On Apr 16, 9:58*am, Home Guy wrote:
" used improper usenet message composition style
by unnecessarily full-quoting:

The pool filter pump is an excellent example of a significant
residential load that can take advantage of lower rates
available with smart metering.

Not everyone has a pool - but I have to wonder what people did before
time-of-use (TOU) metering with their pool pump. *Did they run them
24/7? *And with TOU they're running them 12/5 + 2/24? *Are these pumps
or pump-controllers able to be programmable like this?

Every one I've seen has a programmable timer, usually
just a simple mechanical one, so you can set the
periods when you want it to run. It has to run enough
to circulate the water to keep the pool clean. That
might be 8 hours a day.



If you're
cutting back (by about 50%) on running a pool pump, then of course
you're going to be buying less electricity.

The idea with different rates is that you aren't cutting
back, your SHIFTING your demand to periods when
the utility charges less.



You would also be saving
that money if you weren't on TOU and you reduced the pump use.

Which of course has nothing to do with time of use.




Another would be a well pump for lawn irrigation.

And fewer yet have a well. *And lawn irrigation usually happens at night
anyways (no TOU-motivated time-shifting going on there).

There are smaller loads like the dishwasher, washer, dryer,
basement dehumidifier, that can often be time shifted too.

Many people say that laundry really can't be time-shifted without
impacting lifestyle.

Basement dehumidifiers are very inefficient and probably not used during
the summer when the home's AC unit is doing the job of reducing the
home's humitidy anyways. *Are their dehumidifiers that can be programmed
to only come on in the evening (when TOU rates are low)?

Yes and even if you have one that isn't a simple plug-in timer will do
it.



If not, again
we have a lifestyle-ergonomics issue.

All in all, I have no problem with varying rates being offered
that reflect the different costs of electricity to the utility.
That way you pay for what you actually use and when you use it.

The problem is:

1) the cost-per-home and the networking / software cost is HUGE
* *compared to the change in usage behavior for the average home.

The cost if offset by not having meter readers driving
to each customer to read the meter. My water company, for example,
changed over a decade ago to meters that are read by a guy
driving by in a truck without even stopping.
It obviously saves them enough money that it makes sense,
which is why they did it.
Let's say you wanted to make that a smart water meter,
similar to the electric ones. To make it smart,
all that the meter needs to do additionally is
keep track of how much was used by the hour. That
is a trivial addition of hardware/software to the meter.





2) there have been lots of problems with measurements and people
* *getting huge bills when TOU billing kicked in. *There haven't
* *been enough procedural mechanisms and consumer rights and
* *protection when it comes to arbitrating TOU billing disputes.

There really wasn't a problem with the way it worked before TOU billing.

It's 2012. We've put a man on the moon, a computer
in your oven,car, and cell phone, yet you think we can't make an
electric meter that records properly? There might be
some problems in some cases, but this isn't some
high technology thing that is hard to make work right. An
electric meter is trivial compared to a cell phone.



You have an electricity utility provider and a residential customer
base. *The utility purchases electricity at various rates that change
during the day, and it can easily divide up it's total purchase
expenditure across it's customer base without knowing exactly which
customer used more or less "prime-time" or expensive electricity than
the average customer.





In order to know how your customer base used the prime-time expensive
electricity on an individual level and bill them accordingly, the smart
meter is a very expensive way to do that when you're talking about
residential customers vs industrial or commercial customers when you
look at the actual numbers.

Again, lots of utilities have switched to some type of
remote reading system to eliminae the labor of going
up to each meter and reading it. Once you change the
metering to support that, keeping track of how much is
used per hour is trivial.