I was paying upwards of $150 a month for heating in a tiny <400sqft studio in Boston at one point. $200 on one month. There was definitely something wrong with the meter readings, and pretty sure I was getting charged for someone else's electricity considering how little I was at home with the heater on. The utility company refused to investigate and would only threaten to send in debt collectors if I didn't pay up. My property manager only pointed me to the utility company. I tried complaining to DPU, but they didn't respond to e-mails, and I didn't have time for phone calls or mediating this mess, in general.
As much as I wanted to fight, as sad as it sounds my time was worth more than the money I'd get back by spending time on the phone arguing and escalating the issue at critical hours of the day. :-/
Moved to California, paying a much more reasonable utility bill, and glad I didn't have to deal with that again.
If there were a "deal-with-humans-as-a-service" business that took a 20% cut of any money I could get back in situations like this, I'd totally pay for it. I once had to argue for 2 hours on the phone with T-mobile about $250 in excess charges on my phone bill, and while got it all back after escalating it to a manager, I'd totally pay $50 for someone to deal with the 2 hours of phone calls for me.
OK, first I never expect to read "Moved to California, paying a much more reasonable utility bill.." :-)
That said, it is very hard to argue with the power company. As the article points out you can have the meter sent to a special testing lab but if it works, well it you are out of luck. About 10 years ago a friend in the Santa Cruz mountains got a bill that was out of whack (and he was a EE) and the power company would not be budged, so he pulled his meter out of the socket for a month[1] (don't try this at home!) and still got billed for a bunch of power use. It turned out that someone had 'tapped' the power wires leading up to his house, and PG&E wasn't bothering to read his house meter, just looking at how much their transformer sent to the 'only' house up there. Whoops.
One of the things I suspected, and then later proved, was that my 1st generation SunnyBoy inverters from SMA on my Solar system confused the smart meter when they installed it. It would not accurately read the power generated by the panels so was under reporting power generated. That got "fixed" when one of the inverters failed (unrelated, it was over 10 years old) and we replaced two 2500W inverters with a single 5500W inverter. The modern inverter and smart meter get along fine.
[1] Since he lives in the mountains and outages were not infrequent he had a whole house generator powered by propane that he could use.
I believe https://getservice.com is the "deal-with-humans-as-a-service" you're looking for, taking a 30% cut of recovered money. I haven't personally used them, though.
1 - shut down the incoming circuit breaker, see if the meter "stops spinning" (today it's a light that blinks). If it doesn't, call the electrical company
2 - Get the (heater power) x (time it stays on IN HOURS) = your consumption. Heating and electric showers usually make up the bulk of your consumption (unless you're into home baking or bitcoin mining but even then). Calculate that, see if it matcher what you're paying
3 - Weather proof your place. Find places where cold air seeps through, seal them. Keep doors and windows closed when using aircon.
I got charged $600 for two months in Toronto during a cold winter a while back and calling Toronto Hydro got it reduced to the actual $300 it was supposed to be. So FWIW in my situation at least it was worth the effort to look into it.
I was in an older (1980s) apartment building so I couldn't blame a singular meter, I'm not really sure how measurements are done in big buildings (maybe someone could explain?).
I've heard that elsewhere in Ontario, Canada and in Toronto (two different companies) that overcharging is a big recurring issue. I wasn't given a good explanation about my one anecdotal case outside of an 'accounting error'. I just knew that it sounded far too high to be normal.
Paul English, the co-founder of Kayak, founded a company to do just this, called "GetHuman": https://gethuman.com/
It gives you an option, they can guide you through stuff giving you specific steps they've learned from interacting with the companies in the past, or you can have them handle it for you, for a small charge.
If there were a "deal-with-humans-as-a-service" business that took a 20% cut of any money I could get back in situations like this, I'd totally pay for it.
Just learned a couple of weeks ago from a friend of me that there is something like this in Norway.
They only deal with technicalities around the invoicing, not actual usage but still claimed to maje a decent living by finding issues with invoices for 1/5 companies.
I once was on the phone for hours with Time Warner Cable about a $50 security deposit charged twice, that was a mistake on their side. Turns out I was paying someone elses bill! At the end I explained to the supervisor that I will keep calling back until they fix this, not because I don't have $50 to spare, but because this is their messup and it's a matter of principle. They put me on hold (for about an hour) until their technical team fixed up something on their billing system.
