Family Squabble: Why Wouldn’t You Want a Smart Meter? Or an EV?

“It’s alright for you with your electric cars and electric house!” These were the words out of the mouth of my (ahem) not young, long-widowed mother the other week.

She was moaning about her household bills and cost of petrol and ‘the government’ etc -as they do- and was in need of a new car after a non-fault accident. She has a big drive with plenty of off road parking and does maybe 15 miles on a good day.

A few weeks earlier I happened to be in a lovely little 40kWh 2019 Zoe on the weekly visit. I even managed to get her in it and she had a drive. And…she loved it! “Oh it just drives like an automatic car!”  I replied “Well yes, that’s what it is.”

So, yes, you guessed it- I thought now was the time for her to ‘do a Bob Dylan’ and go electric. (Look it up kids)

“Let’s get you a Zoe shall we? Like the one you drove the other day. And we’ll get you on a cheaper tariff for your electricity. I can even get you a £50 voucher credit plus you can have my £50 referral credit, so that’s a hundred quid saved straight off.” I said

Now-I’d not seen her so befuddled and mildly cross /disappointed in me since I’d told her in 1987 I was giving up eating meat (she’s still not got her head round that ‘weirdness’ to this day).

“I don’t want a sMaRt MeTeR! And I don’t want an EV. I can’t charge it!”

So that brought me on to wondering just what is it about eVs and Smart Meters and so on that makes some people-particularly older people and The ‘Facebook Massive’ so against them?

In my mother’s case it’s simply a misunderstanding or lack of understanding of just what they are and do. In truth , she has no idea what they are. That and the fear of change plus-in no small part, the utter nonsense she’s seen and heard about them.

So I thought I’d try to address the facts, concerns and bust some of the myths and the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt)

We’ll get back to my mother later…

First off, a quick public service announcement: and the level of confusion around this little bit of household kit is ridiculous:

The IHD. That plastic screen with a virtual dial, sitting on your kitchen counter, glowing red because someone dared to turn the kettle on, is not the smart meter! It is an In-Home Display (IHD). It is a cheap gadget given to you by the energy supplier to show your live usage. If it freezes, turns off, is unplugged or gets shoved into the back of that junk drawer-under three dead batteries, a key to a mystery door and a dozen takeaway menus and those disposable chopsticks you’ll never use……your electric supply and actual smart meter will carry on working regardless.

An In Home Display (IHD)

The Difference:

• The Smart Meter: Lives under your stairs or in an outside box. Secure, quiet, and tracks your actual usage.

• The IHD: Sits on your counter and is entirely optional. For me though I find this little gadget super-useful as it shows you just what appliances actually use more electricity than you might have thought-and those that really don’t use much at all. If like me, you have solar/solar batteries, it’s a great tool to show you if you’re drawing power from the grid or not, and you can dial back on some appliances and react quickly.

Myth1. "They’re going to turn off my power!"

If you spend five minutes on Facebook, you would think ‘Big Energy’ built a supervillain control room in Slough with a giant red button specifically to cut off your TV or toaster or your half cooked oven chips, when the grid gets busy. They’re not. And they won’t.

The Facts.

Can a smart meter disconnect your supply remotely? Technically yes-because it contains an internal contactor switch-but people act like this is a scary new dystopian control. It isn't.

With old ‘dumb’ meters, if you had a box on the outside wall of your house, ‘they’ could walk up your driveway open the plastic door, pull your main service fuse and plunge your house into darkness without ever knocking on your door or setting foot inside. If your meter was indoors, they simply got a Court warrant under the Rights of Entry Act, entered legally, and pulled the fuse anyway.

If you ever lived with an old coin, token, or key prepayment meter, your electricity was cut off automatically by a physical mechanical switch the exact second your balance hit zero. No engineer came round to pull a lever. The switch inside the box simply opened. That mechanism is decades old.

The mechanism in a smart meter is slightly different, using a tiny internal switch rather than an engineer pulling a fuse, but the strict Ofgem rules, court processes, and legal hurdles required before a supplier can do it are identical. An energy company cannot turn off your power just because the grid is stressed or because they feel like it. If you pay your bills, your power stays on. Simple as that.

Myth 2. "If it breaks or loses signal, my lights will go out!"

