20 ms·

Electronic meters’ false readings up to six times higher than actual consumption

424 points by rwbhn 10y ago

known 10y ago
http://www.securemeters.com/index.php/global/ http://www.securemeters.com/index.php/global/ were selling high quality elecronic meters for many years
upen 10y ago
So this is why my electricity bill is so high
- thaumaturgy 10y ago
  It's more probable that your bill is high because you haven't done a careful energy audit of your home and all of the devices in it, and one or more of them is malfunctioning or using more energy than you'd expect. I took the time to do this, and found that my electric water heater consumes nearly half of the electricity in my home.
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    > I took the time to do this, and found that my electric water heater consumes nearly half of the electricity in my home. Oh man, do I know this feeling. My old duplex I moved out of last year had an electric water heater from 1991, it easily ate up 1/3 of our electric usage every month. New house has a gas water heater, during the summer months our gas water heater results in a $20 gas bill (roughly $10 of that is the connection and other assorted fees). Old water heaters, especially electric ones can really suck energy like nothing else. My summer electric bill at the new house is still roughly $30/mo cheaper and I'm running like 500W of gear 24/7 in my office/lab that wasn't at the old place.
    - Baeocystin 10y ago
      Same here. We switched over from an electric water heater to a gas one, and it was such a difference on our power bill that it paid for itself in less than a year. Even with running folding@home, BOINC, etc on all of my home machines, our bill is still less. Electric water heaters are expensive!
      - MertsA 10y ago
        As an added bonus the heat coming out of the hot water heater might be inside the home where it has to be removed via AC meaning that not only is that heat being wasted instead of providing hot water, it's also increasing your AC usage and wasting even more power.
        rplst8 10y ago
        It's likely that the cost savings was just due to the fact that natural gas is so much cheaper than electricity, unit for unit.
  - coda_ 10y ago
    I'm curious how you did your energy audit and found the water heater was the culprit. Did you hire someone else, or do it yourself... if so, how?
    - thaumaturgy 10y ago
      Did it myself. I'm sure it wasn't precisely accurate, but, good enough: just go down to the breaker panel, switch off each circuit there, then turn on each circuit individually with its usual devices connected. In the case of appliances like the fridge, stove/oven, clothes dryer, run the device with a normal load. With the water heater, I just ran hot water until it kicked on. Then observe change at meter, write it down, and do some math. As an added benefit, I got to verify and one case relabel the circuits.
ezoe 10y ago
It should be called the Dumb Mater.
ComputerGuru 10y ago
Most installations of electronic meters have been done in the past two to three years. It's easy enough to see if readings skyrocketed after the installation (mine didn't). (I'm presuming electronic == smart)
- stolk 10y ago
  I wish I could compare, but I moved into a (large) new home with a smart meter. I have no measurement that I can compare it to. On top of that, I just replaced all bulbs with LED, and wonder if that has been counterproductive.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - mirekrusin 10y ago
    If you have dimmers on those LEDs then you should check it out. I've seen once little screw for bulbs it said on the box that it corrects wave so it's stable. It said that it extends life of bulbs. Not sure if it would help or not as the problem seems to be coming from appliances having chaotic usage wave patterns, but who knows maybe those work both ways, anybody knows?
  - bavcyc 10y ago
    depending on how much money you want to spend, there are methods you can use to determine your usage. The most expensive would of course be to put CT's on each circuit in the house. Least expensive would be to source a meter for the main.
roywiggins 10y ago
I've heard of free energy scammers using this to trick people, you muck with the waveform so the meter reads wrong, and it looks like you have invented a box that saves energy.
- opportune 10y ago
  I feel like this could work really well if you just slap up some fake/broken solar panels on your roof that you got for dirt cheap
- Neliquat 10y ago
  They now can test for many variations of these. Not sure how, but meter guy mentioned it.
  - dzhiurgis 10y ago
    I doubt they actually enforce it.
- gfisher 10y ago
  I know that where I live, if the power factor is below .4, the meters can't accurately record the consumption. Kind of rare, but it does happen.
ars 10y ago
If a Rogowski Coil and Hall Effect sensors both give incorrect results - what did the researches use to measure the meters?
- stagbeetle 10y ago
  An oscilloscope.
  - ars 10y ago
    An oscilloscope is the display. I was asking what measures the current.
    - kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
      A current shunt. There are modern energy monitoring ICs that sample voltage and current at high speed and accurately compute power and energy with switched reactive loads.
    - zkms 10y ago
      per the article, a Dranetz Products made PowerXplorer PX5-400 http://www.dranetz.com/product-services/current-dranetz-products/powerxplorer-px5-400/ http://www.dranetz.com/product-services/current-dranetz-prod... here's the original paper http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.sci-hub.bz/document/7866234/?reload=true http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.sci-hub.bz/document/7866234/?relo...
      - barrkel 10y ago
        The headline deviations are measured with respect to an eletromechanical meter (the kind that predated smart meters, described as a Ferraris principle meter).
    - mcshicks 10y ago
      A current probe. You might need more then one probe for instance you might have one current probe that was accurate at a lower current but could not measure the higher current, and a second probe for the high current. Then process the data using the appropriate instrument depending upon the current. I haven't done much w/ AC power measurements, but it's a common enough problem (large dynamic current range) for DC power measurements. Agilent (now Keysight) make instruments like the N6705B DC Power Analyzer that can sample a pretty high rates (like 10's of uSeconds) and be accurate at both uA range and 100's of mAs for dynamic current. I would imagine you could rig up something similar for AC power measurements.
Girlang 10y ago
I'm skeptical. I think this is propaganda from the anti-smart-meter crazies.
