracted that information from the meter? What hardware / software / anabaric magic was needed?

I'm getting it from Octopus's API:  https://developer.octopus.energy/docs/api/

(Interestingly, it's returning the same data that it did last night.  Not sure if I jinxed it, or it only updates at midnight or something.)

I hope you don't mind the stupid questions, but does that mean you are getting the information from Octopus's server, via the API, using the internet, so information that the meter has already sent to the server?

I already have have finer-grained monitoring of the electricity meter by means of a phototransistor attached to the blinkenlight on the front with blu-tac and an Arduino, but that's only good for monitoring consumption, rather than accurate billing.
I already knew about that and was admiring the ingenuity.
Quote from: Kim
Paging Diver300.  Diver300 to the GSM Trimphone, please...

Kim

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Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #102 on: 11 October, 2020, 01:19:24 pm »
Can you please explain how you extracted that information from the meter? What hardware / software / anabaric magic was needed?

I'm getting it from Octopus's API:  https://developer.octopus.energy/docs/api/

(Interestingly, it's returning the same data that it did last night.  Not sure if I jinxed it, or it only updates at midnight or something.)

I hope you don't mind the stupid questions, but does that mean you are getting the information from Octopus's server, via the API, using the internet, so information that the meter has already sent to the server?

Yes, exactly.

It proves that the meters are successfully communicating with Octopus.  Which I never expected to happen, because Robin Hood (who had them installed) never managed to obtain data from them, sending us "Ignore this request for a meter reading if you have smart meters" letters once a month, and being completely unclear that they were using estimated readings.

Kim

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Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #103 on: 12 October, 2020, 03:25:20 pm »
Okay, it appears that the API returns consumption in (UTC) whole days, and updates some hours after (UTC) midnight.  Presumably it's processed as a batch job on its way from the meter to Octopus's servers.

So not exactly real time.  Pleasingly, it does appear to broadly agree with my blinkylightmeter data:


frankly frankie

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Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #104 on: 12 October, 2020, 11:12:51 pm »
5am (UTC) is a rather unusual time to be microwaving your breakfast whilst running the tumble dryer.
when you're dead you're done, so let the good times roll

quixoticgeek

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Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #105 on: 13 October, 2020, 12:01:55 pm »
Okay, it appears that the API returns consumption in (UTC) whole days, and updates some hours after (UTC) midnight.  Presumably it's processed as a batch job on its way from the meter to Octopus's servers.

So not exactly real time.  Pleasingly, it does appear to broadly agree with my blinkylightmeter data:



You run Debian, and have substantial spinning rust storage?

J
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Kim

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Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #106 on: 13 October, 2020, 12:09:01 pm »
Debian: yes.
Spinning rust: a couple of drives and a couple more not spinning.  (If this is about baseload, it's a sever, router, a couple of 24 port switches, a fire alarm system, and various SIP phones and deaf tech.)
I'll leave it to your imagination why someone might need to use an electric shower for a couple of minutes at 5am...

quixoticgeek

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Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #107 on: 13 October, 2020, 12:10:34 pm »
Debian: yes.
Spinning rust: a couple of drives and a couple more not spinning.  (If this is about baseload, it's a sever, router, a couple of 24 port switches, a fire alarm system, and various SIP phones and deaf tech.)
I'll leave it to your imagination why someone might need to use an electric shower for a couple of minutes at 5am...

It was more the slight rise, that persisted for a while at 0625...

J
--
Beer, bikes, and backpacking
http://b.42q.eu/

Kim

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Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #108 on: 13 October, 2020, 12:12:54 pm »
It was more the slight rise, that persisted for a while at 0625...

That's the fridge.

ian

Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #109 on: 13 October, 2020, 12:14:18 pm »
British Gas have started to text us random installation dates, unrequested, so they're really keen that we do have one fitted.

Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #110 on: 14 October, 2020, 09:41:23 pm »
Smart meter duly installed and working. Gas is a bit slow to respond on the little monitor thingy. But otherwise working ok. Will be interesting to see if it has any positive or negative impact on bills.
Get a bicycle. You will never regret it, if you live- Mark Twain

rob

Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #111 on: 14 October, 2020, 09:49:27 pm »
Smart meter duly installed and working. Gas is a bit slow to respond on the little monitor thingy. But otherwise working ok. Will be interesting to see if it has any positive or negative impact on bills.

And this is where the ads get a little misleading.  The mere existence of the smart meter does not reduce demand.  It should create an informed consumer that then changes the amount and pattern of their consumption and lowers overall demand.

ian

Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #112 on: 14 October, 2020, 10:02:31 pm »
We finally signed up to get them off our case. I'm not going to bother asking them whether it's a new or an old one, because they won't know, and I figure it's their problem.

