On Apr 15, 12:16*pm, Home Guy wrote:
Way Back Jack wrote:
in terms of energy savings, privacy, fire risk, and, most
importantly, health ramifications. *Thank You.

The only purpose of smart meters for residential customers is to reduce
the meter-reading costs of electric utilities.

The exhorbitant up-front cost of the meters themselves, the
communications network and billing software will be paid for by
customers in the form of additional surcharges.

All other aspects of smart meters represents a false economy, because
residential customers don't use enough electricity (individually) to
warrant the use of time-of-day billing, as opposed to large commercial,
retail or industrial customers.

They may not warrant doing it, but utilities are doing
it and offering different rates at different times of the
day to residential customers. That is nothing new.
Here in NJ the utility was doing that 50 years ago.
The offered a substantially lower rate at night for water heaters.



Residential customers don't consume enough electricity on an individual
level such that any decision they make in changing (or time-shifting)
their electricity usage will only affect their monthly bill by pennies
or at most a few dollars.

And how would you know what rates all the utilities
in the country are charging?


*That level of expenditure is on par with
other forms of discretionary spending (daily coffee, snack, etc) and
people will not sacrifice their home comfort (using their
air-conditioner less) if the savings are on par with
pocket-change-per-day.

Maybe they won't, but then those that are using electricity
at peak rates, will be paying for it. And those that can
and will switch some of their demand to other hours
will pay less.



As for heath and safety issues related to smart meters - totally
bull****.

Now that I agreee with.