Electronic meters’ false readings up to six times higher than actual consumption
sciencebulletin.org
sciencebulletin.org
As much as I wanted to fight, as sad as it sounds my time was worth more than the money I'd get back by spending time on the phone arguing and escalating the issue at critical hours of the day. :-/
Moved to California, paying a much more reasonable utility bill, and glad I didn't have to deal with that again.
If there were a "deal-with-humans-as-a-service" business that took a 20% cut of any money I could get back in situations like this, I'd totally pay for it. I once had to argue for 2 hours on the phone with T-mobile about $250 in excess charges on my phone bill, and while got it all back after escalating it to a manager, I'd totally pay $50 for someone to deal with the 2 hours of phone calls for me.
I was in an older (1980s) apartment building so I couldn't blame a singular meter, I'm not really sure how measurements are done in big buildings (maybe someone could explain?).
I've heard that elsewhere in Ontario, Canada and in Toronto (two different companies) that overcharging is a big recurring issue. I wasn't given a good explanation about my one anecdotal case outside of an 'accounting error'. I just knew that it sounded far too high to be normal.
In most jurisdictions, your electricity must be metered separately if you are billed by the utility company. In my building, there is a room with a bank of electricity meters, one for each apartment. Next to it is a bank of gas meters.
Similar to klodolph - it's very common in the UK for each dwelling in a shared building to have its own supply, termination point and meter for both electricity and gas.
That said, it is very hard to argue with the power company. As the article points out you can have the meter sent to a special testing lab but if it works, well it you are out of luck. About 10 years ago a friend in the Santa Cruz mountains got a bill that was out of whack (and he was a EE) and the power company would not be budged, so he pulled his meter out of the socket for a month[1] (don't try this at home!) and still got billed for a bunch of power use. It turned out that someone had 'tapped' the power wires leading up to his house, and PG&E wasn't bothering to read his house meter, just looking at how much their transformer sent to the 'only' house up there. Whoops.
One of the things I suspected, and then later proved, was that my 1st generation SunnyBoy inverters from SMA on my Solar system confused the smart meter when they installed it. It would not accurately read the power generated by the panels so was under reporting power generated. That got "fixed" when one of the inverters failed (unrelated, it was over 10 years old) and we replaced two 2500W inverters with a single 5500W inverter. The modern inverter and smart meter get along fine.
[1] Since he lives in the mountains and outages were not infrequent he had a whole house generator powered by propane that he could use.
Maybe they do it differently in CA than FL, but I have never seen any device that measures "how much their transformer" sends installed in any normal situation.
A more reasonable explanation would be that they were using "estimated" billing -- billing that is based on a few spot checks of the meter reading, but not a check every month. This is common in places that the electrical meter is not easily accessible, such as behind a gate or being guarded by a dog(or out in the mountains). In this case they would have extrapolated previous months to produce an estimated usage and billed on that.
I have had direct experience with a local power company billing for a "demand"[1] rate that exceeded by >300% the actual capability of the transformer and wires to supply. If that amount had actually been consumed, the wires would have caught fire and/or the transformer would have failed, possibly spectacularly. After I pointed this out to them, they quietly refunded the amount without an explanation and assured me there were no other errors of this type.
[1] https://www.talgov.com/you/you-account-plans-demand-billing....
lmao ... 0. Go on vacation for a month so your usage is at an all-time low, 1. Buy dog, 2. Profit while they extrapolate from the vacation month
In Norway, they do the same - you are supposed to report your actual usage, but if you don't or they believe you've gamed the numbers, they just guesstimate based on the average consumption in the area, past consumption in your home, phase of the moon, whatever.
However, when you move, both you and the new owner/renter need to read off the meter and sign a form, after which the balance is settled.
Years ago, I had a massive refund - ever the workaholic, I traveled 230+ days a year and, unsurprisingly, consumed much less electricity than the previous tenant.
The utility company refused to believe the numbers I reported (which, in fairness, I didn't report too often, as I was most often abroad during the reporting window (typically a couple of days either side of a billing period change))
After a few years, I asked them to send a representative to have a look at my meter; they refused, claiming that they had other, more important matters to attend to.
End result: When I moved after seven years, I got a refund of more than US$6,000. I had a couple of extra beers that evening.
I warned the incoming tenant that he really, really wanted to report his usage - if they guesstimated consumption based on my numbers, he'd be in for a nasty surprise when leaving the property...
It had "Economy 7" tariff, which was supposed to mean 7 hours of cheaper electricity at night. In fact, we had the cheap rate in the day, and the expensive rate at night.
