PowerSwitch

Due to the impending financial clusterf##k that's hitting/will hit the UK , its seems most likely that I will be better off waiting to purchase a property until late this year or more likely sometime next year.
As this means almost certainly spending another winter in a rented mobile home with an electric boiler and with electricity to be priced through the roof, I needed to get a better handle on my electricity usage. I have 4 of the plug in power meters , so since 1st of July I have been keeping daily records of various devices and recording the meter readings at midnight, unfortunately my main electricity meter only recorded to the nearest KWH, which combined will it not being possible to measure the oven, boiler, integrated fridge/freezer or washing machine made getting a true picture of what was using what virtually impossible (when reading the meter you never knew if it had just moved to the next digit or was just about to).

I rescued my old owl wireless clamp meter/display from storage , but that had died completely , and to be fair it was never the most reliable in the first place.

So I have moved to the dark side and last Friday I had a Smart meter fitted. I was not sure if the home display signal would reach far inside as my meter is at the end of the "drive", but as all the blurb showed it would record to 3 decimal places rather than none I would still be much better off. Fortunately the home display does reach inside, though not to the kitchen. I am currently in the improved data gathering stage and will be (when I get time) comparing different ways of cooking things , eg main fan oven, small top oven and portable table top oven.

The first point is that the display has confirmed my suspicion that the fridge/freezer is never or hardly ever shutting off and despite the fact that it has been warm , my own 120 litre Freezer (in the same room) has only been "on" for approx 50% of the time ( of cause I have the condenser of mine in free air). I was certain this was the case so have been trying to run it down , but its been a bit on the hot side for much cooking!!

The other reason for getting a smart meter is it opens up more tariff options , when I have sufficient data and when we know what the various tariffs will be from October I can hopefully mitigate some of the increase .

One option is a cheaper tariff for 4 hours per day (there are various options, but 21:30 to 01:30 would probably be my best bet) and load shifting as much as possible to that time period. Water Heating, Washing Machine and Tumble Dryer (I have no space for an outside line, and no heating on means clothes can still feel damp after a week inside "drying" in the winter) are easy to shift , and 21:30-01:30 is the most likely time I would use any electric heating, possibly to preserve my butane supply.

To increase my load shifting ability and to mitigate against power cuts I am also in the planning stages of moving 4 T105 batteries from my van , to either just outside or possibly just inside the back door and using a sterling pure sinwave inverter charger via a timer (I have rescued this from storage, just need to get the time to check its still working ok).
IF I owned the place this would be easy , but renting means I cant drill any holes through walls or ceiling or fix anything to walls or the floor, which is a right pain, but I have a cunning plan of moving the tumble dryer and using the vent hole (its at a low level) to either run cables from a box outside or to act as a vent from a box inside (I can make something up with some spare kingspan to block most if not all of the draughts and use the same principle to make a new moveable window vent for the tumble dryer.
The next main issue is that I will have to run trailing flexes , but "fortunately the doors that I would need to get through have sufficient space to pass a 3 core 1.5mm trailing flex underneath them and I only plan to use low loads TV , computer etc on the long runs so the voltage drop should not be an issue. The Kitchen is very close to where the inverter will be put , so I can use short runs to power my freezer and what ever I end up using as a fridge and if needed the table top oven and low wattage kettle.
Hopefully I can resurrect a currently not working 12V Freezer that is in my van, (its fixed in and requires other things being removed to get it out, which needs the van being emptied a bit first , so not a 5 min job). I had already replaced the the old analogue controls with a digital version so that I could set the desired temperature, so if this can be fixed I can run a fridge direct from the batteries.

It's very unlikely to be practical to even temp install solar panels (virtually 360 degrees tall trees + low height winter sun are not a great mix) , but I can make up a cable to run DC power from my van to the moved battery bank (I will still have 4 T105's in the van) and I have a 20 Amp Waeco DC to DC charger that can accept 8-16 volts,so the voltage drop on the longish run from the van should still be ok).

