Are smart meters worth it?

28 comments

1. 1. It saves you reporting your own usage every month
   1. They’re giving them to everyone for free anyway

   So…it’s sort of a silly question.

   Edit: as u/geckolord21 points out, if you have seven lizards you may **not** want an economy7 tariff

   Edit edit: forgot a word

2. The changes in prices won’t affect how the smart meter works. If you are someone who forgets to send meter readings then it’s worth getting one. Just one less thing to think about. I rarely look at the monitor these days though.

3. Nah, certainly not from the “saving energy” argument, they just let you see what you’re using.

   From another view, they do save you several seconds worth of effort on reading your meter every month, so it’s how much your time is worth.

4. I don’t see a reason not to get one, they let you see your usage which is nice

5. Main benefit is that it sends automatic readings each month which keeps your billing accurate. Without one, your estimated readings can quickly fall out of sync with your actual reading if you’re not regularly inputting it, resulting in higher or lower bills than your actual usage. So you could be underbilled for a while and then get a bit of a shock when an actual reading comes in. Conversely you could overpay and then they take ages to refund you.

   The actual smart monitors might be useful to show you what energy you’re using. It could encourage you to spend less if you go around turning things off when you don’t need it.

6. They’re useful as you don’t get someone turning up to read the meter. And they charge you correctly rather than a guess and then adjust
   Later.
   And you can check which devices in your house use the most energy.

   Personally I also bought one that is smart and I have a phone app and I can see over history what the use is. Saved me a few quid turning off devices that use a lot of electricity.

7. We had one, but it got disabled when we changed provider. I miss it.

   I definitely saved a few £££ realising where we were using a lot of energy. Also, my meters are a pain to get to

8. Two key uses of smart meters that are often missed:

   * They allow generators to more accurately predict demand, *in theory* leading to cheaper energy prices.
   * You can identify problems in your home wiring, or in the meter itself, in real-time, saving weeks of problems if something is actually fucked.

9. A bit pointless as once you look and see revelations such as tumble driers use a lot of energy, the interest wanes. You don’t need to put any meter readings in of course, good, but they can take a while to install it taking your power down. I found that a pain, the guy was faffing around for ages.

10. They’re free and make your life a little easier by not needing to do meter readings.

    Sounds worth it to me.

11. Gives you excellent insight into your usage…and how not running the heating all day saves you cash

12. I’m an electrician and got talking to a meter installer about smart meters. He said he doesn’t want one because the companies will use them to force time of use tarifs. I’m pretty sure you’ll end up on a terrible tariff if you don’t get one eventually though.

13. No, I moved into a place with two of the fuckers.

    They break a week before the bill is due so I get an (over) estimate, or they start double reporting energy use so get charged twice as much as I should be.

    And it makes it easier for them bring in time based (peak/off-peak) charging in the future, something I think is not far off.

14. Every time I try and I make changes to try and save a little bit and reduce our bill, but we still smash the weekly budget on the smart meter a little piece off me dies.

15. Only downside to it is that you’ll work out how much you’re using and therefore become paranoid, so shout at members of your family if the drier isn’t totally full when it’s used. You’ll become far less popular at home if you’re the person who pays the bills

16. The early versions were rubbish which is why there’s a lot of resistance. Current ones are fine though.

    They won’t save you money on their own. They just report what you use, same as the old one, but some tariffs are only available if you have a smart meter so it opens the whole market up to you.

    Personally I wasn’t going to bother but we’re getting solar panels installed and I will need a smart meter if I want to be paid for energy that I export.

    Like the top comment says, it’s just a metering device and it’s free so why not?

17. My energy company also keeps offering me a smart meter … Every time I try to accept they are fully booked.

18. It’s worth it, I recently turned my monitor thingy on and realised how much electric my TV uses, makes you think twice about leaving it on when not in the room. Etc. Also it gives accurate readings so you’re not getting billed from estimates. Just get one, you’ll have to eventually anyway.

19. When you first get it you’ll be looking at it almost every day to see your usage, but the novelty dies off pretty quickly.

    It’s convenient that my energy company can take remote readings and that I can get accurate cost measurements, but beyond that there’s not much difference.

20. If they’re set up correctly then maybe. Otherwise you can end up being asked to pay someone else’s bill to the point where an ombudsman has to be involved if you’re renting.

