27 Jul 5 Reasons to get a Smart Meter
Here are our current top 5 reasons to get a Smart meter.
- Visibility – You can see what you are using, no more guessing or wondering and you can see what happens when you turn things on and off and put it into pounds and pence. Last year UK Power estimated that the average 3 bed house spent £1,163 per year on electricity and gas, so it is worth knowing what that is being spent on.
- Savings – If you can see it you can save it. Leaving some devices on when you are not in a room is wasteful, leaving them on for longer than you need is also a problem. How many of you have people sitting in one room of the house with all the lights on lots of other rooms? What could you do with the money you save from not doing that? A smart meter can show you the effect of turning them off immediately and there is usually a little device to show your family members and colleagues too.
- Accuracy – No more estimated bills means no more overpaying or underpaying, the impact of which, when they are corrected, can be expensive. Smart meters are read remotely and occasionally in person.
- Renewable Energy decision making – if you are thinking of having a solar system or battery storage installed, before you get a quote, use your smart meter data to show you accurately what you are using. Many providers will now share your half hourly smart meter data so that you can be confident in the savings that you will see from installing PV at home.
- Time based tariffs – the electricity grid is changing, decarbonising and as more renewable energy is supplied to the grid there is a greater need for flexibility. One of the ways the grid can be flexible is by electricity suppliers offering time-based tariffs. If you haven’t heard of time-based tariffs before, basically they are similar to “Economy-seven”, but even smarter. In its simplest form they can be something like two tier pricing with cheap night-rate and then a standard day-rate prices, but some retailers, like Octopus, have their Agile tariff which varies during the day. This year we saw the first period where Octopus paid customers to use power as there was more solar and wind on the grid than ever before. Another example would be tariffs designed for electric car owners like the picture below. Between 12.30am and 4.30am the price for power is below 5p per unit which means that this car can do nearly 10,000 miles on as little as £100 of electricity!
This list is not exhaustive, but at a time when we are probably more aware of what’s going on at home than ever before and probably more aware of our the fundamentals life it pays to get a smart meter to give you more control.
Alex Lockton July 2020
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