In message , at 05:36:18 on Wed, 18
Mar 2015, john james remarked:
I'd expect to be taking perhaps 100 measurements of the house,

Smart meters don't provide samples of the current consumption
of the house, they integrate the total current consumption and
report that at a few instances a day.

To do that they need to take lots of readings - rather than classic
analogue meters which inherently do the integration.

How often they send those individual readings back to base will depend
on how much they need to know.

These metering schemes are advertised as capable of telling the
householder how much power each of his appliances takes - so that the
householder can make decisions about buying more economical examples of
each one, or perhaps arrange that they are only powered-up off-peak. If
the local meter is doing that - they can send the answers back to base
too.
--
Roland Perry