7 ms·

> if you want people to be more environmentally conscious [...] they need far better data This is one of the reasons all UK homes are being fitted for free wit

> if you want people to be more environmentally conscious [...] they need far better data This is one of the reasons all UK homes are being fitted for free with smart meters. (There are others, such as enabling better grid control.) > You want to be able to see usage to a resolution of at most 5 minutes. My one updates every few seconds and has a set of traffic light LEDs at the bottom giving a visible guide to energy use. https://www.edfenergy.com/smart-meters/using-a-smart-meter/chameleon-3-display https://www.edfenergy.com/smart-meters/using-a-smart-meter/c...

albert180 3y ago
Your Grid is operated by the french government? Is there some infrastructure you haven't sold out abroad
- waiwai933 3y ago
  The UK energy market is complicated. The high-voltage transmission grid is operated by National Grid, which is a British company. Distribution to end-users is operated at a regional level by one of six* Distribution Network Operators [1], three of which are British-owned. Consumers can purchase electricity from any electricity supplier that is willing to sell to them. Naturally, since it all goes into one grid, suppliers are responsible for ensuring that they purchase from generators and sell to consumers an equal amount of electricity. EDF is one of several suppliers in the market. (There were many more until energy prices rose following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and many suppliers collapsed.) The gas distribution system works similarly, but I'm not familiar with the details. * It's slightly more complicated, but it rounds to six. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_network_operator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_network_operator
gambiting 3y ago
We have one as well, but since we're on a variable rate tariff(Octopus Tracker) it's completely useless - it doesn't know the current electricity/gas price, it seems to receive rate updates from the network about once every few weeks - so the numbers it displays are just wrong. I've made my own little Raspberry Pico display that queries today's energy prices and shows those, but I have not been able to show today's energy consumption alongside(and therefore show the day's cost so far). Octopus provides an API to query the kWh used....but only for the last day. I even got their little Octopus Mini that broadcasts live usage to their app but I have not been able to query the live data from it from my raspberry, I don't have the necessary skills in web technologies to do that unfortunately :-(
- Angostura 3y ago
  If you use Home Assistant on the Pi there is an Octopus integration that you might find handy. It even works with the Octopus Mini https://bottlecapdave.github.io/HomeAssistant-OctopusEnergy/ https://bottlecapdave.github.io/HomeAssistant-OctopusEnergy/ Hope this is useful
  - gambiting 3y ago
    Ooooooh thanks that is actually super useful - had no idea this existed! Thank you!
- maccard 3y ago
  Mine comes with a display that shows live usage by energy rather than price. The octopus app shows my usage for yesterday in £ for octopus tracker, broken down into 30m increments.
verisimi 3y ago
The consumer element is the sugar to help the masses swallow the pill. If it was just about the consumer, the unit would never report its findings back to base. But blurting back your information is integral to, well, all smart devices. That is the point. Once the government has that info, it will be able to come up with bespoke taxes for you according to what it ordains as fair use. 'Your showers are too long', 'your toolshed is too big a draw on the electric' therefore 'you need to buy carbon credits to offset the environmental damage you are causing'. It's the slow descent to greater tyranny, and loss of personal control. It's amazing that people put up with it, but a slight discount in the short term, or visibility of your own data, is probably enough to get most people to accept spying infrastructure in their lives forever.
- gambiting 3y ago
  I don't understand your point - these meters only report your overal usage, not what is using the energy/water. It's letting you skip the step where you manually upload the reads every couple months or whatever, or worse, where the energy company employee has to visit your house to read them in person. Why does it matter if I upload my meter reads to my provider every month or if the device reports it automatically? The end result is the same. (At least that's how it works in the UK - the "smart" meters don't report live usage back to providers, they just submit kWh reads, the live readout is local device only)
  - userbinator 3y ago
    the "smart" meters don't report live usage back to providers Either they can be easily upgraded to do that, or they already are and the energy company merely gives you the total every month to maintain the impression that they aren't. If the meter-reader needs to visit periodically, you know with much greater certainty that they aren't gathering live data.
    - gambiting 3y ago
      >>Either they can be easily upgraded to do that I mean no offence, but you are literally just guessing and not talking about technologies that people have in their houses. The smart meters here in UK, the latest SMET2 standard ones, cannot broadcast live data back to the grid because they simply don't have the bandwidth to do so, they use low frequency communication back to the area controller and they can barely report the kWh number roughly every hour or so. The live communication with the display you have in your house is done over ZigBee and unless the energy company parks the van outside of your house to get those reads, they aren't getting them. Like, your points about surveilance are true, sure - but they address an imaginary situation you built in your head, not the actual technical solution that exists in the real world. >>If the meter-reader needs to visit periodically, you know with much greater certainty that they aren't gathering live data. Yeah and I need to let them into my house, which to me personally is a far greater invasion of my privacy than my meter automatically uploading kWh numbers to the grid. Also just as a general remark - on HN I think people are likely to divide into two groups - nerds who want ALL the data and they would gladly upload live data to an online system if they could just so they could monitor it live, and people who think any IoT functionality is a massive invasion of privacy and that it's some greater ploy by government to control you. The truth - as always - is somewhere in the middle.
jonathanlydall 3y ago
As evidenced by the article, the problem is that some of these devices within less than 10 years can become essentially bricks. I think these devices must be required to send the data to the utility company and the utility company must be forced to make the data easily accessible in a standard format so that independent analysis is trivially possible. This way you don't have a situation where a device manufacturer goes out of business and the capability to monitor is lost.
- JW_00000 3y ago
  At least in the EU (don't know about the UK), currently these sort of devices are installed by the government. They are replacement of the previous analog meters. In Belgium, they report the data to the (public) electricity grid company, which then forwards the data to your (private) electricity company. They are much simpler than the device in the article (no JavaScript or SSH access). They will surely last for more than 10 years given the investment the government is putting in. (I think roll-out started like 7 years ago and is expected to be finished around 2030 in Belgium.)
  - sofixa 3y ago
    Same in France, the meters report via the grid to the grid operator, which is a public utility and shares your usage data with the (public or private) electricity company from which you buy your electricity. They have a local physical port with an open spec (and e.g. I have a device that connects to it and shares the usage data live over Zigbee for my Home Assistant), and there are ways of getting the data over an API from either the public utility or the electricity company which are more or less complex depending on the entity.
- Qwertious 3y ago
  >As evidenced by the article, the problem is that some of these devices within less than 10 years can become essentially bricks. >I think these devices must be required to send the data to the utility company and the utility company must be forced to make the data easily accessible in a standard format so that independent analysis is trivially possible. The core problem is that these devices are garbage, and nobody cares. I don't mean that scornfully, I'm saying these devices are way over-provisioned and yet are unreliable anyway because they are very carelessly designed, and nobody cares because 1) they have no economic incentive to care, and 2) in the software world it's normal for cheap devices to fail within 10 years, and the people who refuse to accept this norm have no recourse except building their own piece of electronics (i.e. take up a hobby). Demanding they provide the data 'in a standard format' lets us put lipstick on the pig, it doesn't actually solve the core problem of the device being a piece of shit.
paganel 3y ago
I have one here in Bucharest and, while fancy, as in it blips a red light when the power consumptions is higher than usual, it doesn't help me at all. As in, yeah, running the washing machine is power consuming, I knew that, and the same goes for the electric oven or for the vacuum cleaner, but what am I supposed to do with that information? Not wash my clothes anymore? Not using the oven? Leaving dust all over the place for longer?

