Hands up if you have a smart meter indoors keeping you up to date on exactly how much that hallway light is costing you in power.
Not many of us currently do, but if the government is to meet its own targets then by 2020 every single UK home, all 26 million of them, will have one of the clever little devices up and running.
As The Engineer reports the latest attempt to help meet this ambitious target, a unified communications standard for meters, this seems like an appropriate moment to suggest another innovation the home of 2020 could boast to make life a little easier, cheaper or greener.
If we’re on the subject of environmental efficiency, those of us who have just been handed our umpteenth waste disposal receptacle (blue boxes, green buckets, black and brown bins, you know the type of thing) might look for some type of automated system that sorts the paper from the food scraps and the cans from the bottles.
Who knows how many the council will have foisted on us by 2020, so perhaps some type of robot recycler could stop the night before bin collection day turning into a two-hour exercise in sorting.
It’s only a thought. If you have any suggestions for the single innovation that could make life around the house easier, drop us a line. In the meantime, given that meeting the government’s target will require something like 70,000 installations per week, our tip for the business to get into is the smart meter-fitting game.
Andrew Lee
Editor
Smart energy meters do not save energy. They help people who are wasting energy see where they are wasting it but many people are already being efficient or have no desire to change their behaviour (I prefer the colour rendering of incandescent lamps to CFLs and am quite happy to ‘waste’ the tiny difference in cost to get the quality of light I prefer). I am sure I’m not alone. How much energy will be wasted in creating and installing all these smart energy meters?
My gas and electricity meters are in my external garage, so I cannot easily see them anyway. No possibility that these new meters would make me economise more than I am already doing. Most of the bulbs in my house are on dimmer switches so I cannot easily swap to the so-called energy-saving bulbs anyway, without buying new light switches – which will give me full brightness that I rarely want.
I think education might be more use than the meters. We ‘won’ a meter from ‘E-on’ and initially my wife and daughter were curious, but we’ve had it a few months now, and I still find lights and the television left on when no-one is in the room, and tumble dryer in use when the sun is shining and the washing line is empty.
Instead of letting people see how much energy they are using, why not tell people how much energy they are allowed to use? By introducing a rationing system for gas and electricity, it would force us all to become more more efficient. It could also ease the pressures on the grid by making loads more predictable.
I think one of the key points of smart metering is for energy consumption information to be as readily available and as much a part of everyday life as glancing up to the clock on the shelf to check the time. In the same way as responding to a train due time by running to catch it, it will become natural to turn appliances off if the reading creeps higher.
It certainly beats sitting in the cupboard under the stairs with a torch after switching everything off and wondering why the electricity meter wheel was still turning – something I attempted as a child!
Automatic rubbish sorting for recycling brings up a similar issue. It may get used more if it’s easier, but if it does not cause us to examine what we throw away and change long-term behaviour in terms of generating landfill waste and choosing recylable materials, half the purpose is lost.
Simple suggestion- that all councils have to collect the same recyclable items and use the same coloured bins for them. Currently you can have one road were green is recyclable, and 100m away its for ordinary waste and blue is recyclable (yes councils are that stupid!).
How about having a consistent policy of what is recyclable – To avoid risk of getting it wrong (and a fine!) I simply stick to recycling paper – everything else is placed in the green – or is that blue bin 🙂
Won’t it be good to have a meter on the rubbish bin or recycling box showing how much electricity or gas was used to create the item that is being disposed of? It would be interesting to see how many lights I’d have to turn off to equal that used to make plastic containers that have to go in the bin as there are no recycling facilities available.
I asked my electricity company for a meter to record the amount of electricity I could send back to the national grid. As I already have a wind turbine their refusal was disappointing.