Throughout 2013, Adding Light will take a look at practical decisions that everyone can take to contribute to making our communities more ecologically and economically resilient. Everything in this Daily Decisions comes from experience or research applied directly by our family or people we know directly.
Imagine running a business where you had to meet payroll, pay invoices, receive payments, but you could not see your bank account until fifteen days after the end of the month....already half way through a month before you can see what you did last month. No businessperson would tolerate that kind of information lag on their cash flow.
Now imagine that your doctor has told you to lower your blood pressure through diet and exercise, but you can only check it every thirty days. Or that you have been told to lose weight, but you can only check it once a month to see if you are meeting your goals. Each of these, and many other examples, are almost impossible without much more regular information. Yet, every month, most Americans only see what they are using for energy once a month, and well after they have used the energy, rendering the information useless to manage their energy flow.
Enter the digital meter. Instead of a spinning disk, or rotating dials, the meter records the information digitally, providing instant access at the device. Additionally, it logs the instantaneous usage readings so that you can look back and see not only how much of a resource you used at any one time, but exactly when you used it. Information like this is crucial when trying to find waste in resource usage. If you know that you used a certain amount of water over the course of the month, that may not tip you off that you have a problem. If you see that half of your water usage occurred between midnight and six in the morning, that would be useful information. Lastly, depending on your agreement with the utility, you may have access to the information within a day of your usage, and may be able to receive notices that you have used more energy on a given day than you wanted.
That final concept starts to cross over into the realm of what has been termed "smart meters". A digital recording device that can be read by a van driving down the street does not constitute a smart meter. That designation requires instant communication between the meter and the utility, and to some extent, some way for the utility to communicate back to the user - either through the meter or some other interface. Smart meters report power quality or service issues to the utility without the customer having to be around. They also have the capacity to help the customer turn off unneeded equipment during high-price, high-consumption times of day. In addition, these smart meters sit on a network of smart devices that monitor stability and usage in the distribution of the resource.
For right now, as a consumer, you should call your utility and ask for them to install a digital recording meter on your property. Most will do it for free, or will roll the cost into your bill. If they tell you this option is not available, ask to talk to someone in their meter department about the options available. As a last resort, if you get no response, or they have not yet begun that type of program, contact your local elected official and enlist them into the discussion. Smart resource management starts with good information, and ends with more money in the pockets of consumers. To any elected official who knows what they are doing, that means more money to spend at local businesses and improve the local economy.
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