And if the gasman* gets stuck in the cupboard of IT shame, I'm not feeding him.

*sexism aside, I've never seen gaswoman, and if they do electric too, what are they? Energy people? There's an Energizer Bunny, of course, but I don't think he does meters. I figure I'm scared of the tradespeople because of 80s porn. No seriously, if you remember the plot of eighties porn movies like I do, you'll know that they frequently involved a lingerie-clad housewife and a strapping male plumber/electrician/insert trade and anything else of choice. I'm actively trying to minimize the risk by not wearing lingerie.

Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #113 on: 14 October, 2020, 10:23:30 pm »
Just looked into booking one with Bulb. One of the questions is "Is the distance between your meters 10m or less?" and helpfully they add:

Quote
10m is a bit longer than a bus

Thanks Bulb.

And apparently if I answer no to that question (it's borderline) I can't have just the electric done.

FU Bulb.

Kim

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Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #114 on: 14 October, 2020, 11:13:24 pm »
Smart meter duly installed and working. Gas is a bit slow to respond on the little monitor thingy.

Normal behaviour:  The gas meter has quite a long interval between data transmissions, in order to conserve battery.


Quote
Will be interesting to see if it has any positive or negative impact on bills.

Theoretically the main impact is that the bills will be based on consumption, rather than random number generation.  If the supplier actually manages to access the data from the meters, of course.

Otherwise there's a lot of spin based on the dubious assumptions that consumers are a) oblivious to energy consumption in the absence of a smart meter  and  b) inclined to change their habits / appliances in order to reduce it.

Personally I reckon that, while the monitor thing might help you keep an eye on bills, it's marginally useful at best for tracking down excessive power use.  The monitor thing doesn't give you the granularity of the graphs I posted above, so a plug-in power meter is likely to be more useful for working out what's contributing what.

Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #115 on: 15 October, 2020, 09:14:45 am »
Theoretically the main impact is that the bills will be based on consumption, rather than random number generation.  If the supplier actually manages to access the data from the meters, of course.

Most suppliers will still be billing based on estimation to flatten out the monthly bills across the year rather than charging way more in the winter than in the summer.

I'd be happy to be billed for actual monthly consumption but that's because I'm in a lucky position that a ~£150 bill for winter months wouldn't be a problem for me. For a large number of people in the UK it would be a problem, and they want to be charged £75/month over the year rather than £150 in the depths of winter and £50 for spring/summer/autumn months.

The readings from a Smart meter installed in the spring/summer months can't guess how much the bill will be in the winter months.

I suppose the more frequent and accurate readings should mean the random number generator is slightly less random though.
"Yes please" said Squirrel "biscuits are our favourite things."

ian

Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #116 on: 15 October, 2020, 09:27:31 am »
I pay for quarterly actual gas and electricity consumption. They really, really don't like this judging by the amount of correspondence they send me about the 'benefits of direct debit.' They do remind me by text to read the meter (though their online portal always claims that no reading is due, and whenever I input the reading it shouts 'are you sure, this looks wrong?' even though it never is). Anyway, nothing in my experience tells me to anticipate a utility company billing correctly so I'd rather no give them a licence to take the amount.

If they attempt to change my billing to estimated I'll be peeved. Take reading, charge me for what I used.

SES Water did for a while start estimating my water bill, which I only picked up after the fact. Apparently, though they never felt like telling us this, couldn't find the water meter. Fair enough, it's in a verge, but that's where SES Water fitted it when we moved here.

Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #117 on: 15 October, 2020, 09:32:57 am »
Most suppliers will still be billing based on estimation to flatten out the monthly bills across the year rather than charging way more in the winter than in the summer.

All the ones I've had will take real meter readings and feed them into a random number generator for what I should be paying monthly. Which has never worked out.

quixoticgeek

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Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #118 on: 15 October, 2020, 11:12:14 am »
Anyway, nothing in my experience tells me to anticipate a utility company billing correctly so I'd rather no give them a licence to take the amount.


I'm reminded of a few years back when Scottish Gas did an estimated reading, and decided to change my monthly payment to over £1200 per month. I was very grateful of the Direct Debit Guarantee, the charge was reversed very very fast.

What then happened was a lot of them claiming that they had the right reading, and it was the amount I was due etc... In the end there was a conclusion that the electricity meter was faulty, and they would replace the meter, and then use the first 3 months of use, as the basis to calculate the previous year and a bit. They installed the new meter, couple of months pass.

"High, please pay us the several thousand you owe"
"Um, that's not what we agreed."
"Well we analysed the meter we took out and found no fault."
"Are you sure about that"
"yes"
"Well i have the old meter in my hand, so I don't think you did any testing at all"
*silence*

Eventually it got as far as a court summons, at which point a call from a lawyer told them how stupid they were, and within 24 hours my bill had been written off, and we went to just using the numbers from the new meter...

