Octopus "Saving Sessions"

[SteamyTea]

6 minutes ago, Marvin said:

Yet again the most reliable source of renewable energy is tidal

is it?

Don't think there has been a lot a data collected on the reliability.

 

https://www.power-technology.com/analysis/la-rance-learning-from-the-worlds-oldest-tidal-project/

[ProDave]

6 minutes ago, jack said:

And finally, being able to see my smart meter allowed me to notice a persistent 1.5+ kW power consumption even when no-one else was home and almost everything was off, which let me find that my son had left a fan heater on in the garage gym. Without a smart meter, that could have been left running for days.

THIS is the misconception.

 

You are not looking at your "smart meter"  you are looking at the In Home Display unit.  That happens to be something you get with a smart meter, but that is not THE smart meter.

 

You can have such a device with any meter.  I bought one for about £5 to show instantaneous usage, but it turned out to be useless as the particular one I bought could not cope with solar PV and an excess PV dump controller.

 

IF getting people into the habit of watching what the IHD says and reducing your usage was the goal, that could be achieved without forcing everyone to have a smart meter.  Just supply an IHD to everyone but one better designed than the cheap one I bought that does not cope with bidirectional energy.

[SteamyTea]

4 minutes ago, jack said:

it's over 300W a lot of the time

Twice my current usage, and I want to reduce it more.

[joe90]

Re consumption I just look at my bill every month and try and do better 🤷‍♂️

[ProDave]

2 minutes ago, joe90 said:

Re consumption I just look at my bill every month and try and do better 🤷‍♂️

I read my dumb meters once a week and log the readings on a spreadsheet.  I am managing to reduce year on year  consumption every month.

[SteamyTea]

33 minutes ago, ProDave said:

managing to reduce year on year  consumption every month.

Me too, warm autumn so far has helped.

 

[joe90]

36 minutes ago, ProDave said:

I am managing to reduce year on year  consumption every month.

Your PV “shed” and timing your ASHP to daylight hours must help? (That’s what I plan).

[ProDave]

28 minutes ago, joe90 said:

Your PV “shed” and timing your ASHP to daylight hours must help? (That’s what I plan).

That does not explain why my use is steadily dropping.  Perhaps nagging the kids to not leave stuff on standby is working?

 

PV generation is slowly improving year on year, the tree pruning is helping there I think.

[joe90]

2 minutes ago, ProDave said:

That does not explain why my use is steadily dropping. 

I would suggest that as a member here and having just built a very energy saving home you already have a sensible head on regarding energy usage, the big increase in price just makes us all focus some more. It’s a shame we can’t give kids their own meters and charge them from their allowance. My sister in law used to give her kids their child allowance, but any clothes etc other than “essential” they bought themselves, it worked.

[SteamyTea]

1 minute ago, ProDave said:

Perhaps nagging the kids to not leave stuff on standby is working?

Probably is.

I think the only thing I have on standby is my radio. The little voltage regulator seems cold when not in use, though it does probably consume a tiny, tiny amount.

Other things on are the radio alarm, RPi data logger, 4 cheap digital timers to control water and space heating, and fridge, oven and hob. The last 3 could be all turned off at the mains, but I like the convenience, especially cold milk.

I might have a go at calculating all those base loads, but my data shows they are very low, probably less than 10Wh a day. Saving 0.4p a day hardly seems worth the effort.

[SteamyTea]

1 minute ago, joe90 said:

My sister in law used to give her kids their child allowance, but any clothes etc other than “essential” they bought themselves, it worked.

Depends how big the allowance is.

I had a fiver a term in 1972. Still got most of it.

[Dillsue]

2 hours ago, Marvin said:

Yet again the most reliable source of renewable energy is tidal. We're an island with strong tidal currents and territorial waters over 275,000 square Kilometres. Surely we can find somewhere to do this. 

Google "Orbital marine". Up and running in the Orkneys. I think this is something of a test bed with the intent to install more.

[jack]

  

3 hours ago, ProDave said:

THIS is the misconception.

 

You are not looking at your "smart meter"  you are looking at the In Home Display unit.  That happens to be something you get with a smart meter, but that is not THE smart meter.

 

If the display was on the smart meter itself, would you argue that I wasn't looking at the smart meter? Of course not. The only difference is that the display is remote, so as far as I'm concerned, it's part of the package.

 

Moreover, of the three examples I gave, only one of them (the heater in the garage) was a result of interaction with the display. The others were due to me analyzing online data that was uploaded by the smart meter. 

 

And yes, they could supply a device that interfaces with a dumb meter to provide similar data, but why do that given how little extra hardware is required to allow the data to send back to a central site for logging and display via an app or a web interface? You'd be throwing away half the functionality and convenience.