albert180 3y ago

Your Grid is operated by the french government? Is there some infrastructure you haven't sold out abroad

waiwai933 3y ago
The UK energy market is complicated. The high-voltage transmission grid is operated by National Grid, which is a British company. Distribution to end-users is operated at a regional level by one of six* Distribution Network Operators [1], three of which are British-owned. Consumers can purchase electricity from any electricity supplier that is willing to sell to them. Naturally, since it all goes into one grid, suppliers are responsible for ensuring that they purchase from generators and sell to consumers an equal amount of electricity. EDF is one of several suppliers in the market. (There were many more until energy prices rose following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and many suppliers collapsed.) The gas distribution system works similarly, but I'm not familiar with the details. * It's slightly more complicated, but it rounds to six. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_network_operator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_network_operator

gambiting 3y ago

We have one as well, but since we're on a variable rate tariff(Octopus Tracker) it's completely useless - it doesn't know the current electricity/gas price, it seems to receive rate updates from the network about once every few weeks - so the numbers it displays are just wrong. I've made my own little Raspberry Pico display that queries today's energy prices and shows those, but I have not been able to show today's energy consumption alongside(and therefore show the day's cost so far). Octopus provides an API to query the kWh used....but only for the last day. I even got their little Octopus Mini that broadcasts live usage to their app but I have not been able to query the live data from it from my raspberry, I don't have the necessary skills in web technologies to do that unfortunately :-(

Angostura 3y ago
If you use Home Assistant on the Pi there is an Octopus integration that you might find handy. It even works with the Octopus Mini https://bottlecapdave.github.io/HomeAssistant-OctopusEnergy/ https://bottlecapdave.github.io/HomeAssistant-OctopusEnergy/ Hope this is useful
- gambiting 3y ago
  Ooooooh thanks that is actually super useful - had no idea this existed! Thank you!
maccard 3y ago
Mine comes with a display that shows live usage by energy rather than price. The octopus app shows my usage for yesterday in £ for octopus tracker, broken down into 30m increments.