BrailleHunting 10y ago
A SilverSpring Networks meter were installed on our house in N. Cal around 2011. Perhaps there should be some certification requirements like scales for trade?
- averagewall 10y ago
  There certainly are certifications. But the official test doesn't pick out this problem, as mentioned in the article.
zkms 10y ago
OK so serious question -- utility companies tend to have high-accuracy, company-operated/maintained meters (that effectively measure the total use of a bunch of customers). They're meant for like, identifying non-malicious/technical losses but it's possible to use them to identify customers who are bypassing/tampering with their meters, as: total use (as measured by the trusted meter) must be equal to ∑ accuracy(customer ID) * reported use(customer ID) and assuming there aren't many cheating customers, and enough measurements (smartmeters make this easier, 15 minute slices is a lot better than 1 or 2 month slices), and assuming enough variation/independence between customers, it shouldn't be that hard to estimate the accuracy of each reporting meter. I'm wondering if this sort of balance check (i don't know the proper terminology, this isn't my field of expertise, if you know more, i would love to be corrected!) would have been sufficient to detect the sort of misreporting mentioned in this article. Full text of the actual published article is here btw: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.sci-hub.bz/document/7866234/?reload=true http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.sci-hub.bz/document/7866234/?relo...
- rdtsc 10y ago
  I imagine if anyone noticed it and saw it was in the favor of the company, they probably shrugged and said, "Heh, look at that. Let's keep it low priority, some intern will get to it at some point.."
  - mirekrusin 10y ago
    Yep, surely they'd only have resources to deal with half of the problem - meters that undercharge.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Depends on the state utility commission. In a place like South Carolina, they will chuckle. In other places, it's a big deal to resolve.
- bavcyc 10y ago
  It really is a time issue more than anything. Electric utilities in the US have had monthly data from the revenue meters for a long time and the process of switching to having lots of information available is ongoing. Data at the distribution circuit has been available for longer, but you have to have folks who know what to look for and the process to do it. There are companies which are starting to offer analytic packages that make all of the above much easier.
dheera 10y ago
I was paying upwards of $150 a month for heating in a tiny <400sqft studio in Boston at one point. $200 on one month. There was definitely something wrong with the meter readings, and pretty sure I was getting charged for someone else's electricity considering how little I was at home with the heater on. The utility company refused to investigate and would only threaten to send in debt collectors if I didn't pay up. My property manager only pointed me to the utility company. I tried complaining to DPU, but they didn't respond to e-mails, and I didn't have time for phone calls or mediating this mess, in general. As much as I wanted to fight, as sad as it sounds my time was worth more than the money I'd get back by spending time on the phone arguing and escalating the issue at critical hours of the day. :-/ Moved to California, paying a much more reasonable utility bill, and glad I didn't have to deal with that again. If there were a "deal-with-humans-as-a-service" business that took a 20% cut of any money I could get back in situations like this, I'd totally pay for it. I once had to argue for 2 hours on the phone with T-mobile about $250 in excess charges on my phone bill, and while got it all back after escalating it to a manager, I'd totally pay $50 for someone to deal with the 2 hours of phone calls for me.
- dmix 10y ago
  I got charged $600 for two months in Toronto during a cold winter a while back and calling Toronto Hydro got it reduced to the actual $300 it was supposed to be. So FWIW in my situation at least it was worth the effort to look into it. I was in an older (1980s) apartment building so I couldn't blame a singular meter, I'm not really sure how measurements are done in big buildings (maybe someone could explain?). I've heard that elsewhere in Ontario, Canada and in Toronto (two different companies) that overcharging is a big recurring issue. I wasn't given a good explanation about my one anecdotal case outside of an 'accounting error'. I just knew that it sounded far too high to be normal.
  - klodolph 10y ago
    > I'm not really sure how measurements are done in big buildings (maybe someone could explain?). In most jurisdictions, your electricity must be metered separately if you are billed by the utility company. In my building, there is a room with a bank of electricity meters, one for each apartment. Next to it is a bank of gas meters.
averagewall 10y ago
A bit off topic but I once had a water meter that was overcharging by perhaps around 100%. I worked out that it was because it didn't have a one-way valve. When there was air trapped in the pipes, pressure fluctuations would cause water would move back and forth through the meter, racking up the bill with no net flow. People should test their own meters which isn't that hard if you're careful and know the basic concepts of thermostats and power ratings.
- phil21 10y ago
  Interesting. I also had this happen, where the water company installed the wrong size meter for the size pipe in my unit. Luckily it was a relatively small suburb, so the lady on the other end of the phone was able to give me her personal e-mail I could send a video to her of me test filling a gallon jug of milk while video taping the meter. That got their attention finally, and I was being billed about 5x the real usage rate. It was a fun one especially because I had moved into the apartment and immediately traveled for work at 80% time for 3 months. By the time I was home enough to notice the huge bills it took some convincing :)
- Gibbon1 10y ago
  Most cheap meters have a magnet and a reed-switch to generate pulses. As you noted they will generate pulses with backflow. However the dial count on the meter is correct. Another issue that can come up is older reed switches can chatter as they close and open. Usually input debouncing eliminates that, if the firmware guy didn't screw it up. Another thing I've seen is sometimes in a meter the magnet will rock back and forth. Careful design is needed to prevent that from causing the reed switch to open and close constantly. (Deboucing won't save you there) Besides that another thing that happens is if utility selects the wrong scale factor for the meter. That's good for really angry customers if the error is in the utilities favor. If it's in the customers favor they get angry when the utility fixes it. More sophisticated meters actually sense the actual meter reading using a bizarre electromagnetic sensing technique.