It's a pain to do this, and most peoples time is worth more, but if noone does it, we will be (in fact we already are) living in a scam society, where everyone is making money on everyone else's lazyness to track things down. When you call in, you are doing good not only for yourself, but for the company as well as every other customer.
My brother owned a vacation condo in Reno. He didn't rent it out and only occupied it 10% of the year. He always had a big electric bill. After eight years, he found out the meters were cross wires with the next unit which was occupied full time. It would have cost him more in legal fees to do anything about it than he could have hoped to recoup.
I got like a 800 bill one month for an apartment not much larger than you describe. Then close to that the next.
Turned out they had routed the hot water from the heater under the foundation to the taps and there was a leak. They came and jackhammered up a section of floor and fixed it and apartment complex wound up crediting me for rent.
Check the actual papers.[1][2] For single-phase meters, which covers most residential uses, this is a non-problem: "No deviation beyond the specification could be observed; no influence of interference due to interfering or distorted voltage, and no influence caused by interfering currents were observed." All the problems were seen with 3-phase meters, usually found only in industrial and commercial environments.
Figure 3 of [1] is puzzling. They claim to be testing a 3-phase meter, but the circuit shown is single-phase. Are they testing 3-phase meters with only one phase connected? That's way out of balance; 3-phase systems normally have at least roughly equal loads on each phase. While a 3-phase meter with an wildly asymmetrical load ought to measure accurately, that's not a normal condition.
I'll recommend the hacker solution: first, buy and install your own meter, right after the power company one. It isn't expensive. Have it done by an electrician. I got mine installed in my fuse box, a small 3-phase DIN rail meter (I'm in Poland and pretty much all modern hookups are 3-phase).
This gives you a way to at least compare the official meter readings with an independent source. In my case, it showed no correlation whatsoever, and it turned out that the power company swapped the meter numbers between me and my neighbor.
Second, most meters have LEDs that flash a number of times per kWh consumed. It isn't difficult to build a device that measures the time between those pulses and gives you energy monitoring. I built one and had it running for a while. It's an eye-opening experience, you'd be surprised how much energy some devices consume, and also how significant a constant power draw can be.
In the US revenue meters are 1-2% accuracy (usually tested regularly), as such I recommend specifying a meter in that accuracy range for the anticipated amp readings
OK so serious question -- utility companies tend to have high-accuracy, company-operated/maintained meters (that effectively measure the total use of a bunch of customers).
They're meant for like, identifying non-malicious/technical losses but it's possible to use them to identify customers who are bypassing/tampering with their meters, as:
total use (as measured by the trusted meter) must be equal to
∑ accuracy(customer ID) * reported use(customer ID)
and assuming there aren't many cheating customers, and enough measurements (smartmeters make this easier, 15 minute slices is a lot better than 1 or 2 month slices), and assuming enough variation/independence between customers, it shouldn't be that hard to estimate the accuracy of each reporting meter.
I'm wondering if this sort of balance check (i don't know the proper terminology, this isn't my field of expertise, if you know more, i would love to be corrected!) would have been sufficient to detect the sort of misreporting mentioned in this article.
I noticed my electric bill went up a bit when I was moved over to the electronic meter ... not so much that I thought anything of it other than that gee, I use a lot of power and now it seems like I'm using a little more.
The problem here is that the discrepancy is in the favor of the power company. As long as they're making more money and especially because the "Accredited Testing Agency"'s own tests won't detect the fault, it's unlikely anything will be done about it unless there's an obscene amount of media attention paid to it and the regulators step in requiring a correction.
... Though there is one way that might happen more quickly. I wonder if there's a converse effect? Are there methods for consuming electricity on these meters that they similarly fail with but woefully under report the amount of electricity being used? If something like that was discovered and publicized enough for people to take advantage of it, I'd imagine the problem would get fixed on the short order. I'm pretty weak on electrical engineering, so I'm really thinking of this from the perspective of "Hey, that same flaw that allows an attacker to exploit my phone also allows me to gain root and unlock it!"
If the inaccuracies are due to the meter's assumption around the current waveform then there probably is a way to exploit that. I suspect (from the little I have read) that the meters in question are: 1) assuming a sinusoidal current wave form, 2) assuming that the peak observed current is the peak of that sinusoidal wave, 3) effectively integrating under the area of the curve (with respect to voltage) to estimate total power. If all that's true, then to 'cheat' you'd need a device for which the current waveform looks like a 'fat' sine wave - same peak height, but wider peaks and steeper gradient through zero. In the extreme case it would be a square wave, but that might have too much harmonics.
