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Smart home meters draw consumer complaints (Updated August 1, 2010)
President Obama has touted the benefits of smart meters, which can alert consumers to the costliest hours of the day for energy use and can help utilities automate meter reading and quickly identify power outages. Vice President Biden has estimated that 40 million homes could have them by 2015 up from about 8 million now.
More states, including Ohio and Oklahoma, are allowing utilities to install smart meters, reports Stateline.org, a non-profit news site, which says there are large concentrations of them in California, Colorado and Texas.
Implementation has been "controversial" and complaints are increasing, the story says, noting that Maryland's public service commission rejected in June an $835 million smart-meter plan by Baltimore Gas and Electric. The story says:
Individual and class action lawsuits have been filed against utilities in California and Texas, claiming that the meters aren't reliable and have only produced mounting utility bills for customers. In California, the state Public Utilities Commission launched an investigation into the Pacific Gas & Electric Company after consumers in Bakersfield said that their utility bills shot up around the same time PG&E installed smart meters there.
PG&E, which supplies much of Northern California with natural gas and electricity, has denied any problems with the meters. But Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network, a consumer advocacy group in San Francisco, says his office receives 20 to 30 complaints about smart meters each week, most of them citing utility bills "mysteriously going up."
In April, a state Senate hearing drove PG&E to release records showing that that there were indeed some problems associated with smart meters — but that getting accurate readings wasn't one of them. There were some problems with faulty installations, failure to preserve customer usage information and trouble sending usage data back to the utility. But the company found only eight meters measuring energy use incorrectly.
In fact, there's some evidence to suggest that smart meters actually are more accurate than older meters, says Katherine Hamilton, the president of GridWise Alliance, a coalition of technology companies and utilities. "Analog meters degrade and slow down over time," she says. "Immediately, when you put in a digital meter, the reading will become more accurate."
That may explain why some consumers are seeing higher bills, Hamilton says. She suggests that the real problem with smart meters may be that consumers have false expectations that they will save money just from having new meters installed. "A meter in the wall doesn't save money itself," she says. "It isn't smart unless the consumer is actively engaged in it."
That message is reinforced by a recent study from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, which says that meter initiatives alone aren't enough to save energy. It concluded that households could cut their electricity consumption by 12 percent and save at least $35 billion over the next 20 years if utilities use them to give consumers more information about how they're consuming power in ways that will motivate them to cut back.
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----- Original Message -----From: EWSent: Friday, July 30, 2010 10:51 AMSubject: RE: Smart home meters draw consumer complaintsPatrick,Somewhere on the internet, there are directions on how to install a shunt on the electrical wires coming into the meter that will prevent the outside electrical interference that causes the meter to read high, thus increasingelectrical bills. Normally, the 60 cycles of ac electricity calibrates the meter,as it does for an electric clock. The interfering electrical voltages increasesthe ac cycles coming into the meter.The outside electrical source is apparently the high voltage power source for the cell phone towers, and not the cell phone signals themselves.The fix is a shunt, an electrical device that for this condition, consists of a single plastic covered wire, 12 or 14 gauge, and about 6 ft long, plus a wire nut.The shunt wire is wound around the incoming wires to the meter as close to the meter as possible, and can be around the conduit pipe the incoming wires are usually within. For the windings, making a coil (like a coil spring) of about six to eight windings, and leave enough shunt wire to connect to the other end of itself. If stucco or other material around the conduit pipeprevents installation close to the meter, placing the shunt on the wires where they enter the conduit pipe should also work.Strip 1/2 inch of plastic and wire them together with the wire nut, so that the shunt wire becomes a loop for the captured electrons of the interfering electrical source. The installed coil device should be about 6 inches longThe webpage, which I cannot now find, had testimonies of people who saw drastic reductions in their electrical bills by installing this simple device.The website and info was by an electrical engineer.ElW