11 ms·
> A power company vehicle drives around the neighbourhood, collecting the values, storing them and moves on. What the fuck
by orf 5y ago
> A power company vehicle drives around the neighbourhood, collecting the values, storing them and moves on.
What the fuck
- tgv 5y agoIt's like the meter man visiting your house, but now they no longer have to enter. Isn't it wonderful? If I lived in the US, I'd immediately try to hack up a small Arduino project to read out my neighbours' energy usage.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoUse SDR networks to do it from afar. http://www.websdr.org/ http://www.websdr.org/
- amluto 5y agoI think most of the modern gear uses ZigBee’s publicly document smart energy protocols. It’s encrypted.
- dperfect 5y agoI do this with a cheap (~$20) USB RTL-SDR – no Arduino or custom electronics necessary. Of course, I only use it to monitor my own energy usage (electricity and gas) using rtlamr[1] and a script that periodically sends the data to InfluxDB, then displayed using Grafana. The result is a smart home energy monitor that doesn't require any clamps near the electrical panel, and it exactly matches the usage for which I'll be billed. [1] https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr
- flatiron 5y agoCrazy how easy that is. I bet within a year we hear about criminals using something like this to know when people leave their house for extended periods.
- sokoloff 5y agoThat repo is over 7 years old. It’s exploitable, but I’m pretty convinced that this info has been out for many years. https://hackaday.com/2014/02/25/using-sdr-to-read-your-smart-meter/ https://hackaday.com/2014/02/25/using-sdr-to-read-your-smart...
- wolrah 5y agoCan confirm, I was playing with this in my neighborhood years ago. I'm pretty sure it was the gas meters I was seeing.
- bserge 5y agoAnd then promptly get bored. It's in the same category as running wifi deauth attacks - fun for 5 minutes.
- 71a54xd 5y agoYep, as much as I love them Hak5 somehow still maintains a "fan base" for this kind of petty "hacking". Still, hat's off to Darren and Shannon!
- LatteLazy 5y agoOr better still, kill your own meter and have something ping out a reading thats 100 times less expensive.
- RandallBrown 5y agoI live in a townhouse and our meters are outside next to where we park our cars. I can read my neighbors energy usage whenever I want. One uses more electricity than I do and the other less.
- cronix 5y agoI've never had a meter reader enter any house I've lived in, which would be somewhere around 15 different units. All gas/electrical/water meters are on the outside of the house/apartment whether they were smart meters or the traditional ones. Anyone can walk up to them and read them. The digital or analog dial readout is not locked/secured/obscured in any way.
- winrid 5y agoI suppose most of this infra was designed before cell towers were prominent enough.
- AnssiH 5y agoWell, looks like smart meters started appearing in US slightly later than e.g. here in Finland, around 2006-2007, so I'm not sure that explains the difference. Could be explained by lower mobile network coverage in U.S., I guess. US statistic: https://www.statista.com/statistics/676472/number-of-smart-meter-installations-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/676472/number-of-smart-m... In 2005 in Finland about 7% of households had smart meters, with 80%+ coverage mandated by 2013 and actual coverage of 99.6% of under-63A meters in 2016 (Finnish sources: https://www.vttresearch.com/sites/default/files/julkaisut/muut/2006/VTT-R-09048-06.pdf https://www.vttresearch.com/sites/default/files/julkaisut/mu... https://tem.fi/documents/1410877/3481825/AMR+2.0+loppuraportti+15.12.2017/6a2df7e6-a963-40c0-b4d8-d2533fbca488/AMR+2.0+loppuraportti+15.12.2017.pdf https://tem.fi/documents/1410877/3481825/AMR+2.0+loppuraport...).
- Scoundreller 5y agoWhat’s special about 63A meters? That’s low, but I guess nobody has electric heat/AC. I guess they’re the ones that can be installed indoors?
- theshrike79 5y ago3x 63A is the reasonable maximum a normal consumer would want at their house. Normal houses are around 3x 32A. Everything over that is a commercial building and they get billed with different rules and measurements due to the equipment they tend to have. Something about three phase engines and power phases in commercial lighting. I zoned out during those meetings :D
- archi42 5y agoFinland has 230V, so if you're from the US with 110V the low current rating might be confusing ;-) I'd also guess that in Finland they also run three phases into each house/unit (we do in Germany), meaning that's 3*63A = 189A. (Or just shy of 400A on a 110V grid). For us that's the default grid connection you get for your house. As for your guess: That's just a cultural thing I suppose. I've never seen outdoor meters around here.
