5 ms·

Just dealt with this in the US. And what did they replace it with? A "4G" meter. So, what, about 8 years worth of functionality before that tech is turned off a

by diyftw 3y ago

Just dealt with this in the US. And what did they replace it with? A "4G" meter. So, what, about 8 years worth of functionality before that tech is turned off and yet another few million pieces of e-waste are generated?

HPsquared 3y ago
Who pays to replace them?
- fsflover 3y ago
  And who pays to recycle all the e-waste?
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    You. The catch is it's burned, not recycled.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  You do. It’s hidden in that the power company picks up the initial tab, but don’t let that confuse you into thinking that money doesn’t eventually come out of your pocket.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    The same is true from the human employees who'd wander around your neighborhood knocking on doors to do a manual read, though.
    - mnw21cam 3y ago
      Ha! Good joke. These days they just send out letters asking the customer to read the meter instead. First time I got one of those, I was thinking "What? No, that's your job. Don't I pay you for that?"
      - abofh 3y ago
        Most of the world reports their meters regularly to get accurate measures - the company still sends someone out every 6-12 months to true up. You're free to lie or ignore it, but the bill will come due just the same.
        bombcar 3y ago
        Many of them don’t even need to be directly read - they have a little sensor that can be read from nearby, sometimes even just by a utility truck driving by.
      - ceejayoz 3y ago
        Someone other than you has to read it once in a while; every 3-12 months most likely. I report mine (via SMS) so I don't get a surprise bill (or find I've been giving them a six month interest-free loan) when the estimated use and the actual use differ.
        iggldiggl 3y ago
        > Someone other than you has to read it once in a while; every 3-12 months most likely. Not here. I assume that as long as your consumption figures aren't wildly implausible, they just leave you alone. You can voluntarily upload a picture of your meter while submitting the reading, but I've never bothered and they've never requested it. Probably there are random spot checks, but personally I've never been subjected to one of those. They might also catch you when the meter finally gets replaced at some point, but power meters seem to be relatively long-lived, so they probably won't rely on that alone.
        mnw21cam 3y ago
        It also really doesn't help that some of the power companies have started sending letters/emails to their customers saying "your meter has reached the end of its life, we have a legal obligation to replace it, please arrange an appointment to fit a smart meter". They're lying to try to force you to allow them to install a smart meter, and they're only doing that because so many people have said that they don't want one.
jojobas 3y ago
One could mandate a modular design so that the communication pcb could be replaced, i.e. less e-waste. I wonder if smart meter manufacturers stay in business long enough for it to matter.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  The one I saw used BT4.2 to talk with the meter, and cellular network to push data to cloud (IIRC). The video is at https://youtu.be/G32NYQpvy8Q?si=YjQfnY9Ag7YUGJAd https://youtu.be/G32NYQpvy8Q?si=YjQfnY9Ag7YUGJAd
- Haemm0r 3y ago
  Our local suppliers smart meters communicate over the grid (provided the next substation with a beacon is near enough).
raverbashing 3y ago
I'm not sure how modular they are, if they're just replacing a transmitter or something, I've seen some places transmitting only locally (zigbee or other) then a module on the street syncing upstream But let's say even $500 (it's probably cheaper) for something that lasts 8 years is still much cheaper than sending people to get the readings
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Here they drive a car/truck around which reads the meters via a signal on the ISM band. I listen to these and other automated meter broadcasts with an RPi, a TV dongle, and this software: https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr
- phaer 3y ago
  > But let's say even $500 (it's probably cheaper) for something that lasts 8 years is still much cheaper than sending people to get the readings Probably true, but only as long as one can continue to externalize the cost of handling the resulting e-waste to future generations or at least current-day taxpayers.
  - xxs 3y ago
    "e-waste" is, unfortunately, mostly a term used to deflect from the real issues with all the garbage produced. Shipping and installing the meters likely generates more waste than producing the meters, themselves.
  - matt_kantor 3y ago
    I don't get it. Wasn't the cost of sending people to get readings externalized also?
    - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
      It was paid for out of your monthly bill.
coldtea 3y ago
Nobody cares about e-waste. If they did companies would stop producing new products at breakneck speed and consumers would stop buying them. Instead they care about the optics, so you get the ocassional Apple video about how they replaced foo material with bar, while creating not servicable BS - oh, and things like paper straws. Recycling is also mostly BS (things in the "recycle" bins just end in landfills abroad). So this is just another drop in the huge ever increasing pile.
- yterdy 3y ago
  Nobody with money cares about e-waste. Those of us on a tight budget value our devices and lament the difficulty of repair. My phone is 6 years old, and I'm hoping to be able to pay someone to replace the screen and battery at some point (knock on wood). I specifically bought a gaming laptop to replace my hoity-toity Surface-with-the-dead-battery-base, thinking it would be easier to repair. Come charge port issues, I happily tear it down only to find that it's soldered in (my 2008 HP laptop did not have this problem). Even when consumers are forced by circumstances to reduce, and make efforts to reuse, companies essentilly force recycle (which, as you said, is essentially "trash").
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >Nobody with money cares about e-waste. Those of us on a tight budget value our devices and lament the difficulty of repair. People on a tight budget are more concerned about the budget impact of repairability far more than the waste too (which makes sense). And the hundreds of millions with not so tight budget, still buy all kinds of crap, like "fast fashion" and the latest gadgetry.
    - yterdy 3y ago
      I disagree. The difficulty of replacing tech changes one's relationship to one's devices. Things that I see people throw away as "e-waste" are really, "Things someone couldn't be assed to repair or repurpose." For example, broken TVs could be repurposed as large light panels (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrqH2oOTK4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrqH2oOTK4), or their main boards could be hacked for fun and profit (https://hackaday.com/2022/11/14/a-single-board-computer-from-a-tv/ https://hackaday.com/2022/11/14/a-single-board-computer-from...). When I see a broken TV, even one I don't own, that's where the pain comes from. Same with phones, laptops, etc. We throw away so mny perfectly good general-purpose computers, it's insane. When we run out of a necessary resource for their manufacture, will we just be scavenging them?
Garvi 3y ago
> and yet another few million pieces of e-waste are generated That's money generated while the e-waste is not factored in. I know I'm stating the obvious. But it's a problem with being realistic, as you start seeing idiosyncrasies everywhere: I run my household on 4g as I can reach realistic speeds of 100Mb/s. Theoretically that goes up to 150Mb/s. A 4k stream (compressed without visual loss) requires 15Mb/s. So 10 people in a household could simultaneously watch 4k content. Did I fail at math? Why does anyone need 5g? What for?
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  I felt the same way during the 5G hype phase. There were all kinds of sales pitches about how it would enable new applications, but I never really got what more bandwidth was supposed to accomplish.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    5G boils down to “cell phones will continue to work in dense cities” and not really anything consumers care about beyond that.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  Well, ironically, 5g is much better designed for such small devices to connect to the cell network: it can support lower-power devices and they take a lot less network resources. 5G is an infrastructure upgrade more than a consumer upgrade (consumer benefit is incidental: the network is less congested, especially in denser areas)
  - bonton89 3y ago
    Basically it is so your smart TV can upload all your watch information without getting you to cough up your wifi password. Soon when you buy a toilet seat it will have a 5G modem in it and upload your bowel movement information to the cloud automatically. The possibilities are endless.
- andmarios 3y ago
LeifCarrotson 3y ago
I'm dealing with this in a slightly different context right now - installing cellular remote access/VPN appliances in industrial manufacturing equipment. The equipment is required to have a lifespan of at least 10 years. Our adjacent equipment regularly lasts double that. Some of the equipment is built around castings and transformers that are 4-10x that age. But they also want me to be able to dial into the equipment later, and won't give me WAN access. But no cellular vendor in their right mind will certify that the adjoining towers will have any particular frequency available for more than ~5 years, typically limiting it to a warranty of 3 years. This isn't the only pain point - what about the licensing server that the proprietary IDE for the PLC calls out to? The operating system on which said IDE is installed? Security protocols on the SCADA uplink? Replacement parts and critical spares? Good luck! Unfortunately, a huge amount of industry is effectively subsidized by breakneck investment in consumer smartphones, automotive, and PC equipment. People don't care or don't understand that their choices on the showroom floor for the glossier, flashier, 'smarter' gear result in painful, expensive obsolescence just a couple years in the future. Manufacturers are only incentivized to sell new products and ignore old products, we need a massive shift in consumer preference if we want to avoid this.
- SteveNuts 3y ago
  The IT side of manufacturing is a total nightmare. My employer just bought brand new CNC machines which shipped with windows XP controllers. I have no idea why the industry hasn't converged into some sort of Linux platform by now.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Because customers demanded Windows.
- mindslight 3y ago
  Add a wifi radio operating in AP mode with a well-known username and password. </s>
N19PEDL2 3y ago
I guess that at some point they will make a deal with Amazon to use their Sidewalk system to provide connectivity to meters.
theonlybutlet 3y ago
I think in reality it is a more efficient use of bandwidth using GSM. The alternative means your utility would have to maintain infrastructure and use up alternative bandwidth. In reality I think there should be regulation to keep some really basic form operating like 2G with GPRS or something on all networks.
- vel0city 3y ago
  Meters are already hardwired to each other. There's little reason to need it to be wireless to begin with. But either way, it's common for them to also chirp at 915MHz. They don't need their own band to operate, they can participate in these same bands used by other devices. They're not sending that much data.