For example, you could create a heater (a simple resistive load) that alters its resistance at 60hz. When the voltage reaches its peak the heater would have its 'normal' resistance, and during the next 1/4 cycle it would ramp down its resistance, reaching a resistive low as the voltage passes through zero, and then ramp up its resistance for the following 1/4 cycle until it reaches its 'normal' resistance at the peak 'negative' voltage (1/2 a cycle from where we started), then repeat over.
I think that would trick a meter that only looked at peak current and assumed a sinusoidal waveform. But who knows what other things it might break...
A bit off topic but I once had a water meter that was overcharging by perhaps around 100%. I worked out that it was because it didn't have a one-way valve. When there was air trapped in the pipes, pressure fluctuations would cause water would move back and forth through the meter, racking up the bill with no net flow.
People should test their own meters which isn't that hard if you're careful and know the basic concepts of thermostats and power ratings.
Most cheap meters have a magnet and a reed-switch to generate pulses. As you noted they will generate pulses with backflow. However the dial count on the meter is correct.
Another issue that can come up is older reed switches can chatter as they close and open. Usually input debouncing eliminates that, if the firmware guy didn't screw it up.
Another thing I've seen is sometimes in a meter the magnet will rock back and forth. Careful design is needed to prevent that from causing the reed switch to open and close constantly. (Deboucing won't save you there)
Besides that another thing that happens is if utility selects the wrong scale factor for the meter. That's good for really angry customers if the error is in the utilities favor. If it's in the customers favor they get angry when the utility fixes it.
More sophisticated meters actually sense the actual meter reading using a bizarre electromagnetic sensing technique.
Interesting. I also had this happen, where the water company installed the wrong size meter for the size pipe in my unit.
Luckily it was a relatively small suburb, so the lady on the other end of the phone was able to give me her personal e-mail I could send a video to her of me test filling a gallon jug of milk while video taping the meter.
That got their attention finally, and I was being billed about 5x the real usage rate.
It was a fun one especially because I had moved into the apartment and immediately traveled for work at 80% time for 3 months. By the time I was home enough to notice the huge bills it took some convincing :)
Most installations of electronic meters have been done in the past two to three years. It's easy enough to see if readings skyrocketed after the installation (mine didn't).
I've heard of free energy scammers using this to trick people, you muck with the waveform so the meter reads wrong, and it looks like you have invented a box that saves energy.
The registered energy of the static meters was measured using an Arduino microprocessor and optical sensors for detecting the pulses from the LED on the static meter fronts. The readings were verified using the liquid crystal display (LCD) reading on the meter. For example, the LCD displayed 18 kWh, and the Arduino measured 17902 Wh, while on another meter the display showed 7.43 kWh, and the Arduino measured 7430 Wh. A conventional electromechanical meter based on the Ferraris principle was used as reference, because consumers are also using this as reference.
I live in a newly renovated apartment with electric meters in Brooklyn and i have led lights and have experienced similar excesive charges... At one point my bill for my 1 bedroom apt was upwards of $300. Totally absurd.
Whatever meter you get installed, make sure they take the initial reading properly! Obvious for mechanic meters, but it turns out that some Electronic meters are like that too.
In the UK, about 6 or 7 years ago we bought an old house and upgraded the wiring, fuseboard, etc. The Electricity company came and replaced the old meter with a newer Electronic (but not Smart) meter.
Unfortunately the guy they sent to install it didn't record the initial readings. That meant that as far as the company was concerned it had been installed at zero, when in fact it was way past that.
We weren't able to move in immediately, and in the meantime there was very little electricity used - one electric heater on low, occasional lights on/off when we visited. That kind of thing. So you can imagine our horror when the first bill was for thousands of pounds.
Fortunately when we rang up to complain we got somebody at the call center who immediately realised what must have happened and sorted it out. We had to agree an estimated usage, and it's still possible we overpaid for what we actually used, but at least it wasn't thousands.
It would be in consumers' best interest to be able to access meter readings with at least hourly granularity, just like wireless carriers provide call logs with up-to-the-minute accuracy.
This way one can detect anomalies in resource usage based on raw data, unless the error is constant.
For what it's worth, I was really pleased with San Diego gas and electric, who do indeed provide this. I like saving energy, for both economic and environmental reasons, and was pleased to be able to see things like the drop from switching one bulb from incandescent to LED. In the winter my 2 bed apartment's average usage was under 100 watts. People were stunned that our bills would be on the order of $9-$15 a month.
