On 25/04/2013 23:56, Dave Liquorice wrote:
On Thu, 25 Apr 2013 21:29:25 +0100, dennis@home wrote:

The idea is to control smart appliances..

for instance you can smooth the peaks by turning off a few million
freezers and it won't affect the contents at all.

So how do you *actually* do that in a manner that the user can't easily
bypass?

The ones that were trialled used RF switching so most people wouldn't
know how to bypass it, and why would they want to bypass it anyway?


And I doubt that turning freezers off would make that much difference
anyway they aren't running most of the time and when they are it's not
very much maybe 150 W per freezer. You'd probably get a better result
turning off large screen tellies.


A few hundred megawatts could help stabilise the grid when set off
against the wind turbines.

Anyway smart meters are useful as they don't need to send a meter reader
out as often, combine that with the need to replace all the meters
anyway and it makes sense even if you don't use the smart bits.