The online system never accepted my readings, and a guy would come round. One of them showed me how the meter was wrong, but didn't want to report it -- I don't think he was paid enough to care.
Indeed. I don't think that gets measured anywhere, other than in a general "this areas utilises "x" Mwh, so on average, section "y" would use "z"
With this in mind his load is closer to 24A. Seems entirely reasonable for 2007 with incandescent strings. I remember tripping 20A breakers with incandescent lights and having to run lines from different circuits in my childhood.
I would also note our bill at that house ran $400-500 when "normally cold", which I should have mentioned in my post and which only occurs here a few months of the year. Still, we were shocked and it was a lot of lights!
Just learned a couple of weeks ago from a friend of me that there is something like this in Norway.
They only deal with technicalities around the invoicing, not actual usage but still claimed to maje a decent living by finding issues with invoices for 1/5 companies.
(Oh, and I think they took 50%.)
There's a good chance they'll fix it if you even threaten them with that.
1 - shut down the incoming circuit breaker, see if the meter "stops spinning" (today it's a light that blinks). If it doesn't, call the electrical company
2 - Get the (heater power) x (time it stays on IN HOURS) = your consumption. Heating and electric showers usually make up the bulk of your consumption (unless you're into home baking or bitcoin mining but even then). Calculate that, see if it matcher what you're paying
3 - Weather proof your place. Find places where cold air seeps through, seal them. Keep doors and windows closed when using aircon.
- make a complaint
- ensure the company is recording it as a complaint officially
- request that the company provides their "final response"
- contact the Financial Ombudsman Service
Normally mentioning the FOS is enough for all issues to be magically resolved by the supplier instantly, but if not, the FOS a will sort it out for you - free of charge.
The reason companies "shit the bed" about FOS stuff is because they get charged a flat ~£600 if the FOS receives a valid complaint about them, regardless of merit. This is in addition to the compensation they pay you.
Should be an obligation to do business don't you think ?
Turned out they had routed the hot water from the heater under the foundation to the taps and there was a leak. They came and jackhammered up a section of floor and fixed it and apartment complex wound up crediting me for rent.
It gives you an option, they can guide you through stuff giving you specific steps they've learned from interacting with the companies in the past, or you can have them handle it for you, for a small charge.
It's a pain to do this, and most peoples time is worth more, but if noone does it, we will be (in fact we already are) living in a scam society, where everyone is making money on everyone else's lazyness to track things down. When you call in, you are doing good not only for yourself, but for the company as well as every other customer.
Figure 3 of [1] is puzzling. They claim to be testing a 3-phase meter, but the circuit shown is single-phase. Are they testing 3-phase meters with only one phase connected? That's way out of balance; 3-phase systems normally have at least roughly equal loads on each phase. While a 3-phase meter with an wildly asymmetrical load ought to measure accurately, that's not a normal condition.
[1] http://doc.utwente.nl/102016/1/Runaway_energy_Meters.pdf [2] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7866234/
This setup is pretty much a mess, and can wreak havoc on laboratory setups, so e.g. at universities all the lab rooms are laid out with TN (the standard everyone else uses). This means you can mess stuff up in the lab by running an extension cord from the adjacent non-lab room (e.g. get large ground voltage differences, all sorts of wanky stuff).
Loads that span all 3 phases are generally motor loads that will benefit from the rotating magnetic field that 3-phase service provides -- such as pumps and compressors.
3 phase power to residential is rare in the US.
Residential power in North America is usually delivered as "split phase", +120V, neutral, and -120V. (180 degrees out of phase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOh2OSJ44eE) The voltage across the two hot conductors is 240V, which is used for big stuff. You get it by tapping a transformer in the middle of a coil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-phase_electric_power
Three phase power has three hot conductors, 120 degrees out of phase to each other. In the US it can be delivered at a bunch of different voltages, depending on what transformer the customer installs, but generally I worked with 277/480. (277V hot to neutral, 480V hot to hot. Generally all commercial lighting runs on 277V.)
And to be specific, three phase is primarily useful because motors that use it are self-starting, you don't need to capacitor-and-switch arrangement single phase motors use, which frequently break. Less important now that most big motors use VFDs. Also, supposedly due to some frequency voodoo you don't need to use as much cable when running three phrase transmission cable.
As to the benefit to motors, it was my understanding that using split-phase or a single phase and a capacitor creates a less-than-optimal magnetic field which results in more noise/vibration and wear on the motor as opposed to 3 phase.
