Single to 3 phase invertor and smart meters

Hi,

I am thinking of converting my myford with a transwave or newton tesla package, but also just about to get my electricity supplier to fit a fancy smart meter soon.

Has anyone had any issues with this combination or shall i just cancel the smart meter install?

Regards

Derek

I can't see any reason why the VFD should affect the Smart Meter in any way.

There may be other good reasons for cancelling a SmartMeter , but a VFD shouldn't need to be one of them.
I've got a couple on the go here and have no issues.

Bill

Derek,

If it helps, I had a smart meter installed last June and also fitted a vfd and three phase motor to my mill at about the same time. To be honest, I hadn't even thought that there might be any interaction between the two and there hasn't been, as far as I can tell. If a problems arises, I'll ditch the smart meter and keep the vfd!

John

This is all very much up in the air at the moment. It is known that smart meters can tell the difference between resistive and inductive loads like electric motors (and some types of lighting) and this would mean that the supply companies have the ability to charge more for inductive load, because the generators need to provide more power to satisfy inductive loads. They are not doing this at at the moment, at least as far as I know, but they could in the future. Theoretically, the VFD may well actually stop the meter from sensing the motor as an inductive load, so indeed, you may be better off with 3 phase and an RFD than you are with single phase.

Phil.

Edited By Phil Whitley on 09/02/2019 18:38:02

Edited By Phil Whitley on 09/02/2019 18:38:52

John,

I thought that once you have gone"smart" there is no going back?

For me, not having a smart meter if I can help it.

We recently moved to a property that has smart meters fitted, ok at the moment but I don't trust the power companies not to dictate the prices they will charge at different times of the day, remember these things speak both ways, I would advise resist installing them

x2 for Peak4's comments I got transwave setup on my Myford no problems since fitted Had I seen some of the comments on the internet and youtube I dont think I would have gone for a smart meter !!!

H

I won’t be having a smart meter if I can help it. The only reason for having one is not having to read the meter and send the numbers in every month, but that’s not difficult.

All I can say to most of the above is what a load of bull. This is so typical of the misinformed scaremongering around smart meters.

A smart meter cannot 'tell' what type of load is on the metered circuit. The metering element of a smart meter is no different to that of a heritage meter. The 'smart' part is that it is capable of communicating your usage data back to the energy supplier. It maintains a record of your usage history and displays that on your 'in home display unit' so that you can track your usage and make changes in usage if you choose to.

Let's be realistic, the meter is connected to your incoming supply , it is monitoring the whole of your property BEFORE your consumer unit, so within that property there will be a mixture of resistive and inductive load.

As to changes in charges dependent on time of day, that would have to be declared in your T&C's for particular tariff.

Smart meters are smart for both the customer and the supplier. This is not the thin end of the 'Big brother' wedge

Using VFD's has no bearing on whether or not you have a smart meter, I have both and have no issues before or after the Smart installation.

I work in the energy supply sector and and very closely involved with the smart meter rollout so if anyone wants clarification please ask, I will give chapter and verse but be assured, smart meters are NOT a 'spy in the cab' , they are designed to assist everyone in monitoring and optimising their energy usage.

I’ve read many reasons not to have one but the Telegraph have listed a few.

**LINK**

There are many more, not least of which is that customers will ultimately have to pay the bill for these smart meters.

**LINK**

Hi Gray

Perhaps not the spy in the cab at the present but I believe in the not too distant future when all consumers have smart meters there will be different tariffs set at various peak use times, the big six are out to get every bit of profit from their consumers.
If these so called smart meters are so clever why is they won't work universally with any supplier ?

Emgee

I think your belief is probably a certainty. Here in Ontario we weren't given the choice with electrical smart meters (not that I recall anyway - I wouldn't have gone for it). Now we have 3 separate tariffs depending on time of day and day of week)

Even that isn't as bad as what the gas company tried to do (we have gas heating). They wanted to fit smart thermostats that they could talk to directly and adjust the settings according to their preferences/"needs". Yeah, right!

They needed permission for that one though since it involved going into the home (unlike the electrical meter which is outside). They didn't get many takers and it fell through.

Surely the next logical step in this developing saga would be to have heavier consumption appliances made smart so that they can be switched on by the smart meter when the demand is at its lowest, thus helping to even out demand, and possibly to take advantage of increased wind/solar power generation at certain times.

There was a time when it might have been possible to have had a plug top adaptor to do this (like the time switches for washing machines etc, set to come on when the economy 7 rate was cheap), but since dish washers and washing machines are now fitted with "soft" switches these days, any pre-setting is not possible without some fairly heroic appliance re-wiring. I wonder if the appliance and meter manufacturers have any plans for something like this, I'm not holding my breath.

The meters currently being installed by the majority of suppliers are SMETS2 compliant and will work with any supplier. In fact a lot of the SMETS1 meters can be firmware upgraded over the air to make them SMETS2 compatible, so they are a little smarter than some would have you believe.

Gray

What about the White meters in the 1960's - didn't they do just that??

Things must be different here. It's easy to change supplier, you could do it any time you like. Gone are estimated power bills. I think you get charged extra if you don't have a smart meter, and every alternate one will be an estimate. The meters were at no cost, and a lot of the old ones were getting old, and past their use by date, and would have cost more than the SMs to replace.

Most of what I see in the News Paper link from the UK is utter BS in my opinion.

1kwh is 1kwh smart meter or not.

Ian S C

<rant/>

The advertising for smart meters implies that they will save you energy by letting you see how much you are using through the in-home display. Well, you don't need to spend 20 billion on the smart meter infra to do that. I've had a couple of energy displays based on the clip-on sensor gadgets, they were useful initially but after a while I was finding I never looked at them and had absorbed the information on usage patterns as habits. Now we have solar energy we have a third system which actually gives us more information, so I still have no need for a smart meter - in addition it has an extra meter to read to claim the FIT, I'm not sure if smart meters cope with that.

My brother went for a smart meter because his electricity meter was in a place that needed a stepladder for the reader to reach. After a while a new reading company refused to read it for elfin safety reasons. After a year or so they came back to say that they wanted to replace the meter with one that could cope with gas as well. When the guy arrived, first he couldn't fit it because the space was too small, then confided that actually they were replacing all the meters of that type because the batteries were failing - after only a year! For meter systems to be viable the batteries have to work for 10 years or so, otherwise you have to send a truck which costs a lot more that you might save. (Yes you need batteries because the mains may fail over a large area and you need to manage how the load is reconnected.)

Many countries have had remote reading meters for years, using much simpler systems that work well and have been much cheaper to roll out. Because of our crazy supply industry structure that wasn't good enough so we had to go our own way. Even at the start when the (entirely predictable) cost overruns weren't recognised, the business case for smart meters was very marginal - today I suspect it is blown out of the water. Someone I know who was reviewing the project gave me to understand that the suppliers only agreed to support the project because it gave them the ability to switch non-payers off and on remotely. Well, if that's what they wanted it didn't need the complexity of what we have now. And there are remaining concerns about the security of the system and the wisdom of giving criminal or subversive elements the ability to switch off our energy supplies if (when) they hack the system

/<rant>.