In the summers we had a window AC, but even that only pushed it to $40-$50 a month.
Funny you should mention this. I just set this up myself... I have a meter measurement about every 30 seconds, which it gets plotted into a cool web graph that shows usage as well as consumption spikes and I can set alerts and such. Pretty cool.
For anyone who's curious, here's the hardware:
1. A "smart meter" outside the house (set up by the power company)
2. A raspberry pi 3 (w/power cable/sdcard)
3. NooElec NESDR Mini 2+ software defined radio
http://www.nooelec.com/store/sdr/sdr-receivers/nesdr-mini-2-...
This comes with an antenna as well.
And here's the software:
* Ubuntu Mate on the rpi3 (you can also use raspbian or whatever)
* rtlamr to take readings from the meter (https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr -- this is awesome and worked on the first try after I installed golang and ran "go get github.com/bemasher/rtlamr")
* rtl-tcp (a dependency of the above that is automatically installed if I remember correctly.)
* openhab2 open source home automation sw (optional)
* influxdb open source time series database
* grafana graphing software
Once I plugged the USB NooElectric SDR, I was able to grab my meter's reading with a little python3 script. The test code I'm using looks something like:
This gives you the reading for your meter. Change the -filterid to use the number physically written on your meter outside.
I wanted to be able to visualize trends (like the rate of consumption when I turned on the heat) using a nifty chart, so I published from python (via the paho library-- https://pypi.python.org/pypi/paho-mqtt ) to a local mqtt server (mosquitto running on the pi) though I also tried sending to a mqtt feed at io.adafruit.com, which does a neat graph on its dashboard... until I overwhelmed its quota with too-frequent updates. I wanted something faster where I didn't have to worry about any throttling.
So I decided to do it all locally. First, I set up openhab2 (http://docs.openhab.org/) which has an add-on to to automatically read the mqtt feed, then inserted the measurements to a database on a local influxdb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfluxDB) server also on the pi which keeps a real-time history (aka "persistence") of my electric usage over time. (I could have also just inserted to the influxdb directly from my python3 script, but I'm playing with openhab2 for other things so had it do it for me...)
Finally, I connected grafana (http://grafana.org/) to the influxdb database. Now I have gorgeous real-time graphs and an amazing interactive web-UI that lets me zoom in and set alerts and such.
It sounds like a lot of steps to get to the graph, and once you have the actual measurement, you have choices on how to visualize it-- you could have python send the readings to a Google Sheets spreadsheet and graph from there, for example. or do updates to adafruit less frequently to not blow through the quota. Or use openhab2's which includes its own charts.
But grafana's visualizations are just the coolest. See http://play.grafana.org for an idea of what you can do...
Anyway, long drawn out answer, but the point is-- assuming you have a smart electric meter that work with rtlamr, you can do this yourself :)
I work for an energy company and we are working on providing this level of data to our customers at the moment. I think we are even looking at live usage measurement.
Take home message from this thread seems to be never to trust your utility company to charge you fairly. But the alternative seems to be to figure out the problem yourself (or hire someone to do so), saving the company money on what should be its own expenses.
I got a $400 gas bill yesterday that needs investigating and I have little knowhow or time to do so...
If waveform can cause the meter to read high usage... One could make something to correct it, and with that capability one could push power back to the grid with a distorted waveform at a higher rate ;-)
somewhat related, cant comment on cost yet, but house has code-std lighted stairwell switches; when used with fluor. bulb noticed in dark it flickered continuously. appears that neons in switch leak current through bulb all the time, but not enough to start up. a lot of power? yet to be determined, but neons are dead short and fluor. bulb startup is high current so probably high leakage all the time and odd waveform presented to meter.
[+] [-] dheera|9 years ago|reply
As much as I wanted to fight, as sad as it sounds my time was worth more than the money I'd get back by spending time on the phone arguing and escalating the issue at critical hours of the day. :-/
Moved to California, paying a much more reasonable utility bill, and glad I didn't have to deal with that again.
