Smart meters and Loop Energy
The subject of smart meters is one that we might cover in the future but in the meantime, let me share my own recent experience.
Since I switched supplier just over year ago, my smart meter itself continued to send readings to EON every half hour but the monitor inside the house failed so I now have no access to any measure of my instantaneous gas or electricity consumption. However, there is an app called Loop which can be downloaded to a tablet or smartphone from e.g the Android Playstore and which can access the national database of household electricity use.
After downloading, you need to provide Loop with email and home addresses together with a four digit code obtained from the Settings menu of your monitor (which will still display even though there is no network connection as in my case) so you cannot monitor your next door neighbour.
Loop will display graphs of your gas and electricity use (kWh) and costs at half-hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly intervals. The data is updated at 3-hour intervals so, again, does not provide instantaneous readings. The Loop data is available in the home of course but also from anywhere you have internet access and might be similar to the energy suppliers’ own apps.
By examining how your use changes with time of day and day of the week etc some valuable information can be obtained on the relative importance of heating, lighting and hot water. As a guide, an average household consumes on average 400W of electricity. My overnight electricity use is 100W which is accounted for by a fridge and freezer and electronics on standby. As for gas, here is an example of two days use in January. In the evening of the second day (in green) I turned off the central heating and turned on a gas fire to heat just one room. There was a not unimpressive 70% reduction.
The Scheme was triggered for the first time between 4.30pm and 6pm on Monday last week with 400,000 eligible customers being paid £2.50 for reducing usage by an average of 60% - this compares with the 30p that you normally pay your supplier. More energy was saved on Tuesday, when the payment was larger than on Monday.
Nationwide, the total amount of energy saved was about 250 megawatt
hours (a single generating unit at Ratcliffe Power Station operating for half an hour) and it surprising that such a small reduction can trigger
such large payments. This is due to the extreme volatility of electricity prices (see below), a consequence of trying to control an essentially technical system using commercial means.
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| Volatile wholesale electricity prices; £500 per megawatt hour equates to 50p per kWh |