mdip 10y ago
I noticed my electric bill went up a bit when I was moved over to the electronic meter ... not so much that I thought anything of it other than that gee, I use a lot of power and now it seems like I'm using a little more. The problem here is that the discrepancy is in the favor of the power company. As long as they're making more money and especially because the "Accredited Testing Agency"'s own tests won't detect the fault, it's unlikely anything will be done about it unless there's an obscene amount of media attention paid to it and the regulators step in requiring a correction. ... Though there is one way that might happen more quickly. I wonder if there's a converse effect? Are there methods for consuming electricity on these meters that they similarly fail with but woefully under report the amount of electricity being used? If something like that was discovered and publicized enough for people to take advantage of it, I'd imagine the problem would get fixed on the short order. I'm pretty weak on electrical engineering, so I'm really thinking of this from the perspective of "Hey, that same flaw that allows an attacker to exploit my phone also allows me to gain root and unlock it!"
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Research the meter first. I thought the same thing about my gas usage -- turns out the meter was actually running slow.
- tomsaffell 10y ago
  > I wonder if there's a converse effect? If the inaccuracies are due to the meter's assumption around the current waveform then there probably is a way to exploit that. I suspect (from the little I have read) that the meters in question are: 1) assuming a sinusoidal current wave form, 2) assuming that the peak observed current is the peak of that sinusoidal wave, 3) effectively integrating under the area of the curve (with respect to voltage) to estimate total power. If all that's true, then to 'cheat' you'd need a device for which the current waveform looks like a 'fat' sine wave - same peak height, but wider peaks and steeper gradient through zero. In the extreme case it would be a square wave, but that might have too much harmonics. For example, you could create a heater (a simple resistive load) that alters its resistance at 60hz. When the voltage reaches its peak the heater would have its 'normal' resistance, and during the next 1/4 cycle it would ramp down its resistance, reaching a resistive low as the voltage passes through zero, and then ramp up its resistance for the following 1/4 cycle until it reaches its 'normal' resistance at the peak 'negative' voltage (1/2 a cycle from where we started), then repeat over. I think that would trick a meter that only looked at peak current and assumed a sinusoidal waveform. But who knows what other things it might break...
awful 10y ago
somewhat related, cant comment on cost yet, but house has code-std lighted stairwell switches; when used with fluor. bulb noticed in dark it flickered continuously. appears that neons in switch leak current through bulb all the time, but not enough to start up. a lot of power? yet to be determined, but neons are dead short and fluor. bulb startup is high current so probably high leakage all the time and odd waveform presented to meter.
Animats 10y ago
Check the actual papers.[1][2] For single-phase meters, which covers most residential uses, this is a non-problem: "No deviation beyond the specification could be observed; no influence of interference due to interfering or distorted voltage, and no influence caused by interfering currents were observed." All the problems were seen with 3-phase meters, usually found only in industrial and commercial environments. Figure 3 of [1] is puzzling. They claim to be testing a 3-phase meter, but the circuit shown is single-phase. Are they testing 3-phase meters with only one phase connected? That's way out of balance; 3-phase systems normally have at least roughly equal loads on each phase. While a 3-phase meter with an wildly asymmetrical load ought to measure accurately, that's not a normal condition. [1] http://doc.utwente.nl/102016/1/Runaway_energy_Meters.pdf http://doc.utwente.nl/102016/1/Runaway_energy_Meters.pdf [2] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7866234/ http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7866234/
- Toomas 10y ago
  I'm no electrician but I'm sure 3-phase meters are a norm in Estonia. You would usually have devices with high power requirement like electric water heaters and ovens connected to separate phases. And they are often sitting idle as well.
  - snom380 10y ago
    Same in Norway. Almost all new installations have 3-phase.
    - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
      Norway is a different case from most of the rest of the world, we run what's called an IT network earthing system where there is no neutral lead. Everything is connected between two phases getting 240v, and the earth wire is tapped from an actual metal rod dug into the earth. This setup is pretty much a mess, and can wreak havoc on laboratory setups, so e.g. at universities all the lab rooms are laid out with TN (the standard everyone else uses). This means you can mess stuff up in the lab by running an extension cord from the adjacent non-lab room (e.g. get large ground voltage differences, all sorts of wanky stuff).
jwr 10y ago
I'll recommend the hacker solution: first, buy and install your own meter, right after the power company one. It isn't expensive. Have it done by an electrician. I got mine installed in my fuse box, a small 3-phase DIN rail meter (I'm in Poland and pretty much all modern hookups are 3-phase). This gives you a way to at least compare the official meter readings with an independent source. In my case, it showed no correlation whatsoever, and it turned out that the power company swapped the meter numbers between me and my neighbor. Second, most meters have LEDs that flash a number of times per kWh consumed. It isn't difficult to build a device that measures the time between those pulses and gives you energy monitoring. I built one and had it running for a while. It's an eye-opening experience, you'd be surprised how much energy some devices consume, and also how significant a constant power draw can be.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  > In my case, it showed no correlation whatsoever, and it turned out that the power company swapped the meter numbers between me and my neighbor. At which point, it's time to start a bitcoin mining operation!
- DanBC 10y ago