There is a massive panic that if a smart meter loses its cellular signal, crashes, or drops off the network-our you don’t pay your bill-it acts like a tripped circuit breaker and leaves you in the dark. It doesn’t.

People confuse smart meters with internet routers. If your home Wi-Fi drops out, your Netflix stream stops. But electricity flow and smart communication are two completely separate systems inside the box.

I know this first hand because over the years my own smart meter has occasionally stopped working and stopped reporting back to the supplier.

You know what happened? Absolutely nothing. I was never without power for even a fraction of a second.

The physical switch inside the meter is default-closed. It requires a specific command to open, and losing signal never triggers that command. When the network signal drops, the meter simply reverts to dumb mode. Power keeps flowing to your fuse box exactly as it always did. The meter sits under your stairs silently recording total kilowatt-hours on its screen. You don't lose electricity. You just have to read the numbers off the screen with a torch the old-fashioned way and submit them manually until the signal picks back up. (It’s worth noting that my meter was fixed really swiftly by Octopus. One time it was replaced with a newer model and the other a good old reset did the trick.) Again, no loss in power at any time.

Myth3. "They’re tracking when I boil the kettle!"

Another classic myth is that smart meters broadcast your daily routine to government agencies ‘sending-data-to-China’.

Smart meters communicate over a dedicated, closed wireless network run by the Data Communications Company (DCC). They do not connect to your home Wi-Fi, and nobody cares if you get up at 2 AM to secretly eat cheese out of the fridge and make yourself a brew.

All they send are half-hourly numerical readouts of total consumption. Just numbers. No audio, no cameras, and no log of what you are watching on telly.

4. The actual point: Smart Tariffs

Refusing a smart meter when you can load-shift usage to times when electricity is cheap, is like buying a modern smartphone and refusing to turn on mobile data.

A standard dumb meter locks you into a single flat rate. You pay the exact same price for electricity at 3 PM on a Tuesday as you do at 2 AM on a Sunday, even when the grid is overflowing with cheap green power.

What a smart meter actually gets you: access to smart /cheaper energy.

• From 7p/kWh EV night rates: Charge a 60kWh battery overnight for under £4.50 instead of £15 on a flat rate.

• Dynamic pricing: Access tariffs like Octopus Agile that occasionally pay you to charge your car or run the washing machine when renewable generation spikes.

• No more estimated bills: No crawling into an outside cupboard with a torch to read numbers off a dusty dial.

5. The real Not-so-Smart annoyances

To be fair, the UK rollout has not been flawless historically. For some/some areas. Early first-generation (SMETS1) meters often went dumb when you switched suppliers. While most have now been migrated over to the central DCC network, some older ones are still a pain. And if your meter box is stuck behind two feet of solid stone in a basement, signal issues can be genuine.

Those are fair technical complaints. But turning down a modern SMETS2 install because of Facebook rumors? You are just choosing to overpay for energy.

Evil Power-company Overlord

So, back to my Luddite mother:

“I don’t want an EV, I can’t charge it. I don’t have a charger!”

I replied pointing out that she doesn’t have a petrol pump either.

“You do have a drive and that nice properly wired outside plug on the driveway.  You even have power in the garage. You simply can use these normal plugs. As you never park in the garage, the outside socket in the drive is perfect. Just plug in every two three weeks and it’ll be charged when you wake up.

“Oh that’s too complicated! Much easier to go to the petrol station”

I asked her how on earth that was easier than just plugging a lead into the car like she does with her phone daily?

More blank, disappointed ‘he’s still a vegetarian’ looks followed.

So, I got her a petrol, manual Corsa. Which is what she wanted. Of course it’s older and crappier than the same priced Zoe. Fast forward a few months and she’s now moaning that she ‘should have got an auto’ and ‘that little Renault was lovely!’

So, has she got a smart meter?   Of course not. She’s also still moaning about the costs of everything to anyone that will listen. The thought of changing electricity supplier from the one she’s been with for ever is something she can’t /wont compute.

Don’t forget: Them smart meters will cut her off and make her go vegan. You’ll see!

The Verdict

Some people are just numb to the facts and know best/wont change and won’t hear of anyone educating them. Even if that person is your son who actually has all this ‘new fangled’ technology and runs their house and multiple cars at a fraction of the cost you run yours on.

And don’t get them started on HeAt PuMpS!