The electric company installed a new meter on my house. It’s digital. I’m freaking out. Is it a smart meter?
The fact that it is digital is scaring me. We all know what happens to digital items during a power outage. Blinking zeros. How will anyone know how much power I had used?
I called the company to change the meter to an analog one. CS said it can’t be done. Digital meters are installed now. Then she said that I have to push a button after a power outage. There will be a series of 8 blah blah blah.
She did say that I do not have a smart meter... something about having to call in the meter reading. I’m confused.
Now, reading this article, what if someone hacks my meter to show that I used more power than I actually did.
How do I find out if I have a smart meter? I don’t trust the CS.
Get the model number off of it, don’t trust what they tell you, just look it up yourself.
Well, you could start by going out to your meter and looking for a manufacturer’s name, model #, etc on the meter face.
There are many digital meters that aren’t “smart” meters. There are ‘dumb’ digital meters, which just have digits on the face and perhaps some diagnostic logic in them, then there are “remote sensing” meters, aka “turtles” in the power industry, which are “dumb” but can be read remotely by the power company sending a low-frequency signal down the line and your meter sends back a signal which they can read as to your usage, and then there are the “smart” meters, which increasingly use a wireless IP connection to communicate with the power company infrastructure.
Start with the basics: maker, model #, etc. Look those up first, then work from there.
That's something I worry about. They installed a so-called smart meter at my house. So-called because the installer said it has to be read manually until far off in the future when they put equipment in to make it able to be read remotely. I worry that someday I'll see the digital readout going nuts, rapidly hiking the numbers. If it can be hacked to show a lower use rate, it can be hacked to show a vastly higher rate of use.
We all know what happens to digital items during a power outage. Blinking zeros. How will anyone know how much power I had used?
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I’m pretty sure that during a power outage you use ZERO power.
(smacks forehead)
Really? We designers are THAT dumb that we didn't think about that?
Uh, NO.
We have in each and every meter (electric, water, gas):
1. Battery backup.
2. Special memory (EEPROM) that doesn't need power.
3. Flash memory that doesn't need power. You have a thumb drive, don't you? That doesn't need power, does it? Same thing here.