  > most meters have LEDs that flash a number of times per kWh consumed. Watch out though. My meter has an LED that flashes when there's almost nothing being used.
- bavcyc 10y ago
  In the US revenue meters are 1-2% accuracy (usually tested regularly), as such I recommend specifying a meter in that accuracy range for the anticipated amp readings
rodionos 10y ago
It would be in consumers' best interest to be able to access meter readings with at least hourly granularity, just like wireless carriers provide call logs with up-to-the-minute accuracy. This way one can detect anomalies in resource usage based on raw data, unless the error is constant.
- fattire 10y ago
  Funny you should mention this. I just set this up myself... I have a meter measurement about every 30 seconds, which it gets plotted into a cool web graph that shows usage as well as consumption spikes and I can set alerts and such. Pretty cool. For anyone who's curious, here's the hardware: 1. A "smart meter" outside the house (set up by the power company) 2. A raspberry pi 3 (w/power cable/sdcard) 3. NooElec NESDR Mini 2+ software defined radio http://www.nooelec.com/store/sdr/sdr-receivers/nesdr-mini-2-plus.html http://www.nooelec.com/store/sdr/sdr-receivers/nesdr-mini-2-... This comes with an antenna as well. And here's the software: * Ubuntu Mate on the rpi3 (you can also use raspbian or whatever) * rtlamr to take readings from the meter (https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr -- this is awesome and worked on the first try after I installed golang and ran "go get github.com/bemasher/rtlamr") * rtl-tcp (a dependency of the above that is automatically installed if I remember correctly.) * openhab2 open source home automation sw (optional) * influxdb open source time series database * grafana graphing software Once I plugged the USB NooElectric SDR, I was able to grab my meter's reading with a little python3 script. The test code I'm using looks something like: completed = subprocess.run(['/home/myaccount/go/bin/rtlamr', '-filterid=1234567', '-single=true', '-format=json'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.DEVNULL) data=json.loads(completed.stdout.decode("utf-8")) reading = data['Message']['Consumption'] This gives you the reading for your meter. Change the -filterid to use the number physically written on your meter outside. I wanted to be able to visualize trends (like the rate of consumption when I turned on the heat) using a nifty chart, so I published from python (via the paho library-- https://pypi.python.org/pypi/paho-mqtt https://pypi.python.org/pypi/paho-mqtt ) to a local mqtt server (mosquitto running on the pi) though I also tried sending to a mqtt feed at io.adafruit.com, which does a neat graph on its dashboard... until I overwhelmed its quota with too-frequent updates. I wanted something faster where I didn't have to worry about any throttling. So I decided to do it all locally. First, I set up openhab2 (http://docs.openhab.org/ http://docs.openhab.org/) which has an add-on to to automatically read the mqtt feed, then inserted the measurements to a database on a local influxdb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfluxDB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfluxDB) server also on the pi which keeps a real-time history (aka "persistence") of my electric usage over time. (I could have also just inserted to the influxdb directly from my python3 script, but I'm playing with openhab2 for other things so had it do it for me...) Finally, I connected grafana (http://grafana.org/ http://grafana.org/) to the influxdb database. Now I have gorgeous real-time graphs and an amazing interactive web-UI that lets me zoom in and set alerts and such. It sounds like a lot of steps to get to the graph, and once you have the actual measurement, you have choices on how to visualize it-- you could have python send the readings to a Google Sheets spreadsheet and graph from there, for example. or do updates to adafruit less frequently to not blow through the quota. Or use openhab2's which includes its own charts. But grafana's visualizations are just the coolest. See http://play.grafana.org http://play.grafana.org for an idea of what you can do... Anyway, long drawn out answer, but the point is-- assuming you have a smart electric meter that work with rtlamr, you can do this yourself :)
deevolution 10y ago
I live in a newly renovated apartment with electric meters in Brooklyn and i have led lights and have experienced similar excesive charges... At one point my bill for my 1 bedroom apt was upwards of $300. Totally absurd.
djhworld 10y ago
Coincidentally this appeared on BBC news today http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39169313 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39169313
dbg31415 10y ago
So how would anyone know if their meter was broken?
- davedx 10y ago
  Probably only if you were the homeowner when the smart meter was installed, or if you're very dedicated, you could monitor energy usage at every electricity socket. (I did this for our largest appliances, to find out what used the most).
phkahler 10y ago
If waveform can cause the meter to read high usage... One could make something to correct it, and with that capability one could push power back to the grid with a distorted waveform at a higher rate ;-)
savrajsingh 10y ago
#wattvision
peterclary 10y ago
Whatever meter you get installed, make sure they take the initial reading properly! Obvious for mechanic meters, but it turns out that some Electronic meters are like that too. In the UK, about 6 or 7 years ago we bought an old house and upgraded the wiring, fuseboard, etc. The Electricity company came and replaced the old meter with a newer Electronic (but not Smart) meter. Unfortunately the guy they sent to install it didn't record the initial readings. That meant that as far as the company was concerned it had been installed at zero, when in fact it was way past that. We weren't able to move in immediately, and in the meantime there was very little electricity used - one electric heater on low, occasional lights on/off when we visited. That kind of thing. So you can imagine our horror when the first bill was for thousands of pounds. Fortunately when we rang up to complain we got somebody at the call center who immediately realised what must have happened and sorted it out. We had to agree an estimated usage, and it's still possible we overpaid for what we actually used, but at least it wasn't thousands.
kiliantics 10y ago
Take home message from this thread seems to be never to trust your utility company to charge you fairly. But the alternative seems to be to figure out the problem yourself (or hire someone to do so), saving the company money on what should be its own expenses. I got a $400 gas bill yesterday that needs investigating and I have little knowhow or time to do so...