At present a lot of testing needs to be done before I know if it will be viable , including does the neutral earth bonding on the inverter (it should switch from the mains earth when it switches over to batteries) still trigger an RCD ( I will wire it through a small consumer unit with a RCD) via a long cable run and does the inverter switchover from inverter to mains and back in time to not upset a computer (it should do). As I am not a sparky this will all be technically illegal, but should be safe.

Note if anyone has any doubt about what they are doing , then dont "play" with mains voltages as it can be fatal.

I am very doubtful as to the merits of smart meters at present. They are probably the future but I do not want one until the technology is more mature and reliable.

For drying laundry indoors an electric dehumidifier can be helpful. Use during off peak hours only to limit the expense.

Earthing and RCDs is a bit of a minefield when standby arrangements are involved. Be careful.

We use Ecotricity.

I insisted on a smartmeter some 3 years ago.

I have never been able to get the remote wifi screen to work.

Anyway I finally chased up Ecotricity ... ho, humm, they fitted an OLD Siemens meter which doesn't support the remote panel.

adam2 wrote: ↑24 Aug 2022, 04:21 I am very doubtful as to the merits of smart meters at present. They are probably the future but I do not want one until the technology is more mature and reliable.

We had a smart meter fitted about 6 years ago, and seems to be working ok. Compared to the more modern ones, it's looking rather 'dumb' now i.e. it just lets you use a few buttons to scroll through some basic menus and options. It also has an LED which glows green, amber or red depend on how much energy you are using, which has been quite useful in finding out which things are sucking power when on standby etc.

It was also useful when I moved from SSE to OVO Energy (they moved me, not me moving myself) just before the price cap change last April. They managed to 'lose' £200 in credit I had, but luckily I'd recorded the readings before I was switched over, so was able to reclaim it (to be fair, they just credited it to my account without me really pushing for it).

I did see something about National Grid offering you a rebate if you can shift your load-intensive activities to another time, i.e. outside the 5PM-8PM window I believe?

Also, can anyone advise why electricity is the best part of 4x the price per KWh of gas? OVO Energy says its 'providing electricity from 100% renewable sources'. Last time I looked, the sun and wind weren't charging for their services

The problem is most people have got used to electricity requiring no brain-power at all, and having to think about it (on top of all the other things ppl have to think about these days, like juggling 3 jobs, a greedy landlord, an elderly relative and kids who have to be picked up at 3:30) is just too much.

adam2 wrote: ↑24 Aug 2022, 04:21 I am very doubtful as to the merits of smart meters at present. They are probably the future but I do not want one until the technology is more mature and reliable.

For drying laundry indoors an electric dehumidifier can be helpful. Use during off peak hours only to limit the expense.

Earthing and RCDs is a bit of a minefield when standby arrangements are involved. Be careful.

I think eventually everyone will be "forced" to have a smart meter , and any grid usage will be priced in half hourly intervals at an ever changing rate. when I say forced, I suspect that to entice most people the unit rate for none smart meters will be set so high , that people will want to swap.
I went for one as a) I wont be living here long term so it wont be my problem and b) It cost nothing verses the cost of buying a new clamp meter/display
(the remote display has lost contact with the meter twice so far , but taking the battery out to reset it and walking the display closer to the meter has worked so far!!)

I only dry clothes in the kitchen/dining area which is rather draughty and using a dehumidifier is like trying to dehumidify the world!!

There are a lot of things about the whole proposal that I do not like , I prefer cabling to be neat and tidy and out of the way rather than using trailing flexes for one. It seems that at present to get the best off peak tariffs you have to prove you have an EV (which I dont have) and now we have to wait and see what the actual policy on the price cap is going to be before I can decide if its worth the hassle and expense.
For short term power outages I have other options.

Ecotricity have started hassling me to get a smart meter installed, including ringing me at 7pm. As I am moving next month, and my new house already has one, I wasn't interested.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/ar ... ens-advice

"In March, data from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero showed that, at the end of last year, 3.98m meters in Great Britain were not working properly – or had “temporarily lost smart functionality”, to use the official terminology."

So what's to go wrong with ever more metering and billing systems being done automatically over the internet?

They'll all have gone into limp home mode.