Utilities SmartMeters
This past Summer our phone has been ringing again and again with calls from our utilities provider ‘whose team is in the area right now’ and ‘is ready to fit a spanking new SmartMeter in your home free of charge’. The nuisance levels of the utilities provider’s calls have been a cause of disturbance to our homelife. At one time calls were coming more or less daily with the same burden and tenor – how good it would be for us to have a SmartMeter, and how it would be fitted free-of-charge; and how it will sing and dance for us to our good advantage, etc etc.
Of course nothing was mentioned about why SmartMeters are being fitted to homes; apart from a mantra that government has recommended them and is contributing to their roll out in all areas.
The old classical saying: Beware of Greeks bearing gifts applies here. When a corporate entity offers you something ‘to your advantage’ and free of charge – beware! A person gets these presumed freebies offered here and there now and then; Microsoft for some time now has been going to great pains to roll out Windows 10 free-of-charge to its Windows 7 and other versions’ users; offering a handy no-charge upgrade whenever the software for Windows updates itself on PCs etc.
(It is worth noting, if you are a person considering taking up this free-of-charge upgrade to Windows 10, that it is a package licensed for use on your current PC/Tablet only and the license to use it will expire and be unusable when/were you to try to transfer it to another, say a newer, device, to be this newer device’s Operating System. Worth considering before you decide. You in all likelihood are exchanging for the sake of having an apparently more up to date and so ostensibly better, but nonetheles a tied-in OS, a perfectly good OS and one which remains transferrable and so is inherently more flexible and more durable than is the Windows 10 you will be getting.)
Likewise to Windows 10, having a SmartMeter installed will also tie a utilitites customer into the provider companiy who supplies that customer presently. Should you decide electricity or gas is too expensive from your present provider, you will have to exchange SmartMeters so as to have one installed which is compatible with any new provider’s setups. I would suspect with some certainty that you will be charged handsomely by the exiting provider for its own SmartMeter’s removal from your premises; and possibly you will also be charged by the incoming provider for its version of a SmartMeter should you elect to have one installed from them.
Note: The Smartmeter will not be your own property, regardles whether you paid to have it installed or had it free-of-charge. You wil be paying for installation and maybe some covering costs for SmartMeter manufacture generally, marketing, maintenance etc etc; but the meter will remain the property of the utilities company. Thus were it to be damaged say by an accident in your home you will be liable to pay for another or for its repair.
Which brings me to the point that tells you that you are not able easily to have an already installed SmartMeter removed should you have decided you want to go back to how utilities were deliverd to you and managed before your free-of-charge SmartMeter was installed. It’s a one-way ticket only. Government and industry have spoken jointly; they want SmartMeters in your homes, and while a choice to have one or not to have one remains opoen to citizens at present; be sure that government and industry will have their ways and over some years they will act to do all in their very considerable powers to have you accept one into your home. For water, for gas, for electricity; and maybe more? This is the choice in democracy.
The fact that as usual the marketing pitches of the utilities companies who are wanting quite forcibly-desperately for you to have SmartMeters, is always a sanguine and a sunny set of advantages listed as being the benefits to a customer having them bundled in just one place; this tired old fact – it is the case always in advertising pitches – means that the utilities companies are hiding from you their own motivations and desires which cause them to pitch so fervently to you – have a SmartMeter! On us!!!
These advantages to the customer of SmartMeters are generally said by utilities companies to be:
The customer has greater control over his/her consumption of fuels etc
Possibly some meter accessories a customer might pre-set to his/her conveneience
Off peak cheaper utlitiy is more easily accessed obtainable by customer
No waiting-in for a meter reader person to call in quarterly etc
Faster fuller-data billing – itemised
It’s often claimed SmartMeters reduce bill sizes to customers
The biggest selling point to customers and pressed by the utilities companies because they know customers see this aspect as being the prime advantage, is always that promise of Greater Control over one’s usages and so of one’s bills. The ability to manage for oneself better; what one spends, consumes, when, etc and so reduce one’s bills.
Of course this pitch of a customer having more control is at best a half-truth. There are aspects which having a SmartMeter installed opens up which in fact tend towards lesser control for a customer, and/or else towards a greater control over customers by the utility companies. It remains the case ever that the utility companies, because they always set the tarriffs, also set all the terms and conditions for a customer being able to manipulate a SmartMeter’s workings in his/her own favour; and by this way of their terms and conditions utility companies are able to head-off every one of those potentials for customers who might else use SmartMeters well to their own advantage, and also the uitilty companies will just not offer any even reasonable facilities which they do not like or dissapprove; or else which they just see as acting to take away from those aspects which they, the utility companies, want customers to have and to make use of. This is, ‘just business’.
Whilst the utility companies are calling the shots like this on all the terms and conditions for Smart Meter usage you can be sure that all holes and all untoward customer advangtages have been plugged up firmly by them – all those they have thought of. This sort of preclusive action is standard practice amongst most corporate companies; leaving no room for any loss to their maximum lawful profit/advantage. I believe the corporations generally are cooly callously consciensiously religious about doing this sort of thing.
To be continued....
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