It is approximated that till 2030 almost all of the houses will be offered smart meters across Canada. According to statistics, more than 15 million smart meters have already been installed at consumer facilities. It is a fact that smart meters are of great leisure to us, however, it brings various drawbacks as well. This article is dealing with the pros and cons of a smart metering system.
Smart Meter and In-House Display (IHD)
The smart meter is a device for the replacement of conventional energy meter with more intelligence and enhanced features. An in-house display is offered with smart meters which are showing the power consumption readings and one can place it anywhere in the house, however outside the house is highly recommended.
Pros of Smart Meter
- Automatic Readings: The foremost advantage of a smart meter is that neither you nor anyone from the electric company is required to monitor the readings. Both you and the electric company can get the readings on smartphones.
- Track on Power Usage: The in-house display (IHD) is showing the entire readings regarding power usage. The IHD is showing a reading of both energy consumed and energy offered to the grids.
- Accuracy in Bills: The smart meter is intelligent enough to calculate accurate bills according to units consumed.
- Fault Alert: The IHD is showing the graphs and other related measurements of the energy usage by different appliances in the house. Whenever there is a certain rise or spikes in the usage, it alerts you that some of the appliances are having a fault and you need to look in to it.
- Outage Alerts: Whenever there is an outage, the smart meter automatically sends a notification to the electric company.
- Sustainable Environment: The smart meter is a source for achieving a sustainable environment because consumers are knowing their energy pattern use and they might change their behavior towards power usage, making the planet a better place to live in.
- Special Tariffs: The users of smart meters mostly enjoy special tariffs from different electricity providing companies.
Cons of Smart Meter
- Temporary Life: The smart meter will become dumb and outdated if you would switch your electricity providing company. There is no unanimously in the use of smart meters as of now. Each electric company is offering its own electric meter which is not synced with other companies. The major difference lies in communication protocols.
- IHD Inaccuracy: The in-house display is a very good option; however, it might happen that your IHD is inaccurate. Sometimes, IHD may not be evenly synced with your smart meter, hence abnormalities may occur in the monitoring process.
- Communication lag due to Poor signals: The smart meters are communication through mobile networks. Same as cellphone signals are patchy in some areas, the signals acquired by smart meters are also patchy and hence communication lag occurs which results in abnormalities.
- Smart Meters don’t reduce bills: The smart meters cannot reduce your bills until and unless you don’t change the usage pattern of electricity by closely monitoring the IHD.
