Smart meters are coming to destroy America!

[DavidDvorkin]

Xcel Energy will start replacing residential eletric meters with smart meters, which offer a number of advantages. Postcards were sent to houses in the Denver metro area, telling us this would happen. The local Nextdoor site is blowing up with conspiracy theories. This will give Xcell control over your heat and AC! (No, it won't.) It's part of a plot to shut down power plants and move to green energy and control our minds! The meters give off radiation that will do terrible things to you! (Same as cell phones, and lower intensity.)

There's probably more, but I stopped reading.

[hlthe2b]

1. Just tell me it will collect, organize and run my next garage sale...

and I'm all in.

[GregariousGroundhog]

7. The biggest advantage of smart meters is automated outage notification

If a residential customer is away from home or asleep, the utility will know a home is without power before the owner does. The smart meter data can also be fed into an Outage Management System to quickly diagnose what piece of equipment is faulty.

As for organizing and running your garage sale, well... you are on your own!

[Ocelot II]

2. They did that in Minneapolis last year. One of those new meters was installed

in my house, and that's why I'm magnetic, not because of the covid vaccine.

[DavidDvorkin]

3. But can you fly?

If you can't fly, I don't want one.

[Ocelot II]

4. I can't fly, exactly, but I can levitate, which would be a big deal

except for the fact that all my neighbors got the meters, too, so I'm not special.

[sanatanadharma]

20. When everyone is high, no one knows they're high

So here is to high-life, high-times, high-thinking, highlights, highfalutin highwaymen, and high-fives.

[Earth-shine]

17. Can you help me find my keys? nt

[Ka-Dinh Oy]

29. I was going to ask if it was going to act like a magnet.

How many forks and keys are stuck to your house now?

[NutmegYankee]

5. What they will do is allow you to be ripped off.

The utility will mark up power at the times when normal people perform normal chores, like laundry or dishes. If one thing pisses people off, it’s a utility trying to coerce them to change their habits.

[OnDoutside]

15. That's where PV Solar comes in. My electricity supplier installed

a smart meter at my house, and yes they're suggesting moving to the type of tariffs you are saying. However, I am just about to start renovations and will have PV Solar panels installed with battery pack. That's going to massively reduce my electric bill.

[NutmegYankee]

21. But solar is not an option for everybody.

It's specific to the placement of the house as well as the positions of trees. The answer is quite simple - lobby the state to allow those who wish to opt out to opt out. I've known no one in a state with smart meters who successfully reduced their bill.

[OnDoutside]

23. That's absolutely true, it doesn't work for everyone. I'm fortunate too that a friend of mine will

be doing the installation. He's even putting in the cabling for a EV charger, and even that can take the charge from solar. Don't the power company have to get permission to enter a person's property ?

[NutmegYankee]

25. Our local company can read it by just driving by.

Radio tags report the usage. Unlike a "Smart" meter, it is only read once a month.

[OnDoutside]

27. I've heard of that with water meters. My electricity supplier also

hooked up fibre in our area using their electricity poles (really neat job) and once my renovations are completed, we will be getting up to 1gb broadband....beats our current 20mb by a lot !

[jimfields33]

6. I don't think they will control it daily

But if there is an overload or something, you don’t think they will set everybody to 78 in summer even temporarily? If they don’t have any control, what’s the point of these?

[TheBlackAdder]

10. Normally, they shouldn't reduce power to a home. There are devices that are attached to AC units.

.

Utility companies offer yearly incentives of $50 or so to have them attached, so they can throttle the power or turn off the AC during peak loads, allowing it to run, but not as often as is set on the thermostat. This is typically activated during high on-peak periods, when capacity is stretched.

.

[GregariousGroundhog]

13. There's two main reasons - grid reliability and cost

If a home has a smart meter, the utility will automatically receive a notification if a home/business loses power. It can also provide notification when voltage strays too far from where it is supposed to be. This data is fed into Outage Management Systems to quickly identify faulty equipment, which speeds up (or prevents altogether) outages.

Smart meters also mean that the utility does not need to send people out into the field to read meters. That ultimately results in some combination of higher profits and lower consumer prices.

The utility cannot set your home temperature to 78 degrees using a smart meter. In order to do that, you need to install a smart thermostat and give the utility access to it.

[PortTack]

19. A smart meter cannot read the temperature in your house

[NutmegYankee]

22. The meter is not connected to the thermostat.

The stories in Texas were related to a type of smart WiFi connected thermostat.

[TheBlackAdder]

8. Depends on the meter. Some just allow remote usage for bills, some record peak/off-peak usage.

.

Some power companies position themselves for eventually having split usage tiers, and bill people more for demand during the day as opposed to night. Then, one day, poof! A notice comes out telling property owners of this new rate structure. This needs to be investigated with the BPU to see if this is in the works.

