There’s a bit of controversy in Bakersfield, California over the smart meters installed by Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E). Residents are blaming the faulty meters for increased utility bills. Read these articles from the San Francisco Chronicle:
* PG&E’s ‘smart meters’ make dumb mistakes
* ‘Smart meters’ or cunning PG&E thieves?
* Smart meters are key to a clean energy future
* Smart consumers trump smart technology
PG&E says that the higher utility bills were not caused by defective meters but by the hot weather:
But PG&E has already tested many customers’ smart meters – made by General Electric and Landis+Gyr and networked by Silver Spring Networks – and have not found any problems with how they’re working, PG&E spokesman Denny Boyles said Wednesday. Rather than malfunctioning meters, PG&E thinks the higher bills have come from its two rate hikes in the past 12 months, plus a hot summer that led to many Central Valley residents cranking their air conditioners to beat the heat, Boyles said.
This controversy should be of interest to many municipalities and utilities that are installing wireless smart meters. People are already very suspicious of utility companies and they are also unfamiliar with smart meter technology. Many view the new meters as just another attempt by the utilities to fleece them. The Bakersfield saga continues . . .
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I’ve been following this saga, and I believe PG&E is correct in their assessment. I think it’s just mostly people whining about their validly high bill, and being suspicious of the new meters.
In actuality, these wireless smart meters make sense in so many ways, and the technology isn’t brand new… just brand new to us. I have it scheduled to go in here in Pleasant Hill within the next few weeks, and have no worries at all.
I don’t know about Smartmeter yet. I don’t have one. But, I did have an older PGE meter and my usage was ridicules. I was running an average bill of $350 month and an average use of 1294 KW /mo.
When I received my bill last December for Nov 15 to Dec 15th it said I owed $785.00 Two year before that I got a bill that said I owed $1200.00 in January. This time I asked PGE to check my meter which they did after the third request – although reluctantly. 99% of the time I was told the meters were perfectly fine and the customer’s usage was the problem.
They came out and checked my meter on Jan 30 2010. The technician said it checked out fine – No problems. He ran a test that sucked 1 KW through my meter and my meter said I used 1 KW. A “Perfect reading” I was told. Something was apparently wrong but it wasn’t my meter the tech told me.
The tech however stated that I had an older meter and a newer meter they had would allow me to check my actual usage about every 40 seconds easily and digitally. This might help me locate my problem I was told.
My Jan 15 to Feb 15th bill arrived reading 1106 KW used.
One half of that bill was with the old meter and 1/2 with the new meter.
My March bill with the new meter dropped way down. But the month of March is always lower so I didn’t pay much attention to it.
However, all of my bills since March have been 30 to 65% lower with an average drop of 45% from last year.
2009
Mar 1299 Apr 988 May 1016 June 1080 July 1267 Aug 1434 Sept 1258 Oct 1434
2010
Mar 756 Apr 738 May 719 June 763 July 613 Aug 632 Sept 690 Oct 599 proj.
Thanks to the new meter I now know what I am really using and am now being billed correctly.
If my meter was NOT faulty why is the new meter registering so much “less” electrical use? I had an independent use check done and it matches the new meter. Wish I had done that on the old meter instead of trusting PGE.
The lesson is that a PGE meters can be bad even if their tech say it is not. The fact is, the Smartmeters seem to be having the same problems in some cases. Can PGE actually check the meters to find out if they are faulty? I don’t know. Based on my experience apparently not.
From what I can tell, I over paid PGE around $3200 in 2009 and $2300 in 2008. I don’t know how much the year or years before that, since I don’t know how long my meter has been faulty. I just don’t have the records to go back and check when my usage was about what it is today.
the only rea way to check the old versus the new meters is to install two old meters and two new meters in series, outside of a building, in a zone that gets temperatures around 0 in winter and 95 or so in the summer, for a year, and graph the results for each day and compare them, and show them on the net. Now you can make me a believer. I believe in sound scientific experiments following good basic guidelines.