
Electronic meters’ false readings up to six times higher than actual consumption - rwbhn
http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/10940.html
======
dheera
I was paying upwards of $150 a month for heating in a tiny <400sqft studio in
Boston at one point. $200 on one month. There was definitely something wrong
with the meter readings, and pretty sure I was getting charged for someone
else's electricity considering how little I was at home with the heater on.
The utility company refused to investigate and would only threaten to send in
debt collectors if I didn't pay up. My property manager only pointed me to the
utility company. I tried complaining to DPU, but they didn't respond to
e-mails, and I didn't have time for phone calls or mediating this mess, in
general.

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.

~~~
ChuckMcM
OK, first I never expect to read "Moved to California, paying a much more
reasonable utility bill.." :-)

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.

~~~
sathackr
I'm curious as to the details of your friend's story.

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....](https://www.talgov.com/you/you-account-plans-demand-billing.aspx)

~~~
dheera
> being guarded by a dog

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

~~~
lb1lf
3\. Get hit by a massive bill when moving to another property.

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...

~~~
achamayou
My provider here allows me to report my usage with either their mobile app or
website. If I forget to do it, they charge me based on some average like the
one you describe. It works quite well on the whole, and seems both fair and
efficient.

------
Animats
Check the actual papers.[1][2] For single-phase meters, which covers most
residential uses, this is a non-problem: "No deviation beyond the
specification could be observed; no influence of interference due to
interfering or distorted voltage, and no influence caused by interfering
currents were observed." All the problems were seen with 3-phase meters,
usually found only in industrial and commercial environments.

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](http://doc.utwente.nl/102016/1/Runaway_energy_Meters.pdf)
[2]
[http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7866234/](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7866234/)

~~~
throwawayish
In most parts of Europe 3-phase is the standard. Neither high-leg delta nor
split phase have significant deployment outside North America.

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.

~~~
Animats
Ah. That's helpful. US utility residential practice, for those outside the US,
is that pole transformers take in 3 phase at a few KV, at 60Hz, and output
120/240 VAC single phase with a shared neutral. That's what most houses get,
supplied over 3 wires, with a 3-wire single phase meter. Pole-mounted
transformers usually serve about 7 houses or so.

Even in apartment buildings, each apartment has its own meter, almost always
single phase.

~~~
hydrogen18
You can't "take in 3 phase and output single phase". That's not how a
transformer works. It'd be amazing if it did, as in Nobel Prize winning.

In the US most homes are just tapped to 1 phase, if there are 3 on the pole.

~~~
gfisher
Yeah, you are right. I think what they were trying to say is that the
transformers are fed on the high side by one of three phases (as is typical),
and that the residential step-down is a split phase 120/240.

~~~
hydrogen18
Yes, that is the normal configuration for power delivery to a residence in
most of North America.

------
jwr
I'll recommend the hacker solution: first, buy and install your own meter,
right after the power company one. It isn't expensive. Have it done by an
electrician. I got mine installed in my fuse box, a small 3-phase DIN rail
meter (I'm in Poland and pretty much all modern hookups are 3-phase).

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.

~~~
kalleboo
> 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.

At which point, it's time to start a bitcoin mining operation!

------
zkms
OK so serious question -- utility companies tend to have high-accuracy,
company-operated/maintained meters (that effectively measure the total use of
a bunch of customers).

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...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.sci-
hub.bz/document/7866234/?reload=true)

~~~
rdtsc
I imagine if anyone noticed it and saw it was in the favor of the company,
they probably shrugged and said, "Heh, look at that. Let's keep it low
priority, some intern will get to it at some point.."

~~~
mirekrusin
Yep, surely they'd only have resources to deal with half of the problem -
meters that undercharge.

------
mdip
I noticed my electric bill went up a bit when I was moved over to the
electronic meter ... not so much that I thought anything of it other than that
_gee, I use a lot of power and now it seems like I 'm using a little more_.

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!"