424 points by rwbhn 10y ago

known 10y ago

http://www.securemeters.com/index.php/global/ http://www.securemeters.com/index.php/global/ were selling high quality elecronic meters for many years

upen 10y ago

So this is why my electricity bill is so high

thaumaturgy 10y ago
It's more probable that your bill is high because you haven't done a careful energy audit of your home and all of the devices in it, and one or more of them is malfunctioning or using more energy than you'd expect. I took the time to do this, and found that my electric water heater consumes nearly half of the electricity in my home.
- snuxoll 10y ago
  > I took the time to do this, and found that my electric water heater consumes nearly half of the electricity in my home. Oh man, do I know this feeling. My old duplex I moved out of last year had an electric water heater from 1991, it easily ate up 1/3 of our electric usage every month. New house has a gas water heater, during the summer months our gas water heater results in a $20 gas bill (roughly $10 of that is the connection and other assorted fees). Old water heaters, especially electric ones can really suck energy like nothing else. My summer electric bill at the new house is still roughly $30/mo cheaper and I'm running like 500W of gear 24/7 in my office/lab that wasn't at the old place.
  - Baeocystin 10y ago
    Same here. We switched over from an electric water heater to a gas one, and it was such a difference on our power bill that it paid for itself in less than a year. Even with running folding@home, BOINC, etc on all of my home machines, our bill is still less. Electric water heaters are expensive!
    - MertsA 10y ago
      As an added bonus the heat coming out of the hot water heater might be inside the home where it has to be removed via AC meaning that not only is that heat being wasted instead of providing hot water, it's also increasing your AC usage and wasting even more power.
      - rplst8 10y ago
        It's likely that the cost savings was just due to the fact that natural gas is so much cheaper than electricity, unit for unit.
- coda_ 10y ago
  I'm curious how you did your energy audit and found the water heater was the culprit. Did you hire someone else, or do it yourself... if so, how?
  - thaumaturgy 10y ago
    Did it myself. I'm sure it wasn't precisely accurate, but, good enough: just go down to the breaker panel, switch off each circuit there, then turn on each circuit individually with its usual devices connected. In the case of appliances like the fridge, stove/oven, clothes dryer, run the device with a normal load. With the water heater, I just ran hot water until it kicked on. Then observe change at meter, write it down, and do some math. As an added benefit, I got to verify and one case relabel the circuits.

ezoe 10y ago

It should be called the Dumb Mater.

ComputerGuru 10y ago

Most installations of electronic meters have been done in the past two to three years. It's easy enough to see if readings skyrocketed after the installation (mine didn't). (I'm presuming electronic == smart)

stolk 10y ago
I wish I could compare, but I moved into a (large) new home with a smart meter. I have no measurement that I can compare it to. On top of that, I just replaced all bulbs with LED, and wonder if that has been counterproductive.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- mirekrusin 10y ago
  If you have dimmers on those LEDs then you should check it out. I've seen once little screw for bulbs it said on the box that it corrects wave so it's stable. It said that it extends life of bulbs. Not sure if it would help or not as the problem seems to be coming from appliances having chaotic usage wave patterns, but who knows maybe those work both ways, anybody knows?
- bavcyc 10y ago
  depending on how much money you want to spend, there are methods you can use to determine your usage. The most expensive would of course be to put CT's on each circuit in the house. Least expensive would be to source a meter for the main.

roywiggins 10y ago

I've heard of free energy scammers using this to trick people, you muck with the waveform so the meter reads wrong, and it looks like you have invented a box that saves energy.

opportune 10y ago
I feel like this could work really well if you just slap up some fake/broken solar panels on your roof that you got for dirt cheap
Neliquat 10y ago
They now can test for many variations of these. Not sure how, but meter guy mentioned it.
- dzhiurgis 10y ago
  I doubt they actually enforce it.
gfisher 10y ago
I know that where I live, if the power factor is below .4, the meters can't accurately record the consumption. Kind of rare, but it does happen.

ars 10y ago

If a Rogowski Coil and Hall Effect sensors both give incorrect results - what did the researches use to measure the meters?

stagbeetle 10y ago
An oscilloscope.
- ars 10y ago
  An oscilloscope is the display. I was asking what measures the current.
  - kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
    A current shunt. There are modern energy monitoring ICs that sample voltage and current at high speed and accurately compute power and energy with switched reactive loads.
  - zkms 10y ago
    per the article, a Dranetz Products made PowerXplorer PX5-400 http://www.dranetz.com/product-services/current-dranetz-products/powerxplorer-px5-400/ http://www.dranetz.com/product-services/current-dranetz-prod... here's the original paper http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.sci-hub.bz/document/7866234/?reload=true http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.sci-hub.bz/document/7866234/?relo...
    - barrkel 10y ago
      The headline deviations are measured with respect to an eletromechanical meter (the kind that predated smart meters, described as a Ferraris principle meter).
  - mcshicks 10y ago
    A current probe. You might need more then one probe for instance you might have one current probe that was accurate at a lower current but could not measure the higher current, and a second probe for the high current. Then process the data using the appropriate instrument depending upon the current. I haven't done much w/ AC power measurements, but it's a common enough problem (large dynamic current range) for DC power measurements. Agilent (now Keysight) make instruments like the N6705B DC Power Analyzer that can sample a pretty high rates (like 10's of uSeconds) and be accurate at both uA range and 100's of mAs for dynamic current. I would imagine you could rig up something similar for AC power measurements.