If there were a "deal-with-humans-as-a-service" business that took a 20% cut of any money I could get back in situations like this, I'd totally pay for it. I once had to argue for 2 hours on the phone with T-mobile about $250 in excess charges on my phone bill, and while got it all back after escalating it to a manager, I'd totally pay $50 for someone to deal with the 2 hours of phone calls for me.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|9 years ago|reply
That said, it is very hard to argue with the power company. As the article points out you can have the meter sent to a special testing lab but if it works, well it you are out of luck. About 10 years ago a friend in the Santa Cruz mountains got a bill that was out of whack (and he was a EE) and the power company would not be budged, so he pulled his meter out of the socket for a month[1] (don't try this at home!) and still got billed for a bunch of power use. It turned out that someone had 'tapped' the power wires leading up to his house, and PG&E wasn't bothering to read his house meter, just looking at how much their transformer sent to the 'only' house up there. Whoops.
One of the things I suspected, and then later proved, was that my 1st generation SunnyBoy inverters from SMA on my Solar system confused the smart meter when they installed it. It would not accurately read the power generated by the panels so was under reporting power generated. That got "fixed" when one of the inverters failed (unrelated, it was over 10 years old) and we replaced two 2500W inverters with a single 5500W inverter. The modern inverter and smart meter get along fine.
[1] Since he lives in the mountains and outages were not infrequent he had a whole house generator powered by propane that he could use.
[+] [-] piotrkaminski|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|9 years ago|reply
1 - shut down the incoming circuit breaker, see if the meter "stops spinning" (today it's a light that blinks). If it doesn't, call the electrical company
2 - Get the (heater power) x (time it stays on IN HOURS) = your consumption. Heating and electric showers usually make up the bulk of your consumption (unless you're into home baking or bitcoin mining but even then). Calculate that, see if it matcher what you're paying
3 - Weather proof your place. Find places where cold air seeps through, seal them. Keep doors and windows closed when using aircon.
[+] [-] dmix|9 years ago|reply
I was in an older (1980s) apartment building so I couldn't blame a singular meter, I'm not really sure how measurements are done in big buildings (maybe someone could explain?).
I've heard that elsewhere in Ontario, Canada and in Toronto (two different companies) that overcharging is a big recurring issue. I wasn't given a good explanation about my one anecdotal case outside of an 'accounting error'. I just knew that it sounded far too high to be normal.
[+] [-] Twirrim|9 years ago|reply
It gives you an option, they can guide you through stuff giving you specific steps they've learned from interacting with the companies in the past, or you can have them handle it for you, for a small charge.
[+] [-] eitland|9 years ago|reply
Just learned a couple of weeks ago from a friend of me that there is something like this in Norway.
They only deal with technicalities around the invoicing, not actual usage but still claimed to maje a decent living by finding issues with invoices for 1/5 companies.
(Oh, and I think they took 50%.)
[+] [-] sly010|9 years ago|reply
It's a pain to do this, and most peoples time is worth more, but if noone does it, we will be (in fact we already are) living in a scam society, where everyone is making money on everyone else's lazyness to track things down. When you call in, you are doing good not only for yourself, but for the company as well as every other customer.
[+] [-] agumonkey|9 years ago|reply
Should be an obligation to do business don't you think ?
[+] [-] euroclydon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buttcoinslol|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mythrwy|9 years ago|reply
Turned out they had routed the hot water from the heater under the foundation to the taps and there was a leak. They came and jackhammered up a section of floor and fixed it and apartment complex wound up crediting me for rent.
[+] [-] mtgx|9 years ago|reply
There's a good chance they'll fix it if you even threaten them with that.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
Figure 3 of [1] is puzzling. They claim to be testing a 3-phase meter, but the circuit shown is single-phase. Are they testing 3-phase meters with only one phase connected? That's way out of balance; 3-phase systems normally have at least roughly equal loads on each phase. While a 3-phase meter with an wildly asymmetrical load ought to measure accurately, that's not a normal condition.
[1] http://doc.utwente.nl/102016/1/Runaway_energy_Meters.pdf [2] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7866234/
[+] [-] jwr|9 years ago|reply
This gives you a way to at least compare the official meter readings with an independent source. In my case, it showed no correlation whatsoever, and it turned out that the power company swapped the meter numbers between me and my neighbor.
Second, most meters have LEDs that flash a number of times per kWh consumed. It isn't difficult to build a device that measures the time between those pulses and gives you energy monitoring. I built one and had it running for a while. It's an eye-opening experience, you'd be surprised how much energy some devices consume, and also how significant a constant power draw can be.
[+] [-] kalleboo|9 years ago|reply
At which point, it's time to start a bitcoin mining operation!