- geerlingguy 5y agoWe used to have meter readers running (literally) from house to house jotting down the numbers.
- elliekelly 5y agoYes but that’s one data point at one singular moment in time being collected by one person. Smart meters continually broadcast a constant stream of data to anyone who cares to listen.
- wyldfire 5y agoIf I had to guess, it's likely a response to an [unauthenticated] inquiry. If so it's probably not quite the same but effectively similar.
- toast0 5y agoDepends on the meters. My electric utility just replaced their old (circa 1999) smart meters which were one way broadcast with a new smart meter that's supposed to be two way capable. I didn't notice a lot of change at their data collection base station (which happens to be at the corner of my driveway), so I don't know if they already had a transmitter in addition to a receiver, or if it's small enough to fit in the existing equipment box or if they're using a different station.
- amiga 5y agoThe meters used in my area can be wirelessly shut down by any nearby power technician. They have vans with very visible PVC pipes mounted on the roof to interact with the meters.
- ac29 5y ago> They have vans with very visible PVC pipes mounted on the roof to interact with the meters That's more likely a fiberglass antenna.
- username90 5y agoAlmost surely much cheaper short term than having a team of engineers and installers to fix the problem.
- matmatmatmat 5y agoDifferent power companies use different smart meter tech, not all of which is easily readable. SDG&E uses encrypted Zigbee to transmit data. AFAIK, it has not been cracked.
- nicholashead 5y agoI use a Rainforest https://www.rainforestautomation.com/ https://www.rainforestautomation.com/ device to read my own meter on SDG&E and it works, I think I had to go through an auth process though.
- mschuster91 5y agoIndeed. I wonder if one could set up a fake transmitter that sends corrupt data (to lower one's own energy bill, hide a marijuana plantation, or to cause issues in a neighbor dispute), or what would happen if one would blanket jam the entire frequency.
- elliekelly 5y agoI wonder if they do any sort of audit of the amount of power used vs billed and, if so, at what scale. How long would it take them to identify the discrepancy? As long as it was pretty small-scale and not trying to hide a huge crypto-mining operation of something I suspect it would be a very long time before anyone figured it out.
- theshrike79 5y agoThat depends on the power company. But it's quite trivial to compare your average consumption with similar users and find the outliers. That's how people who steal power get caught for example and grow-houses :) And it's also a useful tool for the consumers themselves to know if they are spending more/less/equal amounts of electricity as people with similar profiles.
- Majromax 5y ago> or what would happen Charges for fraud (in the case of false data) and disruption to electrical service at the state level, and charges for unauthorized radio interference at the federal level.
- netr0ute 5y agoThis is the worst case scenario.
- ARandomerDude 5y agoBut a realistic one, especially if it became common enough to want to crack down and make examples.
- amluto 5y agoI am highly in favor of this type of self contained technology. The last thing we need is for the grid to become inadvertently dependent on the cell network, which is, in turn, dependent on the grid. If there’s a multi-day outage that takes out the cell battery backups, the grid needs to be able to start up independently. This is hard enough without accidental networking dependencies. (I believe that at least some of the blatant inequity in the Texas blackouts was necessary for this type of reason. There were various critical facilities (gas pumping stations, for example) that, if shut down due to rolling blackouts, would have further reduced grid capacity.)
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> the grid to become inadvertently dependent on the cell network, which is, in turn, dependent on the grid The grid wouldn't be dependent on the cell network. Billing would.
- willis936 5y agoIf I don't get billed for my power usage then I'm 100% craning my AC, as will everyone else.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> If I don't get billed for my power usage then I'm 100% craning my AC, as will everyone else Sorry, in what relevant scenario does the power company never get paid? OP pointed out a potential feedback loop between the cell network going down and the grid failing. Are you suggesting everyone will crank up their AC when the network fails because the power company will have some difficulty collecting metering data that day?
- cesarb 5y agoIf modern smart meters are anything like classic mechanical meters, they have a counter of the total amount of power consumed so far, and the power company bills the difference between the current reading and the previous month's reading. Which means that, once the meter can be read again, you will be billed for all the power consumed in the meantime.
- reaperducer 5y agoI'm not sure what the source of your astonishment is. Water, gas, and power companies have been doing this for at least a decade. It's a good solution for a nation with a low population density. In higher density locations, meter readers and cellular connections are used.