Girlang 10y ago

I'm skeptical. I think this is propaganda from the anti-smart-meter crazies.

BrailleHunting 10y ago

A SilverSpring Networks meter were installed on our house in N. Cal around 2011. Perhaps there should be some certification requirements like scales for trade?

averagewall 10y ago
There certainly are certifications. But the official test doesn't pick out this problem, as mentioned in the article.

zkms 10y ago

OK so serious question -- utility companies tend to have high-accuracy, company-operated/maintained meters (that effectively measure the total use of a bunch of customers). They're meant for like, identifying non-malicious/technical losses but it's possible to use them to identify customers who are bypassing/tampering with their meters, as: total use (as measured by the trusted meter) must be equal to ∑ accuracy(customer ID) * reported use(customer ID) and assuming there aren't many cheating customers, and enough measurements (smartmeters make this easier, 15 minute slices is a lot better than 1 or 2 month slices), and assuming enough variation/independence between customers, it shouldn't be that hard to estimate the accuracy of each reporting meter. I'm wondering if this sort of balance check (i don't know the proper terminology, this isn't my field of expertise, if you know more, i would love to be corrected!) would have been sufficient to detect the sort of misreporting mentioned in this article. Full text of the actual published article is here btw: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.sci-hub.bz/document/7866234/?reload=true http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.sci-hub.bz/document/7866234/?relo...

rdtsc 10y ago
I imagine if anyone noticed it and saw it was in the favor of the company, they probably shrugged and said, "Heh, look at that. Let's keep it low priority, some intern will get to it at some point.."
- mirekrusin 10y ago
  Yep, surely they'd only have resources to deal with half of the problem - meters that undercharge.
Spooky23 10y ago
Depends on the state utility commission. In a place like South Carolina, they will chuckle. In other places, it's a big deal to resolve.
bavcyc 10y ago
It really is a time issue more than anything. Electric utilities in the US have had monthly data from the revenue meters for a long time and the process of switching to having lots of information available is ongoing. Data at the distribution circuit has been available for longer, but you have to have folks who know what to look for and the process to do it. There are companies which are starting to offer analytic packages that make all of the above much easier.

dheera 10y ago

I was paying upwards of $150 a month for heating in a tiny <400sqft studio in Boston at one point. $200 on one month. There was definitely something wrong with the meter readings, and pretty sure I was getting charged for someone else's electricity considering how little I was at home with the heater on. The utility company refused to investigate and would only threaten to send in debt collectors if I didn't pay up. My property manager only pointed me to the utility company. I tried complaining to DPU, but they didn't respond to e-mails, and I didn't have time for phone calls or mediating this mess, in general. As much as I wanted to fight, as sad as it sounds my time was worth more than the money I'd get back by spending time on the phone arguing and escalating the issue at critical hours of the day. :-/ Moved to California, paying a much more reasonable utility bill, and glad I didn't have to deal with that again. If there were a "deal-with-humans-as-a-service" business that took a 20% cut of any money I could get back in situations like this, I'd totally pay for it. I once had to argue for 2 hours on the phone with T-mobile about $250 in excess charges on my phone bill, and while got it all back after escalating it to a manager, I'd totally pay $50 for someone to deal with the 2 hours of phone calls for me.

dmix 10y ago
I got charged $600 for two months in Toronto during a cold winter a while back and calling Toronto Hydro got it reduced to the actual $300 it was supposed to be. So FWIW in my situation at least it was worth the effort to look into it. I was in an older (1980s) apartment building so I couldn't blame a singular meter, I'm not really sure how measurements are done in big buildings (maybe someone could explain?). I've heard that elsewhere in Ontario, Canada and in Toronto (two different companies) that overcharging is a big recurring issue. I wasn't given a good explanation about my one anecdotal case outside of an 'accounting error'. I just knew that it sounded far too high to be normal.
- klodolph 10y ago
  > I'm not really sure how measurements are done in big buildings (maybe someone could explain?). In most jurisdictions, your electricity must be metered separately if you are billed by the utility company. In my building, there is a room with a bank of electricity meters, one for each apartment. Next to it is a bank of gas meters.

averagewall 10y ago

A bit off topic but I once had a water meter that was overcharging by perhaps around 100%. I worked out that it was because it didn't have a one-way valve. When there was air trapped in the pipes, pressure fluctuations would cause water would move back and forth through the meter, racking up the bill with no net flow. People should test their own meters which isn't that hard if you're careful and know the basic concepts of thermostats and power ratings.

phil21 10y ago
Interesting. I also had this happen, where the water company installed the wrong size meter for the size pipe in my unit. Luckily it was a relatively small suburb, so the lady on the other end of the phone was able to give me her personal e-mail I could send a video to her of me test filling a gallon jug of milk while video taping the meter. That got their attention finally, and I was being billed about 5x the real usage rate. It was a fun one especially because I had moved into the apartment and immediately traveled for work at 80% time for 3 months. By the time I was home enough to notice the huge bills it took some convincing :)
Gibbon1 10y ago
Most cheap meters have a magnet and a reed-switch to generate pulses. As you noted they will generate pulses with backflow. However the dial count on the meter is correct. Another issue that can come up is older reed switches can chatter as they close and open. Usually input debouncing eliminates that, if the firmware guy didn't screw it up. Another thing I've seen is sometimes in a meter the magnet will rock back and forth. Careful design is needed to prevent that from causing the reed switch to open and close constantly. (Deboucing won't save you there) Besides that another thing that happens is if utility selects the wrong scale factor for the meter. That's good for really angry customers if the error is in the utilities favor. If it's in the customers favor they get angry when the utility fixes it. More sophisticated meters actually sense the actual meter reading using a bizarre electromagnetic sensing technique.

