"Smart" Hydro meters

taxslave

taxslave

Hall of Fame Member
Nov 25, 2008
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Dexter Sinister said:
The knock I've seen against these smart meters--and I haven't been able to verify it--is that they're really surveillance devices, in that not only do they report power consumption, they can identify when particular appliances are in use by the load characteristics, track patterns of activity and movement throughout the house by things like lighting usage, and build up a database of the pattern of your life, like when somebody's home and when the house is empty and what hours you keep. As I say, I don't know whether that's true or not, but if it is, these things are far smarter than they need to be for their claimed purpose, and it's a pretty serious invasion of privacy.
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Some of that might possibly be true in some houses. I have lots of power tools including welder and some of our house uses solar just to keep a load on the batteries. In any event there is much more personal data to be mined from facebook and twitter or even hacking cell phones than what electric meters will reveal. Hell if you use a wireless router in your house not only are you exposed to more and closer radio waves than a smart meter you are also much more susceptible to hackers.
 
JLM

JLM

Hall of Fame Member
Nov 27, 2008
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taxslave said:
Some of that might possibly be true in some houses. I have lots of power tools including welder and some of our house uses solar just to keep a load on the batteries. In any event there is much more personal data to be mined from facebook and twitter or even hacking cell phones than what electric meters will reveal. Hell if you use a wireless router in your house not only are you exposed to more and closer radio waves than a smart meter you are also much more susceptible to hackers.
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Yeah, I'm a little confused as to why anyone would care whether I'm running the T.V., the radio or the mix master. I think there is a lot of hysteria about this. :smile:
 
eh1eh

eh1eh

Blah Blah Blah
Aug 31, 2006
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Under a Lone Palm
JLM said:
I'm not just sure how my security would be threatened by someone finding out how much "juice" I'm using! I've generally found the charges for hydro to be fairly reasonable so don't expect any unreasonable increase in rates.
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Your bill will go up. We use more than half our power off peak times and ours went up about 25%.
The information sent from the meter includes when you use certain appliances which now include chips that contain their model number like when you plug a device into your comp it knows what it is.
Conceivably someone could use the information to determine when the house in empty. There are the general privacy concerns too. Do you want your personal habits tracked by bureaucrats and have that info sitting on servers somewhere? This could be called a parinoid view but the more info out there about you the less privacy you will have, it all adds up.
 
Cannuck

Cannuck

Time Out
Feb 2, 2006
30,245
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Alberta
L Gilbert said:
It happens. I learned fairly early on to question even teachers.It pays not to accept things at face value sometimes.
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I was told by one of my teachers (grade 4 I think) that there are no words in the English language that end in "C". She was a fantastic teacher when it came to basic arithmetic and artistic subjects but will always be remembered for the havoc she caused with her epic failure. I'm not sure if her pathetic mistake was caused by her hectic schedule or perhaps, stupid is just genetic. She was apologetic after the Athletic Director pointed out her drastic and idiotic mistake.
 
L Gilbert

L Gilbert

Winterized
Nov 30, 2006
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the-brights.net
SLM said:
Blah, blah, blah...bottom line here, what makes the best hats? ;)
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Layers of things. I'd suggest water encased in lead and aluminum.

Cannuck said:
I was told by one of my teachers (grade 4 I think) that there are no words in the English language that end in "C". She was a fantastic teacher when it came to basic arithmetic and artistic subjects but will always be remembered for the havoc she caused with her epic failure. I'm not sure if her pathetic mistake was caused by her hectic schedule or perhaps, stupid is just genetic. She was apologetic after the Athletic Director pointed out her drastic and idiotic mistake.
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lol That's pretty cool.
 
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