> Most European transformers are three-phase and on the order of 300 to 1000 kVA, much larger than typical North American 25- or 50-kVA single-phase units.
Systems which run a higher consumer voltage (e.g. 230V) will tend to use higher kVA transformers compared to the American system (~110V).
I believe this is because it is feasible to run longer cables when using higher voltage (higher voltage -> lower current -> lower thermal losses per metre of cable), hence it is economical to use fewer, larger transformers in a higher voltage system vs. a lower voltage system.
However, even here the network transformers do get three-phase.
I'm trying to google a diagram, but I only find a bunch of forum posts that explain. For Neff stuff (the one we have), the connectors are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
1-2-3 would be separate phases in a 3-phase home and joined together for a single phase.
https://www.diynot.com/diy/threads/neff-hob-t1-k40x2-wiring-...
The cooker should never be connected to a normal kitchen ring main.
> Q1.18 Appendix 15 of BS 7671: 2008 gives advice on ring final circuits and sharing/spreading the load around the circuit. Item (iii) suggests that cookers, ovens and hobs over 2 kW should be on their own dedicated circuit. Why can’t ovens of less than 3 kW be connected to a ring final circuit via a suitable connection point such as a socket-outlet or fused connection unit?
> Appendix 15 is intended to give guidance only. Such connection is not prohibited, provided that no part of the ring final circuit will be overloaded as a result.
> Regulation number(s)
> 433.1.5
So, not forbidden, but if you have new wiring the electrician is going to give the cooker its own circuit.
(I think I have seen concerns about privacy and smartmeters here...)
That being said, in household use the per-household balancing between the phases is usually very poor (e.g. all lightning on one phase). Overall the balancing turns out ok across the grid, but the meter doesn't see that. So this is a very relevant condition for household meters.
Even in apartment buildings, each apartment has its own meter, almost always single phase.
Also, most overhead transformers I have seen are entirely single phase. Often you will see a bank of 3 single-phase transformers if a customer requires 3 phase service. Larger customers are connected to a pad-mounted 3-phase transformer connected to the primary overhead service through an underground dip from the pole.
In the US most homes are just tapped to 1 phase, if there are 3 on the pole.
This gives you a way to at least compare the official meter readings with an independent source. In my case, it showed no correlation whatsoever, and it turned out that the power company swapped the meter numbers between me and my neighbor.
Second, most meters have LEDs that flash a number of times per kWh consumed. It isn't difficult to build a device that measures the time between those pulses and gives you energy monitoring. I built one and had it running for a while. It's an eye-opening experience, you'd be surprised how much energy some devices consume, and also how significant a constant power draw can be.
At which point, it's time to start a bitcoin mining operation!
Watch out though. My meter has an LED that flashes when there's almost nothing being used.
They're meant for like, identifying non-malicious/technical losses but it's possible to use them to identify customers who are bypassing/tampering with their meters, as:
total use (as measured by the trusted meter) must be equal to ∑ accuracy(customer ID) * reported use(customer ID)
and assuming there aren't many cheating customers, and enough measurements (smartmeters make this easier, 15 minute slices is a lot better than 1 or 2 month slices), and assuming enough variation/independence between customers, it shouldn't be that hard to estimate the accuracy of each reporting meter.
I'm wondering if this sort of balance check (i don't know the proper terminology, this isn't my field of expertise, if you know more, i would love to be corrected!) would have been sufficient to detect the sort of misreporting mentioned in this article.
Full text of the actual published article is here btw: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.sci-hub.bz/document/7866234/?relo...
In a place like South Carolina, they will chuckle. In other places, it's a big deal to resolve.
Data at the distribution circuit has been available for longer, but you have to have folks who know what to look for and the process to do it.
There are companies which are starting to offer analytic packages that make all of the above much easier.
The problem here is that the discrepancy is in the favor of the power company. As long as they're making more money and especially because the "Accredited Testing Agency"'s own tests won't detect the fault, it's unlikely anything will be done about it unless there's an obscene amount of media attention paid to it and the regulators step in requiring a correction.
... Though there is one way that might happen more quickly. I wonder if there's a converse effect? Are there methods for consuming electricity on these meters that they similarly fail with but woefully under report the amount of electricity being used? If something like that was discovered and publicized enough for people to take advantage of it, I'd imagine the problem would get fixed on the short order. I'm pretty weak on electrical engineering, so I'm really thinking of this from the perspective of "Hey, that same flaw that allows an attacker to exploit my phone also allows me to gain root and unlock it!"
