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Anybody work for a utility company?

jay hay-char

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We've had a letter inviting us to have smart meters installed, to replace our current old-skool meters. On the face of it, this should be good, because it will stop the proliferation of "We called but you weren't in" cards that land on the doormat when I'm in the kitchen, and should mean that Scottish Power don't have so much of our money in their bank account,earning interest for them.

I have one reservation, however: does anyone know if installing smart meters means that utilities companies can disconnect your supply remotely? It's not that we're likely to have trouble paying the bills but mistakes are made on a fairly regular basis, with technology of this kind, and I don't want to find that my supply has been arbitrarily cut off by some power-crazed computer in Bangalore without it needing to go through due process to access my property, in order to do so.

Any insights would be appreciated; TIA
 
I Don, t work for any utility company.
I had both gas and electric meters smart meters installed 3 years ago. I would recommend taking up the offer to have the smart meters. Though eventually everyone will eventually be changing to smart meters.
The best thing I have found, like you have had, the card put through the door saying the company had tried to read the meters. When that happened to me, I used to then phone my energy company with the readings. If I didn't, t ring through the readings, then would get an estimated reading bills which were always way out.
I have no idea if the energy companies are able to to disconnect at their end. With the smart meters, you get a more accurate bill
 
Everyone will get smartmeters by 2020 anyway . I think they are good when you read up on them , I asked for one from power but was told they don't do requests they just roll out different areas according to a pre set schedule
 
mist said:
Well, Germany has successfully created nuclear fusion, So soon, our power sources may be completely overhauled.

http://www.sciencealert.com/german-...red-up-a-revolutionary-nuclear-fusion-machine
Click to expand...
I think this report is getting slightly ahead of the game . What they've done is to produce a machine that can create an environment, currently for one tenth of a second, in which fusion can theoretically take place. There's a way to go yet, before we actually get fusion. I have an uncle, now retired, who is a plasma physicist and who worked on the fusion project at Princetown University for most of his career. He reckons that large scale, affordable fusion that creates more energy than it consumes is still thirty or forty years off, although he would be delighted to be proved wrong.

If it can be achieved it will, indeed, revolutionise the generation of energy and pretty much solve future problems in that area.
 

Well it's a step in the right direction. Can I make a joke about German efficiency?
 
mist said:
Well it's a step in the right direction. Can I make a joke about German efficiency?
Click to expand...
By all means

This is monumental thread drift, but I was once organising a secondment for an employee to work in Germany for a period of five years. She had a degree in German which she'd acquired about 15 years previously and in the course of which she'd spent a year working in Germany. When we were arranging things, I told her in no uncertain terms to register her religion as "Atheist" because there's a Church Tax on employees in Germany, and I thought she might avoid it if she said she was an unbeliever. She duly did this, only to get a letter from the German Tax Authorities a few weeks later informing her that their records showed that she had worked in Germany before, that they knew she was a Roman Catholic and that they would be taxing her accordingly. Efficient or what?

Incidentally, we're talking serious money, here. Church Tax revenues in Germany were about 8 or 9 billion Euro in 2010, according to Mr Wiki's Pedia
 

Church tax? ***..LOL
 
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