Electricity Smart Meter

There is a new device on the market that claims it can save you money on your electricity spending, it is called the Smart Meter.  The Smart Meter is an advanced electrical meter identifies consumption in more detail than a conventional meter. It will also communicates that information back to the local utility company for monitoring and billing purposes for both you and them.

In the past traditional electrical meters only measure total consumption and as such provide no information of when the energy was consumed.  Now we are trying to be more efficient with are energy so the old ways just are not very helpful.  The way electricity works is it is generated in one place and then distributed to our local electricity providers who will then submit it to our homes and offices.  There has been a lot of wasted electricity in the past because you can not store this energy.  Once it has been generated if it is not used it will be wasted.  So during certain hours of the day when we are not using a lot of electricity, these are called the off peak hours, the price drops because the demand is not high.  Just the opposite happens during the on peak hours.  These new Smart Meters will help by letting the utility companies know how much electricity is being used at certain times during the day, it will also allow you to know how much electricity you are using at any given time.  This will be beneficial to both parties, you can lower your bill by using less electricity during the off peak hours and when you are not home.  While the electricity companies have an even better idea of how much electricity well need to be generated for any given time cutting down on all the wasted supply.

This is still a very new product so not all the problems are worked out yet.  The new meters are not cheap and the utility companies are passing these expenses off to the customer along with adding a small monthly charge for the data that will be transmitted.  A lot of people are upset with this and think that the costs do not out weight the benefits.  But  there are a number of trials going on through out the U.S. among other countries so time will tell.