Members of the SERL UCL team carried out their regular Monday meeting on location on 17th June in North London. The occasion was James O’Toole – SERL Consortium Manager – joining the UK’s growing population of SMETS2 smart meter owners
Installation
The installers arrived at 11am, conveniently as the SERL meeting drew to a close. Despite concerns that they might be surprised to find a group of researchers in attendance, the installers were happy to talk through the process of putting in the smart meters. The group of two installers (one being trained by the other) and three SERL employees convened in the cellar as the technicians explained what they needed to do replace the old meters (which sadly had to go back with them and couldn’t be kept as souvenirs) with the new ones.
After turning off the power the installers carried on with their work for about an hour before announcing that the physical work of replacing the old gas and electric meters with new SMETS2 meters – plus a communications hub that allows the meters to talk to the network – was complete.
The next step was to check the meters were talking to the DCC gateway – the national communications system that allows SMETS2 meters to send and receive data without going through a specific energy supplier. This entailed pressing a series of buttons on the meters and monitoring progress on a handheld tablet as various lights flashed into life on the communications hub.
In-home display
The final part of the process was to turn the power back on and ensure the gas was working normally, before a brief tutorial on the in-home display. The in-home display (or IHD) is a device usually supplied with smart meters that allows consumers to monitor their daily gas and electricity use in kilowatt hours and pounds and pence. It allows the user to set budgets for energy use and check how much power is being used during a particular time e.g. when the tumble dryer is running. These devices are intended to give consumers a better understanding of how their home uses energy in order to potentially reduce bills and ultimately reduce the UK’s domestic energy usage.
Live data
The IHD began to display live electricity usage data almost immediately and was able to show the gas usage within a few hours, and thus the conversion to smart energy was complete. The home was subsequently able to go onto a special smart meter tariff that aims to reduce bills using the more detailed information now available.
Overall the day was a very useful opportunity for the team to gain first-hand experience of the installation process so that they are better placed to understand the concerns and experiences of potential SERL participants around smart meters and data sharing.
More on smart meter installations (external link)