[+] [-] DanBC|9 years ago|reply
Watch out though. My meter has an LED that flashes when there's almost nothing being used.
[+] [-] bavcyc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zkms|9 years ago|reply
They're meant for like, identifying non-malicious/technical losses but it's possible to use them to identify customers who are bypassing/tampering with their meters, as:
total use (as measured by the trusted meter) must be equal to ∑ accuracy(customer ID) * reported use(customer ID)
and assuming there aren't many cheating customers, and enough measurements (smartmeters make this easier, 15 minute slices is a lot better than 1 or 2 month slices), and assuming enough variation/independence between customers, it shouldn't be that hard to estimate the accuracy of each reporting meter.
I'm wondering if this sort of balance check (i don't know the proper terminology, this isn't my field of expertise, if you know more, i would love to be corrected!) would have been sufficient to detect the sort of misreporting mentioned in this article.
Full text of the actual published article is here btw: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.sci-hub.bz/document/7866234/?relo...
[+] [-] mdip|9 years ago|reply
The problem here is that the discrepancy is in the favor of the power company. As long as they're making more money and especially because the "Accredited Testing Agency"'s own tests won't detect the fault, it's unlikely anything will be done about it unless there's an obscene amount of media attention paid to it and the regulators step in requiring a correction.
... Though there is one way that might happen more quickly. I wonder if there's a converse effect? Are there methods for consuming electricity on these meters that they similarly fail with but woefully under report the amount of electricity being used? If something like that was discovered and publicized enough for people to take advantage of it, I'd imagine the problem would get fixed on the short order. I'm pretty weak on electrical engineering, so I'm really thinking of this from the perspective of "Hey, that same flaw that allows an attacker to exploit my phone also allows me to gain root and unlock it!"
[+] [-] tomsaffell|9 years ago|reply
If the inaccuracies are due to the meter's assumption around the current waveform then there probably is a way to exploit that. I suspect (from the little I have read) that the meters in question are: 1) assuming a sinusoidal current wave form, 2) assuming that the peak observed current is the peak of that sinusoidal wave, 3) effectively integrating under the area of the curve (with respect to voltage) to estimate total power. If all that's true, then to 'cheat' you'd need a device for which the current waveform looks like a 'fat' sine wave - same peak height, but wider peaks and steeper gradient through zero. In the extreme case it would be a square wave, but that might have too much harmonics.
For example, you could create a heater (a simple resistive load) that alters its resistance at 60hz. When the voltage reaches its peak the heater would have its 'normal' resistance, and during the next 1/4 cycle it would ramp down its resistance, reaching a resistive low as the voltage passes through zero, and then ramp up its resistance for the following 1/4 cycle until it reaches its 'normal' resistance at the peak 'negative' voltage (1/2 a cycle from where we started), then repeat over.
I think that would trick a meter that only looked at peak current and assumed a sinusoidal waveform. But who knows what other things it might break...
[+] [-] Spooky23|9 years ago|reply
I thought the same thing about my gas usage -- turns out the meter was actually running slow.
[+] [-] averagewall|9 years ago|reply
People should test their own meters which isn't that hard if you're careful and know the basic concepts of thermostats and power ratings.
[+] [-] Gibbon1|9 years ago|reply
Another issue that can come up is older reed switches can chatter as they close and open. Usually input debouncing eliminates that, if the firmware guy didn't screw it up.
Another thing I've seen is sometimes in a meter the magnet will rock back and forth. Careful design is needed to prevent that from causing the reed switch to open and close constantly. (Deboucing won't save you there)
Besides that another thing that happens is if utility selects the wrong scale factor for the meter. That's good for really angry customers if the error is in the utilities favor. If it's in the customers favor they get angry when the utility fixes it.
More sophisticated meters actually sense the actual meter reading using a bizarre electromagnetic sensing technique.
[+] [-] phil21|9 years ago|reply
Luckily it was a relatively small suburb, so the lady on the other end of the phone was able to give me her personal e-mail I could send a video to her of me test filling a gallon jug of milk while video taping the meter.
That got their attention finally, and I was being billed about 5x the real usage rate.
