Smart Meter? No Thanks!

Every night, before going to bed, my mother would patrol the house checking that every electrical appliance – apart from the fridge – was switched off, and preferably unplugged from the wall socket too. This applied especially to the television. Whether this was supposed to save electricity or whether it was for safety’s sake, I don’t know.

When I was a child and we went on holiday, every domestic appliance – including the fridge, which would have been defrosted in anticipation – was unplugged. I have a sneaking suspicion that the electricity was turned off at the mains as well.

Mum making sure that everything was turned off reminded me of James Thurber, the American cartoonist and writer, who described an elderly relative as having a great suspicion of electricity, which she believed was dripping invisibly all over the house, and leaking from empty sockets if the switch had been left on.

If there’s a reason for unplugging your television – either when you go to bed, or during the day – then a thunderstorm is it. It is not unheard of for televisions to be affected by lightning strikes, and I did once experience a fried video recorder after a thunderstorm. I have been known to unplug the TV during a thunderstorm, but wandering around the house, unplugging appliances just before bedtime is not an activity I indulge in at present.

In the days when my mum was dutifully defrosting the fridge prior to our annual holiday, our electricity was supplied by the London Electricity Board (LEB), which came into being in 1948 as a result of the nationalisation of the electricity industry. All of the UK’s electricity was then supplied by one of the fifteen regional electricity boards, but under the flurry of privatisations pushed through by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, the LEB disappeared in 1990, replaced by London Electricity plc.

The nationalised, regional, electricity boards circa 1948

There are now around sixty companies from whom one can buy one’s electricity, led by the Big Six:

 

These companies offer consumers a bewildering array of different tariffs, a far cry from the days of my mother’s television unplugging and fridge defrosting, when there was one supplier, and no opportunity to shop around for the best price.

Once upon a time, the quarterly electricity bill could be a shock (pun intended), arriving as it invariably did, between pay days and for an un-budgeted for amount. Those bills were based on meter readings performed by a representative of the electricity board who would root around with a torch in the cupboard under the stairs (where the meter was usually located), once a quarter. Or if there was no one in the house when the meter reader called (which was more often than not), then the reading would be estimated and the bill might not bear any relation to the amount of power used, resulting in the consumer overpaying or underpaying on that particular bill.

Today, my electricity meter is in a box outside my front door; if a meter reader wanted to call to read it, they could do so without me even being aware. Meter readers still call on householders – unsurprisingly, UNISON (the union that represents many of the nation’s meter readers), asked for this to stop as a result of the coronavirus pandemic – but for the majority of us, smart meters, or providing our own readings, mean that visits from the meter reader, and estimated bills, are a thing of the past.

No more estimated bills is a selling point that my energy supplier has been using to try and get me to convert to a smart meter lately.  

“A smart meter means no more estimated bills,” said the lady from the electricity company. “I give my meter readings online as soon as I’m asked,” I replied, “I don’t get estimated bills.” And besides, since I pay monthly by direct debit, I don’t get bills, I get statements, which is not the same thing at all.

The lady from the electricity company then said that all old meters were being replaced for ‘health and safety reasons,’ to which I replied in alarmed tones, “What! You mean my meter is dangerous?” -  I got no response to that. Our current meter was only installed in 2015, so clearly not old enough to represent any sort of safety hazard.

My objection to having a smart meter is based on the premise that there’s nothing wrong with the current system. The idea that a smart meter will make my energy costs more manageable is quite frankly, tosh.

The notion that I can control my electricity costs by referring to the in-home display that is linked to the meter falls down for two reasons. Firstly, smart meters cannot (so far as I can see) allow me to drill down to individual appliances or wall sockets to see how much they are consuming at any given time, and even if they did, daily costs are so small that changes resulting from switching something off (or on) would be unmeasurable. I say that on the basis that in the twelve months from May 2020 to April 2021, we used 3,770 kWh of electricity, which works out at about £1.44 per day, or 6p per hour. At that rate, if I turned off everything bar the fridge, I think a difference in usage might be observable in an hour or two; frankly, what’s the point?

An advertised benefit of smart meters is that they save time as customers no longer have to submit meter readings. That will save me about 40 minutes a year, but I’ll spend much longer checking my in-home display for minuscule changes in expense, and even longer trying to work out which device I should switch off to save me a penny or two. Even the government's own estimates suggest that smart meter savings will amount to no more than £11 per year - that's just 3p per day!

The advertised costs of using certain household devices mean changes
 in use would be almost undetectable under normal conditions.

Although the government has set a target of a smart meter in every domestic property by the end of 2025 (revised from by 2020 for obvious reasons), having one installed is not yet compulsory. Eventually, I suppose I will succumb to having a smart meter because apparently, without a smart meter, I may be denied access to certain tariffs. Why this should be, I do not know, and in fact, I fail to understand exactly why there are so many different tariffs for the same, homogenous, product anyway. After all, whether I pay 15p per kWh as I do now, or £15, the electricity is the same; it’s not like petrol, more expensive power doesn’t mean better quality, doesn’t mean better performance.

With the cost of the programme to install smart meters in the UK around £11billion (which we, the consumers are paying), and given that there are about 14 million domestic electricity accounts in the UK, we are all going to have to save nearly £800 to pay off installation costs before we save any money on the power we consume. 

To save that sort of money I’ll have to become like my dear old mum, prowling around the house each night, turning everything off – oh, and unplugging the telly!