mdip 10y ago

I noticed my electric bill went up a bit when I was moved over to the electronic meter ... not so much that I thought anything of it other than that gee, I use a lot of power and now it seems like I'm using a little more. The problem here is that the discrepancy is in the favor of the power company. As long as they're making more money and especially because the "Accredited Testing Agency"'s own tests won't detect the fault, it's unlikely anything will be done about it unless there's an obscene amount of media attention paid to it and the regulators step in requiring a correction. ... Though there is one way that might happen more quickly. I wonder if there's a converse effect? Are there methods for consuming electricity on these meters that they similarly fail with but woefully under report the amount of electricity being used? If something like that was discovered and publicized enough for people to take advantage of it, I'd imagine the problem would get fixed on the short order. I'm pretty weak on electrical engineering, so I'm really thinking of this from the perspective of "Hey, that same flaw that allows an attacker to exploit my phone also allows me to gain root and unlock it!"

Spooky23 10y ago
Research the meter first. I thought the same thing about my gas usage -- turns out the meter was actually running slow.
tomsaffell 10y ago
> I wonder if there's a converse effect? If the inaccuracies are due to the meter's assumption around the current waveform then there probably is a way to exploit that. I suspect (from the little I have read) that the meters in question are: 1) assuming a sinusoidal current wave form, 2) assuming that the peak observed current is the peak of that sinusoidal wave, 3) effectively integrating under the area of the curve (with respect to voltage) to estimate total power. If all that's true, then to 'cheat' you'd need a device for which the current waveform looks like a 'fat' sine wave - same peak height, but wider peaks and steeper gradient through zero. In the extreme case it would be a square wave, but that might have too much harmonics. For example, you could create a heater (a simple resistive load) that alters its resistance at 60hz. When the voltage reaches its peak the heater would have its 'normal' resistance, and during the next 1/4 cycle it would ramp down its resistance, reaching a resistive low as the voltage passes through zero, and then ramp up its resistance for the following 1/4 cycle until it reaches its 'normal' resistance at the peak 'negative' voltage (1/2 a cycle from where we started), then repeat over. I think that would trick a meter that only looked at peak current and assumed a sinusoidal waveform. But who knows what other things it might break...

awful 10y ago

somewhat related, cant comment on cost yet, but house has code-std lighted stairwell switches; when used with fluor. bulb noticed in dark it flickered continuously. appears that neons in switch leak current through bulb all the time, but not enough to start up. a lot of power? yet to be determined, but neons are dead short and fluor. bulb startup is high current so probably high leakage all the time and odd waveform presented to meter.

Animats 10y ago

Check the actual papers.[1][2] For single-phase meters, which covers most residential uses, this is a non-problem: "No deviation beyond the specification could be observed; no influence of interference due to interfering or distorted voltage, and no influence caused by interfering currents were observed." All the problems were seen with 3-phase meters, usually found only in industrial and commercial environments. Figure 3 of [1] is puzzling. They claim to be testing a 3-phase meter, but the circuit shown is single-phase. Are they testing 3-phase meters with only one phase connected? That's way out of balance; 3-phase systems normally have at least roughly equal loads on each phase. While a 3-phase meter with an wildly asymmetrical load ought to measure accurately, that's not a normal condition. [1] http://doc.utwente.nl/102016/1/Runaway_energy_Meters.pdf http://doc.utwente.nl/102016/1/Runaway_energy_Meters.pdf [2] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7866234/ http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7866234/

Toomas 10y ago
I'm no electrician but I'm sure 3-phase meters are a norm in Estonia. You would usually have devices with high power requirement like electric water heaters and ovens connected to separate phases. And they are often sitting idle as well.
- snom380 10y ago
  Same in Norway. Almost all new installations have 3-phase.
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    Norway is a different case from most of the rest of the world, we run what's called an IT network earthing system where there is no neutral lead. Everything is connected between two phases getting 240v, and the earth wire is tapped from an actual metal rod dug into the earth. This setup is pretty much a mess, and can wreak havoc on laboratory setups, so e.g. at universities all the lab rooms are laid out with TN (the standard everyone else uses). This means you can mess stuff up in the lab by running an extension cord from the adjacent non-lab room (e.g. get large ground voltage differences, all sorts of wanky stuff).

jwr 10y ago

I'll recommend the hacker solution: first, buy and install your own meter, right after the power company one. It isn't expensive. Have it done by an electrician. I got mine installed in my fuse box, a small 3-phase DIN rail meter (I'm in Poland and pretty much all modern hookups are 3-phase). This gives you a way to at least compare the official meter readings with an independent source. In my case, it showed no correlation whatsoever, and it turned out that the power company swapped the meter numbers between me and my neighbor. Second, most meters have LEDs that flash a number of times per kWh consumed. It isn't difficult to build a device that measures the time between those pulses and gives you energy monitoring. I built one and had it running for a while. It's an eye-opening experience, you'd be surprised how much energy some devices consume, and also how significant a constant power draw can be.

kalleboo 10y ago
> In my case, it showed no correlation whatsoever, and it turned out that the power company swapped the meter numbers between me and my neighbor. At which point, it's time to start a bitcoin mining operation!
DanBC 10y ago
> most meters have LEDs that flash a number of times per kWh consumed. Watch out though. My meter has an LED that flashes when there's almost nothing being used.
bavcyc 10y ago
In the US revenue meters are 1-2% accuracy (usually tested regularly), as such I recommend specifying a meter in that accuracy range for the anticipated amp readings

rodionos 10y ago

It would be in consumers' best interest to be able to access meter readings with at least hourly granularity, just like wireless carriers provide call logs with up-to-the-minute accuracy. This way one can detect anomalies in resource usage based on raw data, unless the error is constant.