It was a fun one especially because I had moved into the apartment and immediately traveled for work at 80% time for 3 months. By the time I was home enough to notice the huge bills it took some convincing :)
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|9 years ago|reply
(I'm presuming electronic == smart)
[+] [-] roywiggins|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] opportune|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Neliquat|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gfisher|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ars|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rnhmjoj|9 years ago|reply
The registered energy of the static meters was measured using an Arduino microprocessor and optical sensors for detecting the pulses from the LED on the static meter fronts. The readings were verified using the liquid crystal display (LCD) reading on the meter. For example, the LCD displayed 18 kWh, and the Arduino measured 17902 Wh, while on another meter the display showed 7.43 kWh, and the Arduino measured 7430 Wh. A conventional electromechanical meter based on the Ferraris principle was used as reference, because consumers are also using this as reference.
[+] [-] flapjackdan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stagbeetle|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deevolution|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterclary|9 years ago|reply
In the UK, about 6 or 7 years ago we bought an old house and upgraded the wiring, fuseboard, etc. The Electricity company came and replaced the old meter with a newer Electronic (but not Smart) meter.
Unfortunately the guy they sent to install it didn't record the initial readings. That meant that as far as the company was concerned it had been installed at zero, when in fact it was way past that.
We weren't able to move in immediately, and in the meantime there was very little electricity used - one electric heater on low, occasional lights on/off when we visited. That kind of thing. So you can imagine our horror when the first bill was for thousands of pounds.
Fortunately when we rang up to complain we got somebody at the call center who immediately realised what must have happened and sorted it out. We had to agree an estimated usage, and it's still possible we overpaid for what we actually used, but at least it wasn't thousands.
[+] [-] upen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rodionos|9 years ago|reply
This way one can detect anomalies in resource usage based on raw data, unless the error is constant.
[+] [-] CalRobert|9 years ago|reply
In the summers we had a window AC, but even that only pushed it to $40-$50 a month.
[+] [-] fattire|9 years ago|reply
For anyone who's curious, here's the hardware:
1. A "smart meter" outside the house (set up by the power company) 2. A raspberry pi 3 (w/power cable/sdcard) 3. NooElec NESDR Mini 2+ software defined radio http://www.nooelec.com/store/sdr/sdr-receivers/nesdr-mini-2-... This comes with an antenna as well.
And here's the software:
* Ubuntu Mate on the rpi3 (you can also use raspbian or whatever) * rtlamr to take readings from the meter (https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr -- this is awesome and worked on the first try after I installed golang and ran "go get github.com/bemasher/rtlamr") * rtl-tcp (a dependency of the above that is automatically installed if I remember correctly.) * openhab2 open source home automation sw (optional) * influxdb open source time series database * grafana graphing software
Once I plugged the USB NooElectric SDR, I was able to grab my meter's reading with a little python3 script. The test code I'm using looks something like:
This gives you the reading for your meter. Change the -filterid to use the number physically written on your meter outside.I wanted to be able to visualize trends (like the rate of consumption when I turned on the heat) using a nifty chart, so I published from python (via the paho library-- https://pypi.python.org/pypi/paho-mqtt ) to a local mqtt server (mosquitto running on the pi) though I also tried sending to a mqtt feed at io.adafruit.com, which does a neat graph on its dashboard... until I overwhelmed its quota with too-frequent updates. I wanted something faster where I didn't have to worry about any throttling.
So I decided to do it all locally. First, I set up openhab2 (http://docs.openhab.org/) which has an add-on to to automatically read the mqtt feed, then inserted the measurements to a database on a local influxdb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfluxDB) server also on the pi which keeps a real-time history (aka "persistence") of my electric usage over time. (I could have also just inserted to the influxdb directly from my python3 script, but I'm playing with openhab2 for other things so had it do it for me...)
Finally, I connected grafana (http://grafana.org/) to the influxdb database. Now I have gorgeous real-time graphs and an amazing interactive web-UI that lets me zoom in and set alerts and such.
It sounds like a lot of steps to get to the graph, and once you have the actual measurement, you have choices on how to visualize it-- you could have python send the readings to a Google Sheets spreadsheet and graph from there, for example. or do updates to adafruit less frequently to not blow through the quota. Or use openhab2's which includes its own charts.
But grafana's visualizations are just the coolest. See http://play.grafana.org for an idea of what you can do...
Anyway, long drawn out answer, but the point is-- assuming you have a smart electric meter that work with rtlamr, you can do this yourself :)
[+] [-] davedx|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djhworld|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kiliantics|9 years ago|reply
I got a $400 gas bill yesterday that needs investigating and I have little knowhow or time to do so...
[+] [-] known|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phkahler|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awful|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbg31415|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] savrajsingh|9 years ago|reply