~~~
tomsaffell
> I wonder if there's a converse effect?

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...

~~~
takingflac
This is called phase shifting(1) adding a large enough inductor to all of your
resistive loads will cause your power factor(2) to drop. Unfortunately for you
the power company bills you for your apparent power useage which takes into
account both the real and imaginary parts of your power consumption, it
measures your shifted loads.

1\. [http://www.learnabout-
electronics.org/ac_theory/ac_ccts_51.p...](http://www.learnabout-
electronics.org/ac_theory/ac_ccts_51.php)
2.[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_factor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_factor)

------
averagewall
A bit off topic but I once had a water meter that was overcharging by perhaps
around 100%. I worked out that it was because it didn't have a one-way valve.
When there was air trapped in the pipes, pressure fluctuations would cause
water would move back and forth through the meter, racking up the bill with no
net flow.

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.

~~~
Gibbon1
Most cheap meters have a magnet and a reed-switch to generate pulses. As you
noted they will generate pulses with backflow. However the dial count on the
meter is correct.

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.

------
ComputerGuru
Most installations of electronic meters have been done in the past two to
three years. It's easy enough to see if readings skyrocketed after the
installation (mine didn't).

(I'm presuming electronic == smart)

~~~
stolk
I wish I could compare, but I moved into a (large) new home with a smart
meter. I have no measurement that I can compare it to. On top of that, I just
replaced all bulbs with LED, and wonder if that has been counterproductive.

~~~
mirekrusin
If you have dimmers on those LEDs then you should check it out.

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?

------
roywiggins
I've heard of free energy scammers using this to trick people, you muck with
the waveform so the meter reads wrong, and it looks like you have invented a
box that saves energy.

~~~
Neliquat
They now can test for many variations of these. Not sure how, but meter guy
mentioned it.

~~~
dzhiurgis
I doubt they actually enforce it.

------
ars
If a Rogowski Coil and Hall Effect sensors both give incorrect results - what
did the researches use to measure the meters?

~~~
stagbeetle
An oscilloscope.

~~~
ars
An oscilloscope is the display.

I was asking what measures the current.

~~~
zkms
per the article, a Dranetz Products made PowerXplorer PX5-400

[http://www.dranetz.com/product-services/current-dranetz-
prod...](http://www.dranetz.com/product-services/current-dranetz-
products/powerxplorer-px5-400/)

here's the original paper [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.sci-
hub.bz/document/7866234/?relo...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.sci-
hub.bz/document/7866234/?reload=true)

~~~
barrkel
The headline deviations are measured with respect to an eletromechanical meter
(the kind that predated smart meters, described as a Ferraris principle
meter).

------
deevolution
I live in a newly renovated apartment with electric meters in Brooklyn and i
have led lights and have experienced similar excesive charges... At one point
my bill for my 1 bedroom apt was upwards of $300. Totally absurd.

------
peterclary
Whatever meter you get installed, make sure they take the initial reading
properly! Obvious for mechanic meters, but it turns out that some Electronic
meters are like that too.

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.

------
upen
So this is why my electricity bill is so high

~~~
thaumaturgy
It's more probable that your bill is high because you haven't done a careful
energy audit of your home and all of the devices in it, and one or more of
them is malfunctioning or using more energy than you'd expect.

I took the time to do this, and found that my electric water heater consumes
nearly half of the electricity in my home.

~~~
snuxoll
> 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.

~~~
Baeocystin
Same here. We switched over from an electric water heater to a gas one, and it
was such a difference on our power bill that it paid for itself in less than a
year. Even with running folding@home, BOINC, etc on all of my home machines,
our bill is still less. Electric water heaters are expensive!