fattire 10y ago
Funny you should mention this. I just set this up myself... I have a meter measurement about every 30 seconds, which it gets plotted into a cool web graph that shows usage as well as consumption spikes and I can set alerts and such. Pretty cool. For anyone who's curious, here's the hardware: 1. A "smart meter" outside the house (set up by the power company) 2. A raspberry pi 3 (w/power cable/sdcard) 3. NooElec NESDR Mini 2+ software defined radio http://www.nooelec.com/store/sdr/sdr-receivers/nesdr-mini-2-plus.html http://www.nooelec.com/store/sdr/sdr-receivers/nesdr-mini-2-... This comes with an antenna as well. And here's the software: * Ubuntu Mate on the rpi3 (you can also use raspbian or whatever) * rtlamr to take readings from the meter (https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr -- this is awesome and worked on the first try after I installed golang and ran "go get github.com/bemasher/rtlamr") * rtl-tcp (a dependency of the above that is automatically installed if I remember correctly.) * openhab2 open source home automation sw (optional) * influxdb open source time series database * grafana graphing software Once I plugged the USB NooElectric SDR, I was able to grab my meter's reading with a little python3 script. The test code I'm using looks something like: completed = subprocess.run(['/home/myaccount/go/bin/rtlamr', '-filterid=1234567', '-single=true', '-format=json'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.DEVNULL) data=json.loads(completed.stdout.decode("utf-8")) reading = data['Message']['Consumption'] This gives you the reading for your meter. Change the -filterid to use the number physically written on your meter outside. I wanted to be able to visualize trends (like the rate of consumption when I turned on the heat) using a nifty chart, so I published from python (via the paho library-- https://pypi.python.org/pypi/paho-mqtt https://pypi.python.org/pypi/paho-mqtt ) to a local mqtt server (mosquitto running on the pi) though I also tried sending to a mqtt feed at io.adafruit.com, which does a neat graph on its dashboard... until I overwhelmed its quota with too-frequent updates. I wanted something faster where I didn't have to worry about any throttling. So I decided to do it all locally. First, I set up openhab2 (http://docs.openhab.org/ http://docs.openhab.org/) which has an add-on to to automatically read the mqtt feed, then inserted the measurements to a database on a local influxdb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfluxDB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfluxDB) server also on the pi which keeps a real-time history (aka "persistence") of my electric usage over time. (I could have also just inserted to the influxdb directly from my python3 script, but I'm playing with openhab2 for other things so had it do it for me...) Finally, I connected grafana (http://grafana.org/ http://grafana.org/) to the influxdb database. Now I have gorgeous real-time graphs and an amazing interactive web-UI that lets me zoom in and set alerts and such. It sounds like a lot of steps to get to the graph, and once you have the actual measurement, you have choices on how to visualize it-- you could have python send the readings to a Google Sheets spreadsheet and graph from there, for example. or do updates to adafruit less frequently to not blow through the quota. Or use openhab2's which includes its own charts. But grafana's visualizations are just the coolest. See http://play.grafana.org http://play.grafana.org for an idea of what you can do... Anyway, long drawn out answer, but the point is-- assuming you have a smart electric meter that work with rtlamr, you can do this yourself :)

deevolution 10y ago

I live in a newly renovated apartment with electric meters in Brooklyn and i have led lights and have experienced similar excesive charges... At one point my bill for my 1 bedroom apt was upwards of $300. Totally absurd.

djhworld 10y ago

Coincidentally this appeared on BBC news today http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39169313 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39169313

dbg31415 10y ago

So how would anyone know if their meter was broken?

davedx 10y ago
Probably only if you were the homeowner when the smart meter was installed, or if you're very dedicated, you could monitor energy usage at every electricity socket. (I did this for our largest appliances, to find out what used the most).

phkahler 10y ago

If waveform can cause the meter to read high usage... One could make something to correct it, and with that capability one could push power back to the grid with a distorted waveform at a higher rate ;-)

savrajsingh 10y ago

#wattvision

peterclary 10y ago

Whatever meter you get installed, make sure they take the initial reading properly! Obvious for mechanic meters, but it turns out that some Electronic meters are like that too. In the UK, about 6 or 7 years ago we bought an old house and upgraded the wiring, fuseboard, etc. The Electricity company came and replaced the old meter with a newer Electronic (but not Smart) meter. Unfortunately the guy they sent to install it didn't record the initial readings. That meant that as far as the company was concerned it had been installed at zero, when in fact it was way past that. We weren't able to move in immediately, and in the meantime there was very little electricity used - one electric heater on low, occasional lights on/off when we visited. That kind of thing. So you can imagine our horror when the first bill was for thousands of pounds. Fortunately when we rang up to complain we got somebody at the call center who immediately realised what must have happened and sorted it out. We had to agree an estimated usage, and it's still possible we overpaid for what we actually used, but at least it wasn't thousands.

kiliantics 10y ago

Take home message from this thread seems to be never to trust your utility company to charge you fairly. But the alternative seems to be to figure out the problem yourself (or hire someone to do so), saving the company money on what should be its own expenses. I got a $400 gas bill yesterday that needs investigating and I have little knowhow or time to do so...