Incompetent bunch of utter fuckwits.

I still have that old meter, sat in the server room... It's a proper old mechanical bakerlite thing.

Here in Amsterdam we got a new smart meter installed, including a smart gas meter. Despite my inquiries, noone can tell me what smart gas is. It wasn't a brand new meter, and had an existing reading on it. Which took a few weeks to sort out with them. I was glad I took photos within an hour of it being wired in. They could hardly claim I'd used a few megawatts within the first hour... on a 25 amp feed...

Why are meters so damn hard? you'd think energy companies would have got this sorted by now...

J
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http://b.42q.eu/

ian

Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #119 on: 15 October, 2020, 11:45:14 am »
It took several weeks here to convince BG that our meter wasn't imperial (because the database*) after our first surprise £1000+ bill. I had to do a comedy photo of my holding a dated newspaper over the meter. Which seems a bit pointless as it could have been someone else's meter. You'd think the huge bill would have been a giveway.

Not to mention my often mentioned travails with EDF literally billing the wall that a meter was located on, rather than an actual address. Etc.

I don't think any utility company can bill.

*I do wonder if the previous owners were paying for imperial gas, so about three-times as much...

Kim

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Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #120 on: 15 October, 2020, 11:52:12 am »
I do wonder if the previous owners were paying for imperial gas, so about three-times as much...

Isn't imperial gas about 35 times as much?  Gas comes in cubes, remember...

ian

Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #121 on: 15 October, 2020, 12:23:31 pm »
I do wonder if the previous owners were paying for imperial gas, so about three-times as much...

Isn't imperial gas about 35 times as much?  Gas comes in cubes, remember...

If I recall, there's a factor of ten involved in the meter values as read (I can't be bothered to look), so the actual conversation was 3.5 rather than 35 so not quite so obvious, but it still inflated a £300ish bill to a £1000 mid-winter whopper. But with no baseline to go on, you might not know it's wrong (we lived in a bigger house before and never used anything like that much gas).

Discussion with customer 'services' went along the lines of Hi there, I think there's a mistake with our bill. Oh no, sir, it's quite correct. But it's rather large and you see, it says cubic feet and the meter says m3. Yes, that's correct! So the bill is wrong then. No, the meter is correct. Yes, I know the meter is correct but your bill is wrong. No, sir, the billing uses your meter...

You can't just explain to them that they are billing based on the wrong unit.

Kim

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Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #122 on: 15 October, 2020, 12:30:49 pm »
Its worse than that, the Octopus API is returning kWh for gas meter readings.  This is apparently expected for the SMETS1 meter (SMETS2 meters return m^3), but implies another level of bistromathics is being applied somewhere re calorific value.  Possibly even at the meter itself.  I suppose that must be where the smart gas comes in.

ian

Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #123 on: 15 October, 2020, 12:48:04 pm »
Its worse than that, the Octopus API is returning kWh for gas meter readings.  This is apparently expected for the SMETS1 meter (SMETS2 meters return m^3), but implies another level of bistromathics is being applied somewhere re calorific value.  Possibly even at the meter itself.  I suppose that must be where the smart gas comes in.

There's some calculation listed on the bill so both gas and electric are kWh, but I suspect to most people that might as well be quadratic calculus with imaginary numbers. Basically some unit changes and a calorific conversation. If you were following till that point, then they bring in the tariffs, so x units at this, y units at that. Then, as you pull up the end of that epic calculation, they put a little e next to the number.

rob

Re: Electricity Smart Meter
« Reply #124 on: 15 October, 2020, 01:34:20 pm »
Its worse than that, the Octopus API is returning kWh for gas meter readings.  This is apparently expected for the SMETS1 meter (SMETS2 meters return m^3), but implies another level of bistromathics is being applied somewhere re calorific value.  Possibly even at the meter itself.  I suppose that must be where the smart gas comes in.

There's some calculation listed on the bill so both gas and electric are kWh, but I suspect to most people that might as well be quadratic calculus with imaginary numbers. Basically some unit changes and a calorific conversation. If you were following till that point, then they bring in the tariffs, so x units at this, y units at that. Then, as you pull up the end of that epic calculation, they put a little e next to the number.

Gas meters measure volume but you're required to bill energy, hence all the buggering about with formulae.   The Calorific Value is provided to the supplier daily by Transco/Grid.   In order to produce your bill they need to average the CV between meter reading 1 and meter reading 2.   It's not perfect but neither is the rest of the industry.

Incidentally if you have an old style gas meter you can disconnect them and turn them round so they run backwards.   The trick is to not let the reading run below the last one.