Smart meter

The husband and I have been unusually compliant in having our old electric and gas meters replaced with a smart meter. You would have expected us to be part of the awkward squad on this one, but in fact when the letter from the energy company came, urging us to do this we rather meekly signed up to it.

A smart meter, for those who dont know, is a way of transmitting your energy use directly back to the company without the need for anyone to come to actually read the meter in your cupboard. (How many meter readers this will make redundant, I dont know. But when, with a flicker of subversion, I asked the last man to knock on the door before the smart installation if he was anxious, he replied rather brightly that the new meters were likely to break down so often that he wasnt honestly very concerned.)

The advantage for the consumer is supposed to be that you get a little screen (ours looks like the one above) that tells you exactly how much energy you are using at any moment, or any day, or week... The idea is that when you see how much your tumble dryer is actually costing, you wont use it so much. You'll save money -- and the planet at the same time. How green is that?

Well according to some things I've now been reading, not very green at all.

 One big question turns out to be how much radiation these smart things emit. If you believe their critics (and I'm not sure I do), then it's more than the government is claiming. So the green benefit in cutting down on the tumble dryer (not in my case, because we dont have one) is more than cancelled out by poisoning the atmosphere in other ways.

And if that is an unnecessary worry, then there's the question of whether they (or their faulty installation) are liable to burn your house down; or if not that, if they will be an open door to hackers. Why should anyone want to hack into my electricity and gas meter? Well apparently, a clever hacker could simply turn everyone's power off, so creating mayhem. And that's not even thinking about those who could hack into their own meter to reduce the bills.

To be honest, I haven't been worrying too much on any such score. But spent the first week or so of smart meter ownership, turning the kettle or the electric fire or the lights on and off to see how much they cost. It was, I confess, entrancing for a bit, with all the obvious games... how could you get it all down to under 5p an hour? or how few machines did you have to turn on to get it up to over a quid?

But the novelty didn't last long. The truth is that you dont actually need a smart meter to tell you that the more heat something produces for longer, the more expensive it's going to be.