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Some people are reporting on social media that their electricity bills are doubling after the installation of smart meters:

This blog explains the problem:

Simply speaking, when any domestic electrical appliance is switched on, it momentarily draws heavily on the electricity supply. The key words to remember here are ‘surge voltages’. These surges at switch on can be several times the electrical rating of an appliance, and the bigger (and older) the appliance, the larger the surge. With the old meters this wasn’t an issue, as these surges are so short that the old electromechanical meters couldn’t record them. However, the ‘Smart meters’ being purely electronic, record every last milliamp, and report these directly to the suppliers via a mesh type network on a real time basis. Never mind being billed at varying rates for different times of the day.

Essentially what happens is that if you have a family that uses dishwashers two or three times daily, or cooks with electricity using an electric oven twice a day, and has gotten used to washing their clothes regularly, then your bills will soar, especially if you cannot afford to replace all your older appliances whose surge voltages are likely to be significantly higher than more electricity efficient modern equipment.

Does this sort of meter behavior significantly increase electricity bills?

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Peter Tirrell
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    The "electromechanical meters can't record them" is false. They work by diverting a very small fraction of the incoming power to turn what's basically a motor - if you've ever looked at one, it's the spinning horizontal disk - that engages gears to trun counters. This is an analog device, not a digital one, so there's no "too small to measure" interval. Wikipedia explains it better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_meter#Electromechanical_meters And purely anecdotally, my power bill has dropped by about 20% in the several years since a "smart meter" was installed. – jamesqf Jan 05 '17 at 02:59
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    The total surge energy of a motor is essentially negligible if the motor's on for a few seconds, comprising only a few percent of the initial power. There is no possible way that mere surge currents could double your power bill. Not making this an answer because I don't have the numbers to back it up right now – 0xDBFB7 Jan 05 '17 at 03:53
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    Obvious bullshit alert - for these surges to cause 'soaring electric bills', or even to register on a bill, the surges would have to be thousands of amps. For a 'surge' lasting a second to take even a kWh of energy (typically costing around 10c) it would have to be around 10,000 amps, which would trigger fuses or circuit breakers. – DJClayworth Jan 05 '17 at 14:22
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    Also do you have other examples of this claim? One guy on a blog does not make this notable. – DJClayworth Jan 05 '17 at 16:29
  • My only examples are anecdotal, coming from a local message board (I know, I know...but that's how these usually start, right?). Basically the local power company is replacing meters with the digital kind, and a number of posts have been shared about people's bills being outrageously higher, and then those that have come out of the woodwork saying that the new meters are dangerous and can cause illness. This was the first I had seen as to an explanation (other than colder temps and more usage) that attributed usage to "spiking" on appliance startup. – Peter Tirrell Jan 05 '17 at 16:38
  • I've heard of people complaining about bills being higher with smartmeters, but not this specific piece of pseudo-scientific hogwash. Usually just about pricing algorithms working against them. Do you have other claims of this spike thing? – DJClayworth Jan 05 '17 at 16:50
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    There may be an issue with the context in which the meter is installed. If a smart meter is needed to support billing based on time-of-day price variations, peak usage, ..., then there may be a change in the bills received. That doesn't make the change a result of the meter _per se_, it's just reporting more information back to . – HABO Jan 06 '17 at 03:44
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    I think we should ignore the hyperbole of "doubling" and focus on the quoted claim of "significant" (which I interpret as "noticeable") – Oddthinking Jan 06 '17 at 03:53
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    @jamesqf: Without defending the claim, I can see the intuitive appeal of it. Yes, an analogue device has no "too small to measure" time period, but I can imagine an analogue device failing to accurately measure all the "area under the curve" in a rapidly fluctuating environment because of drag, tolerances, physical limits and the like. All I am saying is a simple appeal to common sense isn't enough here, because my untrustworthy, ill-informed (and almost certainly wrong) common sense is rating the claim "plausible". Teach me! – Oddthinking Jan 06 '17 at 04:01
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    @Oddthinking: I am not expert enough (nor good enough at explaining what I do understand) to teach anyone. But it would seem that, for fairly obvious economic reasons, the builders of either sort of meter would try to make them as accurate as feasible. Indeed, the irony here is that if the two kinds of meters worked as claimed, then all the smart meters are doing is charging a fair price to people who were freeloading in the past :-) – jamesqf Jan 06 '17 at 07:47
  • As DJClayworth said this is the same BS as "Don't switch you (tube) lights on and off because the initial power usage it as much as -*insert your favorite large time period here*- of lighting" –  Jan 06 '17 at 08:48
  • I don't see them increasing the amount of electricity you use. I can see them being used as a reason to increase the price per KWh you pay though. After all, someone has to pay for the equipment and as you're being given an extra service by your utility company they're going to find a way to have you pay for that through your electricity bill. – jwenting Jan 06 '17 at 10:45
  • Look at the blogs source: http://www.eiwellspring.org/smartmeter/Smart_Meter_overview.htm. It's a long pamphlet with 0 sources. Then look at the website that hosts the pamphlet. http://www.eiwellspring.org/ That one is pretty self explanatory. – TsSkTo Jan 06 '17 at 13:27
  • @jwenting: But smart meters also mean that the power company doesn't have to pay a bunch of people to go around manually reading each meter every month. – jamesqf Jan 08 '17 at 05:58
  • @jamesqf the power company here doesn't that either. They just send you a card with return payment prepaid once a year to report your meter's readings. And they have a few people to do spot checks or check meters where the reported numbers make no sense when compared to past reports. And ever more they don't even send cards, but have a website where you report your numbers to. – jwenting Jan 16 '17 at 07:12
  • @jwenting: That sounds awfully trusting. First, that everyone knows how to read a meter - the conventional US ones weren't exactly obvious. And second, that everyone is going to report the exact reading, instead of say 10-20% less. – jamesqf Jan 17 '17 at 18:24
  • @jamesqf meters here are pretty simple. Just a single number for water, one for electricity, and one for natural gas (and each is a different device too, clearly marked as such). As to deliberate fraud attempts, that's why there are spot checks and the numbers are compared to long term averages too. Plus the actual numbers are reported when terminating and/or starting a lease or buying/selling. And the previous tennant then gets a bill for the difference from previous reports. – jwenting Jan 18 '17 at 06:52

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