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Smart Meters – Not Such a New Idea After All?

Strange how an engineer’s mind works. Ignoring the obvious heckles, it’s an interesting question. Case in point, waking up to the alarm clock radio yesterday morning to the news that the government has plans to equip every home in Britain with smart meters by the end of 2020 to monitor and record gas and electricity energy usage remotely.  The hope is that by using remote monitoring systems rather than sending someone round to read the electric meter, costs will be reduced – and, theoretically at least, this money-saving can be passed on to directly reduce customers’ bills.

I suspect the normal response of an intelligent bystander is “how much is a smart meter going to cost me?” – or even “how does this compare to a Government Minister claiming for underfloor heating for their second (or third, or fourth - delete where applicable) home?”

And yet what did I think?  “Are they going to use powerline comms or wireless to communicate back from the domestic meters ?” that’s what.

Here at MLE we’ve designed systems using pretty much every communications protocol   you can imagine. So we know that, while powerline comms (PLC) is a great idea, because the mains wiring was never intended to host sets of carriers running at hundreds of MHz, the system needs a bit of loving care and attention. Under ideal conditions you can get 100 metres point-to-point data transfer, under worse conditions you’ll need to use something like our self-healing mesh data network to make a high reliability always-ready highly-redundant communications system.

Similarly wireless often seems to have the perverse knack of knowing when you really need it to work, and then doing the opposite, especially at 2.4GHz!  I’ve used a wireless network 150m from the Access Point and used it well under open-air conditions, but try to use the same AP in the next room? Not on your life. And we’ve all heard about people only being able to use their mobiles in the garden. That was almost side-splitting until I signed up with my current provider.

So, curiosity piqued, I was off to see what Wikipedia says about smart meters for a quick review - although, in truth, it doesn’t actually an awful lot about the comms systems used at the moment. Italian systems have bi-directional powerline comms running over the low-voltage power line network. (A quick aside – low voltage in this sense has always struck me as strange terminology to my mind – surely any voltage that bites back can’t be called low!  Although the power electronics engineers at MLE do seem to laugh mockingly at me for comments like that…)

However, just for info, I did stumble across a very interesting document while researching all this. It’s a report by William Kerr and R.C Walker of the University of Michigan about “Remote Metering of Gas and Electricity delivered to a Consumer” - dated September 1952!

Plus ca change?
 
By Ray
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