Most often, it's just so they don't have to send someone to you home every month to read the meter. Perhaps the utility company had too many close encounters with violent property owners, especially if the utility employee is a minority.

.

[NutmegYankee]

24. I don't have smart meters but they do have radio transponders on them.

The utility companies collect the data by just driving by on the street. The electric and gas meters are built in. The water meter, because it is inside in the basement, has a transponder mounted near the ceiling and connected by wire to the meter.

[spinbaby]

9. I don't like them

I regularly park in a lot across from where I take cats to be fixed. Now, instead of just throwing a quarter in the meter and taking my cat in, I take a cat in a carrier or trap to the machine, perform a data-entry chore that requires my license number, put in my quarter, and obtain a paper receipt I don’t want, and then take in my cat.

[TheBlackAdder]

16. To stop meter feeders in Philly, they installed kiosks. You pay for time & place slip on dashboard.

.

The meter people in Philly are scumbaggy. They will issue tickets if you have a minute still on the meter, because it takes them 20 minutes to walk their beat. It's up to you to prove you still had time left. They write them while there is time, finish as it expires. If you walk out in that minute they start writing it, they can't stop and hand you the ticket anyway. This is whether it was coin or new kiosk slips.

So, back when coins were used, we used to drop quarters in the meter when we would a parking enforcement person walking down the street and there was a vehicle with a meter about to expire. Sometimes they would yell at us, because they get commission for tickets they write, but the city is still getting meter money.

Now, you just can't buy time for someone, because if the receipt isn't on the curb side of the dashboard, it doesn't count. This prevents anyone from buying time for someone else since the cars are locked.

.

[Ocelot II]

18. The OP is about household electric meters from the power company, not parking meters.

But speaking of those, we have parking meters downtown that work with a phone app, no quarters needed. I do like them.

[spinbaby]

32. Oops, I see that now

[bucolic_frolic]

11. Only thing that happened to me

was my bill went down. I believe, but cannot prove of course, that the old mechanical was either worn or always did, overbill me. I immediately noticed about 8% lower bill. Electric Co sent, unprompted, a technician to look at it. I went out and said, 'What's happening, I thought you guys read my meter remotely now?' Guy said he was "calibrating" the meter. I didn't ask why, maybe they do it to all of them when newly installed. But it seemed odd to me.

I also replaced my grounding clamp, old one was loose, and I think contributed to destroying gaskets as well as blowing the whole house main breaker. Maybe that loose clamp was a drain.

[Takket]

12. we've had smart meters where i live for at least 5 years now. no issues

[ProfessorGAC]

14. Same Here

Probably around the same time.
Our city did it with water meters too.
With the water meters though, I think it's very short range and a water department guy drives by in one of their trucks recording data.
I'm not sure how our electric meter transmits. Might be cellular.

[Mr.Bill]

26. We've had them for about 10-15 years.

The only difference is they don't have to send out someone to read the meter.

[DavidDvorkin]

28. Clearly, the posters who have them and approve of them have been brainwashed by their

socialst EMF rays.

[Victor_c3]

30. I can understand the conspiracists point

If the meter is transmitting data through 5G, I could see some real concern there. We know the COVID-19 vaccines make us magnetic and I suspect that the vaccines also interact someway with 5G as well. Covid, itself, is caused/transmitted by 5G so there is obviously a link there.

It has to be a plot by the government to both control our minds and to build in a kill-switch in our bodies for those who act up. I’m willing to bet that by reversing the polarity of the magnetic field generated in our bodies by the Covid vaccine (which they’ll be able to do with the smart electric meters) that the government can turn on or off the ability for us to become infected by Covid.

So, why Covid? I mean it’s no worse than a bad cold. Shouldn’t the government have used a more deadly virus? Also, why would we use a virus that was developed in a Chinese lab? Are the Chinese working to take over America?

So, by allowing the virus to spread unabated, were trump and the republicans trying to secretly protect the American population? I just read a study the other day saying that if you have had Covid that you don’t need to get the Covid shot and if you don’t get the vaccine then the government won’t have the ability to control your mind or kill you.

So much conspiracy! It’s hard to keep track of. Now I have to figure out how flat earth, lizard people, hollow earth, Qanon and the Illuminati all fit into this thing. I bet the Freemasons and/or Bigfoot are involved too.

[DavidDvorkin]

31. You're clearly on the right track.

[Johnny2X2X]

33. Sounds like progress

I know my smart thermostat is great, Consumer's Energy gave it to me for free (A Nest) if I just signed up to let them take it over on peak energy hours a few times a year. We've had 2 days this Summer where for 4 hours I let them take it over, they precooled my house prior to the hottest part of the day so my AC would run less during those peak hot hours. I have learning mode on with it, it definitely saves me money because of it.