~~~
MertsA
As an added bonus the heat coming out of the hot water heater might be inside
the home where it has to be removed via AC meaning that not only is that heat
being wasted instead of providing hot water, it's also increasing your AC
usage and wasting even more power.

~~~
rplst8
It's likely that the cost savings was just due to the fact that natural gas is
so much cheaper than electricity, unit for unit.

------
rodionos
It would be in consumers' best interest to be able to access meter readings
with at least hourly granularity, just like wireless carriers provide call
logs with up-to-the-minute accuracy.

This way one can detect anomalies in resource usage based on raw data, unless
the error is constant.

~~~
fattire
Funny you should mention this. I just set this up myself... I have a meter
measurement about every 30 seconds, which it gets plotted into a cool web
graph that shows usage as well as consumption spikes and I can set alerts and
such. Pretty cool.

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-...](http://www.nooelec.com/store/sdr/sdr-receivers/nesdr-
mini-2-plus.html) 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](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']
    

This gives you the reading for your meter. Change the -filterid to use the
number physically written on your meter outside.

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](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/](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](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/](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](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 :)

~~~
Vendan
wow, this post inspired me to look at that SDR, and I had no idea SDR had
gotten so cheap. Last time I looked was a couple years ago, and anything
halfway decent was 100+. Suffice it to say, I just ordered one, and I'm going
to look at building a similar setup, though as I'm rather familiar with Go,
probably as a single binary that does recording and web display as a single
thing.

~~~
fattire
Yeah you don't need all the levels that I used :) I've been playing around to
figure the best way to do it and integrate it with everything else, so I
figured I'd list everything I've tried in case someone wants to play with
them.

Update: Just found this at the top of the discussion at
[http://bemasher.net/rtlamr/](http://bemasher.net/rtlamr/) \-- which I
actually should probably sit down and read at some point :)

[https://gist.github.com/bemasher/7af275c3d2fd3f02933e7990e8e...](https://gist.github.com/bemasher/7af275c3d2fd3f02933e7990e8e27d41)

~~~
Vendan
I just wrote up
[https://gist.github.com/andyleap/01601cc9cdf7d3708bb63d5867a...](https://gist.github.com/andyleap/01601cc9cdf7d3708bb63d5867afc484)
real quick, uses the rtlamr stuff directly and turns around and spits them
into a local influxdb instance. It's been working out fairly well so far! I'd
still like to make it more "all in one" down the road, but influxdb + grafana
is a good start for the display side of things.

------
djhworld
Coincidentally this appeared on BBC news today
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39169313](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39169313)

------
kiliantics
Take home message from this thread seems to be never to trust your utility
company to charge you fairly. But the alternative seems to be to figure out
the problem yourself (or hire someone to do so), saving the company money on
what should be its own expenses.

I got a $400 gas bill yesterday that needs investigating and I have little
knowhow or time to do so...

------
known
[http://www.securemeters.com/index.php/global/](http://www.securemeters.com/index.php/global/)
were selling high quality elecronic meters for many years

------
phkahler
If waveform can cause the meter to read high usage... One could make something
to correct it, and with that capability one could push power back to the grid
with a distorted waveform at a higher rate ;-)

------
awful
somewhat related, cant comment on cost yet, but house has code-std lighted
stairwell switches; when used with fluor. bulb noticed in dark it flickered
continuously. appears that neons in switch leak current through bulb all the
time, but not enough to start up. a lot of power? yet to be determined, but
neons are dead short and fluor. bulb startup is high current so probably high
leakage all the time and odd waveform presented to meter.

------
dbg31415
So how would anyone know if their meter was broken?

~~~
davedx
Probably only if you were the homeowner when the smart meter was installed, or
if you're very dedicated, you could monitor energy usage at every electricity
socket. (I did this for our largest appliances, to find out what used the
most).

------
savrajsingh
#wattvision

------
ezoe
It should be called the Dumb Mater.

------
BrailleHunting
A SilverSpring Networks meter were installed on our house in N. Cal around
2011.

Perhaps there should be some certification requirements like scales for trade?

~~~
averagewall
There certainly are certifications. But the official test doesn't pick out
this problem, as mentioned in the article.