I thought the same thing about my gas usage -- turns out the meter was actually running slow.
If the inaccuracies are due to the meter's assumption around the current waveform then there probably is a way to exploit that. I suspect (from the little I have read) that the meters in question are: 1) assuming a sinusoidal current wave form, 2) assuming that the peak observed current is the peak of that sinusoidal wave, 3) effectively integrating under the area of the curve (with respect to voltage) to estimate total power. If all that's true, then to 'cheat' you'd need a device for which the current waveform looks like a 'fat' sine wave - same peak height, but wider peaks and steeper gradient through zero. In the extreme case it would be a square wave, but that might have too much harmonics.
For example, you could create a heater (a simple resistive load) that alters its resistance at 60hz. When the voltage reaches its peak the heater would have its 'normal' resistance, and during the next 1/4 cycle it would ramp down its resistance, reaching a resistive low as the voltage passes through zero, and then ramp up its resistance for the following 1/4 cycle until it reaches its 'normal' resistance at the peak 'negative' voltage (1/2 a cycle from where we started), then repeat over.
I think that would trick a meter that only looked at peak current and assumed a sinusoidal waveform. But who knows what other things it might break...
1. http://www.learnabout-electronics.org/ac_theory/ac_ccts_51.p... 2.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_factor
People should test their own meters which isn't that hard if you're careful and know the basic concepts of thermostats and power ratings.
Luckily it was a relatively small suburb, so the lady on the other end of the phone was able to give me her personal e-mail I could send a video to her of me test filling a gallon jug of milk while video taping the meter.
That got their attention finally, and I was being billed about 5x the real usage rate.
It was a fun one especially because I had moved into the apartment and immediately traveled for work at 80% time for 3 months. By the time I was home enough to notice the huge bills it took some convincing :)
Another issue that can come up is older reed switches can chatter as they close and open. Usually input debouncing eliminates that, if the firmware guy didn't screw it up.
Another thing I've seen is sometimes in a meter the magnet will rock back and forth. Careful design is needed to prevent that from causing the reed switch to open and close constantly. (Deboucing won't save you there)
Besides that another thing that happens is if utility selects the wrong scale factor for the meter. That's good for really angry customers if the error is in the utilities favor. If it's in the customers favor they get angry when the utility fixes it.
More sophisticated meters actually sense the actual meter reading using a bizarre electromagnetic sensing technique.
(I'm presuming electronic == smart)
I've seen once little screw for bulbs it said on the box that it corrects wave so it's stable. It said that it extends life of bulbs. Not sure if it would help or not as the problem seems to be coming from appliances having chaotic usage wave patterns, but who knows maybe those work both ways, anybody knows?
The most expensive would of course be to put CT's on each circuit in the house.
Least expensive would be to source a meter for the main.
I was asking what measures the current.
http://www.dranetz.com/product-services/current-dranetz-prod...
here's the original paper http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.sci-hub.bz/document/7866234/?relo...
You might need more then one probe for instance you might have one current probe that was accurate at a lower current but could not measure the higher current, and a second probe for the high current. Then process the data using the appropriate instrument depending upon the current.
I haven't done much w/ AC power measurements, but it's a common enough problem (large dynamic current range) for DC power measurements. Agilent (now Keysight) make instruments like the N6705B DC Power Analyzer that can sample a pretty high rates (like 10's of uSeconds) and be accurate at both uA range and 100's of mAs for dynamic current. I would imagine you could rig up something similar for AC power measurements.
http://doc.utwente.nl/102016/1/Runaway_energy_Meters.pdf
In this paper, it seems they were using an electromechanical meter (i.e. the analog style that predated digital) for reference because that's what consumers were using. This is measuring energy, obviously, not current.
The registered energy of the static meters was measured using an Arduino microprocessor and optical sensors for detecting the pulses from the LED on the static meter fronts. The readings were verified using the liquid crystal display (LCD) reading on the meter. For example, the LCD displayed 18 kWh, and the Arduino measured 17902 Wh, while on another meter the display showed 7.43 kWh, and the Arduino measured 7430 Wh. A conventional electromechanical meter based on the Ferraris principle was used as reference, because consumers are also using this as reference.
In the UK, about 6 or 7 years ago we bought an old house and upgraded the wiring, fuseboard, etc. The Electricity company came and replaced the old meter with a newer Electronic (but not Smart) meter.
Unfortunately the guy they sent to install it didn't record the initial readings. That meant that as far as the company was concerned it had been installed at zero, when in fact it was way past that.
