For the past year-and-a-half or so my local power company has been swapping
out all of the electric meters in Omaha with units that can be read via
radio signal. The meter readers now just drive a car down the road
collecting readings from all the houses that they pass, saving them a HUGE
number of man-hours to read the meters. The new meters don't have a
spinning wheel anymore; they just have an LCD display that shows the
reading. Also, about every 10 seconds or so, the display flashes a couple
of times, changes to zeros, and then goes back to the normal reading.
I hadn't thought about it until Doug's post, but I wonder if it would be
possible to have something in the house that would continuously read the
meter the same way the power company does. I don't know if the meter is
continuously sending out the information, possibly when it blinks, or if it
waits for a signal from the car to tell it to send. I also don't know if
the signal has any sort of encryption, though I don't know why it would
since you can walk right up to anyone's meter and see the reading.
Does anyone know anything about this type of meter, and if anyone makes an
aftermarket product for reading them?
Mike Frerichs
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Doug Braun
>
> Hello,
>
> I always have electricity bills higher than I expect,
> and I've always wanted something that would tell me
> how much electricity my house was using at any given
> moment. (Then I could tell if my air compressor or
> other shop tools were a significant contributor).
>
> I thought I would have to buy something that had to be
> attached to the main power feed to the house,
> involving the services of an electrician (and $$$).
> But then
> I stumbled across a web site for an interesting
> gadget:
>
> http://www.save-electricity.ca/
>
> This has a battery-powered optical pickup that
> attaches to your electric meter and detects the
> rotation of the disk inside it. Then it transmits a
> signal to a desktop display that shows the current
> power usage and other statistics. It's $139, which
> seems quite reasonable.
>
> Has anyone ever seen or bought one of these? Has
> anyone ever heard of something similar for sale?
> Ideally I'd like a system with a computer interface
> that would let me log data, put it on a web page,
> etc., etc.
>
> Doug
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