Some years ago the Wisconsin Energy people offered a program where the customer would get a five dollar rebate applied to their monthly bill if they allowed WEPCO to add a switching device to their electric water heater. The idea was to reduce "peak" loading by shutting down your water heater for ten minutes at a time.
They could never switch off the entire load as the device was hard wired into just one 220 volt branch circuit. I got the rebate for years and never noticed a change in water temperature. Eventually WEPCO sent out letters announcing that they were abandoning the program. I pulled out their hardware just to be sure they didn't cheat.
The device operated like the X10 system which sent a pulse coded high frequency (100KHZ) signal atop the 60HZ carrier wave. Such hardware is very sensitive to line noise from lightning.
Regards,
GtG
Yeah, you can do that with anything, including the total power supply to the residential house or business.
You have to install the equipment first, of course.
But a smart meter by it’s self, can’t do that. Which was what I argued.
Power lines and power supplies to commercial buildings and residences, being a hard wired systems, have been exploited for various reasons as far back as WWII when spy gear was used by allies and foes...
You can do most anything...the point is, that they are not doing anything now that they have not done before in the past.
What smart meters do, that the old tech could not do, is to provide “real time” data to improve service and repair, as well as detection of power losses for what ever reason. And that includes the detection of power theft, which was difficult to narrow down without the real time data.
With real time data, they can determine a power loss quickly and more accurately, while also narrowing it down to a smaller area. The loss could be a resistive line fault or bad transformer. Or just as commonly a theft of power.
At least this is why they justify the upfront expense. IMO
But it’s not intended to micro manage your power usage, with the exception of protecting the grid. The more you know about what is going on in real time, the more likely a lineman or technician would be able to know exactly where to go, rather than have to do a tedious step by step troubleshooting plan.
Yep, which is why most of them now are RF instead of carrier-current-controlled.