We weren't able to move in immediately, and in the meantime there was very little electricity used - one electric heater on low, occasional lights on/off when we visited. That kind of thing. So you can imagine our horror when the first bill was for thousands of pounds.
Fortunately when we rang up to complain we got somebody at the call center who immediately realised what must have happened and sorted it out. We had to agree an estimated usage, and it's still possible we overpaid for what we actually used, but at least it wasn't thousands.
I took the time to do this, and found that my electric water heater consumes nearly half of the electricity in my home.
Oh man, do I know this feeling. My old duplex I moved out of last year had an electric water heater from 1991, it easily ate up 1/3 of our electric usage every month. New house has a gas water heater, during the summer months our gas water heater results in a $20 gas bill (roughly $10 of that is the connection and other assorted fees).
Old water heaters, especially electric ones can really suck energy like nothing else. My summer electric bill at the new house is still roughly $30/mo cheaper and I'm running like 500W of gear 24/7 in my office/lab that wasn't at the old place.
Then observe change at meter, write it down, and do some math.
As an added benefit, I got to verify and one case relabel the circuits.
This way one can detect anomalies in resource usage based on raw data, unless the error is constant.
For anyone who's curious, here's the hardware:
1. A "smart meter" outside the house (set up by the power company) 2. A raspberry pi 3 (w/power cable/sdcard) 3. NooElec NESDR Mini 2+ software defined radio http://www.nooelec.com/store/sdr/sdr-receivers/nesdr-mini-2-... This comes with an antenna as well.
And here's the software:
* Ubuntu Mate on the rpi3 (you can also use raspbian or whatever) * rtlamr to take readings from the meter (https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr -- this is awesome and worked on the first try after I installed golang and ran "go get github.com/bemasher/rtlamr") * rtl-tcp (a dependency of the above that is automatically installed if I remember correctly.) * openhab2 open source home automation sw (optional) * influxdb open source time series database * grafana graphing software
Once I plugged the USB NooElectric SDR, I was able to grab my meter's reading with a little python3 script. The test code I'm using looks something like:
completed = subprocess.run(['/home/myaccount/go/bin/rtlamr', '-filterid=1234567', '-single=true', '-format=json'],
stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.DEVNULL)
data=json.loads(completed.stdout.decode("utf-8"))
reading = data['Message']['Consumption']
I wanted to be able to visualize trends (like the rate of consumption when I turned on the heat) using a nifty chart, so I published from python (via the paho library-- https://pypi.python.org/pypi/paho-mqtt ) to a local mqtt server (mosquitto running on the pi) though I also tried sending to a mqtt feed at io.adafruit.com, which does a neat graph on its dashboard... until I overwhelmed its quota with too-frequent updates. I wanted something faster where I didn't have to worry about any throttling.
So I decided to do it all locally. First, I set up openhab2 (http://docs.openhab.org/) which has an add-on to to automatically read the mqtt feed, then inserted the measurements to a database on a local influxdb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfluxDB) server also on the pi which keeps a real-time history (aka "persistence") of my electric usage over time. (I could have also just inserted to the influxdb directly from my python3 script, but I'm playing with openhab2 for other things so had it do it for me...)
Finally, I connected grafana (http://grafana.org/) to the influxdb database. Now I have gorgeous real-time graphs and an amazing interactive web-UI that lets me zoom in and set alerts and such.
It sounds like a lot of steps to get to the graph, and once you have the actual measurement, you have choices on how to visualize it-- you could have python send the readings to a Google Sheets spreadsheet and graph from there, for example. or do updates to adafruit less frequently to not blow through the quota. Or use openhab2's which includes its own charts.
But grafana's visualizations are just the coolest. See http://play.grafana.org for an idea of what you can do...
Anyway, long drawn out answer, but the point is-- assuming you have a smart electric meter that work with rtlamr, you can do this yourself :)
Can rtlamr send text over TCP to a remote data collection server? I think they call it a 'receiver'.
Looks like different formats are supported, e.g. plain and csv, so it's a pretty open setup. With that in mind, what's the added value of mqtt in your reference configuration?
Update: Just found this at the top of the discussion at http://bemasher.net/rtlamr/ -- which I actually should probably sit down and read at some point :)
https://gist.github.com/bemasher/7af275c3d2fd3f02933e7990e8e...
In the summers we had a window AC, but even that only pushed it to $40-$50 a month.
I got a $400 gas bill yesterday that needs investigating and I have little knowhow or time to do so...
Perhaps there should be some certification requirements like scales for trade?