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Eskom plan to install smart meters


Raiden2912

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Smart meters are probably needed for a real time energy market. Unfortunately the money at Eskom ran out a long time ago. Without funds, energy prices will have to rise sharply or government will have to pour more taxpayer money in the bottomless pit.

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17 hours ago, Raiden2912 said:

Hi All,

Apparently eskom is planning to install smart meters in all homes in 4 years, with this they can apparently turn off appliances in your home? 😳 

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMYT3942J/

The meter is the single connection to your property. If they want to cut off devices they'll go for the geyser and use ripple switches or the modern equivalent of that. 

COJ have been talking about using smart meters to throttle the supply to properties during the evenings. If you exceed the limit the meter gives an audible alarm. If you don't heed that then the meter will trip with what is now an overload. 

Municipalities should think about the Power Heroes program that COCT have. You sign up for this. "Heroes" are then incentivised to reduce their consumption when they get a message on their phone. 

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10 minutes ago, Dieter said:

Will the Smartmeter not just change/throttle the incoming supply from 60A to 10A?

That's exactly the idea. They send a signal to meters in the load shedding block to limit the current allowed.

If you exceed the limit then you get a warning. After a stipulated period of time (also included in the message), if you have not reduced your load you will be cut off until the end of the load shed or until a reset message is sent.

They don't know what you use the electricity for and they don't care. They only know and care how much you are using.

People who are careful with their electricity supply should remain unaffected. Those of us running off of batteries should not have much to be worried about.

Where this is potentially problematic is if there are multiple dwellings on a property but only one meter.

One way of looking at this may be that it encourages people to do the prudent things: Efficient lighting, alternate ways of heating water, timers on geysers, not leaving things on that aren't actually needed.
 

10 minutes ago, Dieter said:

I cannot see how they will control individual circuits, will they rewire the db? what if a household has 2 x geysers?

 

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Thinking: What will my inverter do if load is 30A, battery has charge, grid is limited to 10A? Sure... the essential circuits will keep on running if the meter is turned off. But is the meter smart enough to say "I can only get 10A from the grid, so I will get the rest of the required power from other sources"?

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On 2023/04/30 at 7:35 PM, Vaal said:

Haha. The users who doesn't pay for electricity, why would the save or do loadshifting? LoL, another scheme to plunder and steel. 

There's lots of things to be said EG why is this even neccessary? But it sounds better to me than the current situation. This way at least you can keep the lights, wifi and a TV on, probably the fridge too. That has to be better.

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