21. It really rather depends on your circumstances. Prior to moving to my current propety I had absolutely no interest in having one installed; I don’t need an IHD to have an approximate idea of how much energy I’m using, nor do I need something to tell me how much the cost of said electricity usage amounts to. I can determine the cost of my energy usage myself. It’s far from difficult.

    *However* my current property is setup on a PAYG meter (I’ve previously been billed monthly). Said meter is old. Very, very, old. You need to physically take a key to a shop and have money ‘added onto it’. This is at best very inconvenient, at worst very very stressful and worrisome.

    It also, under normal circumstances necessitates being on a tariff that costs more money. So for those reasons alone – not having to “faff around” with physically adding credit to the machine, and the possibility of cheaper rates, I would like to have one installed.

22. I had a smart meter with British Gas and I hated it, I would check it constantly and it would always jump up and down randomly with no real correlation to it, one day on a Sunday when I’ve had nothing on it would read £25 used, at 9am on a Sunday, then on a Thursday at 5pm it would be 78p… I’d ring up and query this and they’d just give some spiel about how its not accurate and if it loses connection it will just try and estimate what you’ve used to update the display.

    Then the charges they get added on every week for the entire week, which explained the £25 as it was like 50p a day or something all got added on a Sunday, so because £4 got added on a Sunday early hours, if the meter lost connection it would assume you were using at the rate of £4 every X hours so calcualte £25.

    I’ve never gone back to one after I’ve switched, things are a load of shite.

23. It’s free (to you) and it can help you to save money if you choose to use it that way. It can also usually save you from having to bother reading your meter.

    It’s not free to the taxpayer or bill payers nationwide, and the rollout has been slow and badly managed and inordinately expensive and hasn’t provided the exaggerated advantages that were promised – all of that is why you’ve read that they’re pointless.

24. I have one, and it’s really good. I know roughly how much energy I use a day and how long is going to last and I get a message via the app when it’s low an I can just top it up with my phone whenever an wherever lol. It’s just so much easier. And all this talk of metre readings and sending them off somewhere, yeah I’ve never had to do it.

25. I’m kind of indifferent about them but one thing to consider is there are some tariffs that are are only available if you have a smart meter, and some of these give you much cheaper electricity through the night. Might be useful if you have an electric car or use a lot of electricity heating up your SEVEN LIZARDS.

26. The little device that says how much you’re using needs constant charging and then makes your bill even higher.

27. In my opinion, no.

    You’re not “saving” any energy by switching. All you really get some sketchy hardware in a plastic box and a complementary cheap plastic framed screen in your house that you watch with anxiety as the prices go up. The value add for doing this is really tenuous.

    At best it saves you 2 minutes reporting your gas and electric every few months.

    The thing is, that they promise to give you cheaper bills by more accurately calculating stuff, but that just isn’t true. You just pay what is due more efficiently, and you’re also subject to *changes to the tariff more efficiently*. Which was terror inducing for a mate of mine that had to watch his daily usage climb to £10 per day, and his billing adjusted in real time to reflect that.

    I on the other hand, will just give a reading in 3 months time and pay whatever.

    This is without even mentioning the future intentions of energy companies. My electrician mates are sceptical about what schemes could be coming in the future as energy becomes more and more uncertain.

    There is also the problem that these energy companies often skimp on hardware, and software. The result is a shit product that is a significant security vulnerability that you’re potentially opening yourself up to. As a consumer, you should be trying to reduce your attack surface, but this adds another one, and not only that but this attack could occur outside your house, without you even being aware, and could affect multiple people on your street.

    The smart meter works by pinging radio signals to a collector, that is just tied to the top of a lamp post at the end of your street. Attacking an individual smart meter itself is pointless, because you can access your data and more on the collector unit. Once the data is collected, it’s just stored on mSATA drive… Completely open on the street… A lot of these collectors just run old versions of windows, and the software often logs key customer information in raw text files. If you could somehow get in to the collector box. You could set up SSH access or something similar, as it’s also of course on the internet, and play around with the data being sent to the energy companies, and also fuck with everyone on the street. Of course I won’t speculate what sort of attacks could be done, but you get the idea.

    Like, nah. The smart meter brings negative value to me overall.

28. Do not get one. Your energy company can also use it to disconnect your supply as mine did, I moved into my place contacted the company to arrange the supply. They fucked up and didn’t change it over form pay as u go, and promptly cut off my gas and electrify supply via the smart meter. I’m still battling with them and so far yet to receive a bill from them.