Electricity Smart Meter

[Kim]

I'm still enjoying the novelty of accurate billing without performing keyhole surgery to access the gas meter.

[ian]

I won't argue with no longer needing to insert my iPhone into the cupboard, arm outstretched, in the hope of getting a picture of the electricity meter readout*.

*our fault. In olden times, back when the Asbestos Palace was a mere castle, everything in the hallways was en-cupboarded in fabulously crappy dark wood that was favoured in the 60s and 70s and reminded me of schools and hospitals, which turned the hallway into a grimly dark institutionalized intestine that squeezed you from the front door to the kitchen. Rip it out, declared we. Unfortunately, then we had to minimally box in the meters which our destructive processes had left cruelly exposed.

[robgul]

Novelty over. I put the gadget in the cupboard with the meters (it kept losing connection anyway, but as previously discussed, The Asbestos Palace is impervious to weasily little radio waves).

Told you!!   We should have Smart Meters shortly, I'm not even going to bother to get the reader gadget out of the box.

[ian]

The instructions said the gadget didn't need to be connected to the wifi for billing but please connect it to your wifi for billing. I assume this means it uses the wifi as a backup, but it preferred the elegance of a quantum superposed instruction.

[Kim]

Neither of the smart meter display gadgets we've had had any sort of WiFi functionality.  They were able to obtain tariff data (in order to display in Currency Units rather than something intuitive like kW) via the meter.

[Feanor]

I think it means it gets its useage from the meters in the usual way, and can present this in kW.
But to be able to present this to you in £, it needs to know about your tariff, so it needs to be able to go online to the supplier to get this info.

The meters connect to the suppliers by themselves to supply usage info, and don't need the display device to do this.
The display device is cosmetic to the metering.

[ian]

I suppose that makes more sense than the instructions. It wanted to be connected to the wifi for some reason, though from this point on, I'm blaming it if any p0rn gets downloaded.

[Feanor]

That's fair enough, I look forward to an Oglaf series where in some other-world smart meters have become sentient and have their own p0rn, subjugating hapless homeowners and their guests in some mass orgy where inserting 50p coins is a historic-fantasy fetish.