verisimi 3y ago

The consumer element is the sugar to help the masses swallow the pill. If it was just about the consumer, the unit would never report its findings back to base. But blurting back your information is integral to, well, all smart devices. That is the point. Once the government has that info, it will be able to come up with bespoke taxes for you according to what it ordains as fair use. 'Your showers are too long', 'your toolshed is too big a draw on the electric' therefore 'you need to buy carbon credits to offset the environmental damage you are causing'. It's the slow descent to greater tyranny, and loss of personal control. It's amazing that people put up with it, but a slight discount in the short term, or visibility of your own data, is probably enough to get most people to accept spying infrastructure in their lives forever.

gambiting 3y ago
I don't understand your point - these meters only report your overal usage, not what is using the energy/water. It's letting you skip the step where you manually upload the reads every couple months or whatever, or worse, where the energy company employee has to visit your house to read them in person. Why does it matter if I upload my meter reads to my provider every month or if the device reports it automatically? The end result is the same. (At least that's how it works in the UK - the "smart" meters don't report live usage back to providers, they just submit kWh reads, the live readout is local device only)
- userbinator 3y ago
  the "smart" meters don't report live usage back to providers Either they can be easily upgraded to do that, or they already are and the energy company merely gives you the total every month to maintain the impression that they aren't. If the meter-reader needs to visit periodically, you know with much greater certainty that they aren't gathering live data.
  - gambiting 3y ago
    >>Either they can be easily upgraded to do that I mean no offence, but you are literally just guessing and not talking about technologies that people have in their houses. The smart meters here in UK, the latest SMET2 standard ones, cannot broadcast live data back to the grid because they simply don't have the bandwidth to do so, they use low frequency communication back to the area controller and they can barely report the kWh number roughly every hour or so. The live communication with the display you have in your house is done over ZigBee and unless the energy company parks the van outside of your house to get those reads, they aren't getting them. Like, your points about surveilance are true, sure - but they address an imaginary situation you built in your head, not the actual technical solution that exists in the real world. >>If the meter-reader needs to visit periodically, you know with much greater certainty that they aren't gathering live data. Yeah and I need to let them into my house, which to me personally is a far greater invasion of my privacy than my meter automatically uploading kWh numbers to the grid. Also just as a general remark - on HN I think people are likely to divide into two groups - nerds who want ALL the data and they would gladly upload live data to an online system if they could just so they could monitor it live, and people who think any IoT functionality is a massive invasion of privacy and that it's some greater ploy by government to control you. The truth - as always - is somewhere in the middle.

jonathanlydall 3y ago

As evidenced by the article, the problem is that some of these devices within less than 10 years can become essentially bricks. I think these devices must be required to send the data to the utility company and the utility company must be forced to make the data easily accessible in a standard format so that independent analysis is trivially possible. This way you don't have a situation where a device manufacturer goes out of business and the capability to monitor is lost.

JW_00000 3y ago
At least in the EU (don't know about the UK), currently these sort of devices are installed by the government. They are replacement of the previous analog meters. In Belgium, they report the data to the (public) electricity grid company, which then forwards the data to your (private) electricity company. They are much simpler than the device in the article (no JavaScript or SSH access). They will surely last for more than 10 years given the investment the government is putting in. (I think roll-out started like 7 years ago and is expected to be finished around 2030 in Belgium.)
- sofixa 3y ago
  Same in France, the meters report via the grid to the grid operator, which is a public utility and shares your usage data with the (public or private) electricity company from which you buy your electricity. They have a local physical port with an open spec (and e.g. I have a device that connects to it and shares the usage data live over Zigbee for my Home Assistant), and there are ways of getting the data over an API from either the public utility or the electricity company which are more or less complex depending on the entity.
Qwertious 3y ago
>As evidenced by the article, the problem is that some of these devices within less than 10 years can become essentially bricks. >I think these devices must be required to send the data to the utility company and the utility company must be forced to make the data easily accessible in a standard format so that independent analysis is trivially possible. The core problem is that these devices are garbage, and nobody cares. I don't mean that scornfully, I'm saying these devices are way over-provisioned and yet are unreliable anyway because they are very carelessly designed, and nobody cares because 1) they have no economic incentive to care, and 2) in the software world it's normal for cheap devices to fail within 10 years, and the people who refuse to accept this norm have no recourse except building their own piece of electronics (i.e. take up a hobby). Demanding they provide the data 'in a standard format' lets us put lipstick on the pig, it doesn't actually solve the core problem of the device being a piece of shit.

paganel 3y ago

I have one here in Bucharest and, while fancy, as in it blips a red light when the power consumptions is higher than usual, it doesn't help me at all. As in, yeah, running the washing machine is power consuming, I knew that, and the same goes for the electric oven or for the vacuum cleaner, but what am I supposed to do with that information? Not wash my clothes anymore? Not using the oven? Leaving dust all over the place for longer?