Diary #3: Don’t Fear The Meter

Smart meters are a very mixed blessing

Winter officially arrived this week and the TV says people have been “turning on the heating”. Tell me about it.  In Edinburgh the boilers have been singing for the last six weeks. Now the rest of Britain will discover the joy of meter watching.

How it racks up £1.40 in daily standing charges before a joule of heat has been emitted.  Then there is the wandering from room to room with the thermostat and trying to remember which radiators you turned off.  Then puzzling over the enigmatic energy bills. Prepare for a shock because the meter and the bill don’t always agree.

My last monthly bill was £155, but when I checked with the smart meter it said I’d used only £101 for the “month”. I immediately emailed Bulb in a lather of righteous indignation.  My anger increased when they replied saying that the meter figure “excludes the cost per unit as well as tax”.  What? The device is surely pointless if it doesn’t give you a measure of you real time energy use.   

I emailed their press office to check this was correct and an admittedly helpful Bulb person got back to me explaining that no, it wasn’t. I’d been misinformed. The smart meter does show how much you are spending, in real time except,er, when you ask it what you used in the past month. The billing goes by calendar month, while then meter thinks a “month” is the previous four weeks. 

This is confusing since the billing period is from the middle of one month to the middle of the next.I tried to work it out and couldn’t get near the figure on my bill, but my arithmetic may have been at fault.  So I asked to be billed in future by the month at the end of the month not in the middle of it .

I should explain that I had already asked to be billed monthly (not prepayment) rather than on their normal annualised basis.  This was because Bulb tried to nearly double my monthly standing payment last April. Paying only what you use each month means you don’t end up hundreds of pounds in credit to the energy company - something with which I’ve never been comfortable.

But the main takeaway from my smart meter experience so far is that it’s very difficult to retain focus. I’m losing it. I’ve given up trying to follow the guidelines and procedures and am now heating the flat by intuition. A degree of Zen detachment is necessary for mental wellbeing if nothing else.

Some days the meter records £7.50, some £12.50 and it’s never entirely clear why. Perhaps the variation is to do with people in the flat below turning up their heating. Perhaps it is atmospherics.  At any rate it is beyond mere human control.  And watching the clock because it doesn’t make it go round any more slowly.