Smart Meter: What is it and Why it can Save You Money on your Bills

The smart meter is a newly introduced kind of electricity and gas meter that digitally sends meter readings to your energy utility company. This ensures more accuracy in your energy bills. In addition, the meter comes with a monitor to assist you in terms of understanding your energy usage. By 2020, every home in Britain will be having a smart meter already installed.

How does it Work?

These next generation meters are designed to replace your current meters, which are still using technology developed a couple of decades ago. The Smart Meters utilise DCC, a secure national communication network in automatically and wirelessly sending to your supplier the actual energy usage in your household. As such, households will no longer be relying on energy bills that are estimated, or be required to supply their own regular meter readings, or even have meter readers coming to read the meter in their homes.

Smart Meters also come equipped with an In-Home Display (IHD) and it’s not really the meter per se that will save you money, rather it’s the useful information you’ll get from the IHD. This is because the Display will show you precisely what your homestead is using and when, from which you can learn energy saving techniques and potentially bring down your energy bills.

Benefits of a Smart Meter

Using a Smart Meter comes with several benefits:

• More accurate energy bills: The Smart Meters ushers in the end of estimated bills, or the need of remembering to supply meter readings and/or strange meter readers intruding into your domestic privacy.
• Better insights into your usage: With the IHD, you immediately can see how your lifestyle and habits impact your energy consumption and ultimately the bill. From such insights, it is possible to make decisions that are smarter towards saving money and energy.
• Easier and faster energy switching: Because your data on usage is readily accessible, if you find it necessary to switch your energy utility company, the process is very fast, taking just about half an hour.
• Innovative energy tariffs: Making use of collected energy household consumption data, suppliers are in a position to develop more competitive and cost-effective tariffs.
• Taking the UK’s energy system into the contemporary 21st century: Today the future is definitely smart, and the new smart meters form part of the national effort towards creating a smart energy grid, part of providing efficient, low-carbon, reliable and efficient energy to households in Britain.

What is the Cost?

Installation of your Smart Meter is usually going to cost you nothing as it gets installed by the energy supplier for example, First Utility. The roll-out cost is already covered in your energy bill—similar to how installation and maintenance of your traditional meters is covered.

Bottom Line

It’s the simple, small changes that will assist you in terms of saving money on your energy bill like boiling only a single mug’s worth of hot water if in fact that’s what is needed. One more tip is to consider turning off some appliances overnight when they are not required. Even when on standby you are still using some energy, which of course doesn’t make sense financially if your goal is to save.

With this Smart Meter, you will obtain a clearer picture and deeper insight into the amounts of energy different household actions and appliances use so that you can accordingly modify your behaviour with the goal of making savings.

*This is a collaborative post.