DIYbanter - View Single Post - All your fears about Smart meters confirmed

Robin

On 05/02/2019 13:03, wrote:
On Tuesday, 5 February 2019 12:39:32 UTC, Dave Liquorice wrote:
On Tue, 5 Feb 2019 08:19:23 +0000, Chris Green wrote:

But the meters don't (as far as I know) analyse the power factor of
the load do they? ... and even if they did then they don't have the
ability to analyse a mixed load and thus work out which of several
devices you have turned on.

The meter doesn't have to do anything other than report the
consumption of the a given period. The data analysis is done
elsewhere using the entire data set. Don't under estimate the power
and capabilty of modern data processing.

Given a big enough data set it isn't that hard to spot similar
changes taking place at around the same time be that daily or 5+2
days. The system doesn't need to know that it's the kettle that gets
used somewhere around 0730 weekday mornings just that something is.
It's the patterns and any regularity that is looked for.

30 mins is probably a bit long TBH but I reckon you could still spot
when someone gets up, goes to bed, etc. It's not going to work very
well, if at all for a multioccupancy household, it's not aimed at
that though. It's aimed at people slightly "at risk" and living
alone.

Say person has a fall and stops doing what they would normally do. It
might take the system several hours to flag up that the person was
following their normal pattern but has now stopped all apparent
activity. ie. power consuption is still at normal "in and active"
levels, but is far too constant, no cups of tea, telly on/off, no
meal prep, no lights on/off etc. If they'd gone out the lights, telly
etc would have been turned off so consumption would be lower.

People frequently stop doing what they generally do, so such data won't have any validity for a day or two. Not a good way to detect falls etc but better than nothing, & no hardware cost.

Of course it will be misused too, these things ever are. Burglars would love to get their hands on a list of addresses where no activity has happened for 3 days. It's worth £££ so will happen.

Do you mean just like happens with employees of ISPs telling burglars
when there's been no activity at an address? (I know some people use
remote access, stream security video etc but that's not different in
kind from the power used while people are away for PVRs, heating,
automatic watering systems, people coming in to check the post etc etc.)

--
Robin
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