 

The alternative would be local(-only) logging, but it would be a waste to store that sort of data locally and not make use of it for billing purposes. If it gets uploaded for billing, then we're back to the result effectively being a smart meter.

 

As you say, if you're technically competent, you can probably put together some hardware and software that provides you with the data you get from a smart meter (probably better data, actually), but 99% of the population can't do that.

[jack]

4 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

Twice my current usage, and I want to reduce it more.

 

I'm surprised it's only a factor of two.

[SteamyTea]

3 minutes ago, jack said:

 

I'm surprised it's only a factor of two.

Single occupancy small houses are energy inefficient, and I am all resistance here, no HPs.

[Radian]

8 hours ago, ProDave said:

You can have such a device with any meter.  I bought one for about £5 to show instantaneous usage, but it turned out to be useless as the particular one I bought could not cope with solar PV and an excess PV dump controller.

 

I can understand why your knives are out for smart meters - the godawful advertising for them is enough to piss-off anyone who holds Einstein in the slightest regard. Other reasons to buck them might be the fact they can be used to remotely switch off an individual house's power at will. But you raised a point about metering... a revenue grade meter is a valuable item and here they are supplied FOC.

 

8 hours ago, ProDave said:

IF getting people into the habit of watching what the IHD says and reducing your usage was the goal, that could be achieved without forcing everyone to have a smart meter.

 

Sottish power and no doubt other suppliers used to supply these FOC as well (@SteamyTea's favourite Current Cost device  in my case) But the lack of real power monitoring makes them of limited use as they're inherently biased towards reporting higher power than actually billed for especially at base load.

 

I want to know the exact power I'm being billed for and also measure it independently as a check on their system. The smart meter allows this process to be automated so I'm OK with it.

[SteamyTea]

3 minutes ago, Radian said:

But the lack of real power monitoring makes them of limited use as they're inherently biased towards reporting higher power than actually billed for especially at base load.

Except mine reads the LED on the main meter.  One of the reasons the CC device was so good.

[Radian]

4 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Except mine reads the LED on the main meter.  One of the reasons the CC device was so good.

Mine didn't have that add-on. Was yours FOC with that?

[SteamyTea]

14 minutes ago, Radian said:

Mine didn't have that add-on. Was yours FOC with that?

No, but they did give out the same ENVI with the optical reader.

There are probably a million of these, still in boxes, up in peoples lofts.

 

The real problem is that people are illiterate about their whole domestic energy, no amount of metering and displaying is going to change that, Strictly is on the TV.

 

Edit:

 

I am going to add this, even most people on here don't give a (expletive deleted) about what they are using, and don't want to learn even the basics.

Edited October 30, 2022 by SteamyTea

[Radian]

1 hour ago, SteamyTea said:

I am going to add this, even most people on here don't give a (expletive deleted) about what they are using, and don't want to learn even the basics.

 

I don't get that impression but I guess that might be because I tend to read topics that chime with my interests (selection effect).

[SteamyTea]

14 minutes ago, Radian said:

 

I don't get that impression but I guess that might be because I tend to read topics that chime with my interests (selection effect).

Yes, it is easy to self filter information.

Why I never comment (almost) on peoples' house designs/layouts.  What do I know, or care, about what other peoples houses look like, or how they think they will live in them.

Edited October 30, 2022 by SteamyTea

[NSS]

32 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Why I never comment (almost) on peoples' house designs/layouts....

Don't worry Steamy, I doubt anyone will trawl back through your 14,000+ posts to check whether you ever did 😉

[ProDave]

3 hours ago, Radian said:

Other reasons to buck them might be the fact they can be used to remotely switch off an individual house's power at will.

And as any electrician will tell you, they chose NOT to use that in built facility to allow electricians to safely isolate an installation.

 

My present dumb meter has an inbuilt isolator switch, another reason I would like to keep it.

[Radian]

1 minute ago, ProDave said:

And as any electrician will tell you, they chose NOT to use that in built facility to allow electricians to safely isolate an installation.

I can understand that. But who would be 'remotely throwing' that switch anyway? And in what circumstances?

[NSS]

9 hours ago, ProDave said:

That does not explain why my use is steadily dropping.  Perhaps nagging the kids to not leave stuff on standby is working?

 

PV generation is slowly improving year on year, the tree pruning is helping there I think.

We've been in our place for 5 years now. We still worked when we moved in but have both since retired, and yet our energy imports have also declined year on year. In the past 12 months we've imported less than 4,500 kWh, down from 5,300 kWh in the first year (we have no gas). In addition, we generate circa 3,600 kWh from the PV, and my gut feeling is the reduction in grid imports is due to a mixture of better PV utilisation and refining how best to program the ASHP, MVHR and SageGlass to most efficiently meet our needs.