by diyftw 3y ago

HPsquared 3y ago

Who pays to replace them?

fsflover 3y ago
And who pays to recycle all the e-waste?
- bayindirh 3y ago
  You. The catch is it's burned, not recycled.
sokoloff 3y ago
You do. It’s hidden in that the power company picks up the initial tab, but don’t let that confuse you into thinking that money doesn’t eventually come out of your pocket.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  The same is true from the human employees who'd wander around your neighborhood knocking on doors to do a manual read, though.
  - mnw21cam 3y ago
    Ha! Good joke. These days they just send out letters asking the customer to read the meter instead. First time I got one of those, I was thinking "What? No, that's your job. Don't I pay you for that?"
    - abofh 3y ago
      Most of the world reports their meters regularly to get accurate measures - the company still sends someone out every 6-12 months to true up. You're free to lie or ignore it, but the bill will come due just the same.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        Many of them don’t even need to be directly read - they have a little sensor that can be read from nearby, sometimes even just by a utility truck driving by.
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      Someone other than you has to read it once in a while; every 3-12 months most likely. I report mine (via SMS) so I don't get a surprise bill (or find I've been giving them a six month interest-free loan) when the estimated use and the actual use differ.
      - iggldiggl 3y ago
        > Someone other than you has to read it once in a while; every 3-12 months most likely. Not here. I assume that as long as your consumption figures aren't wildly implausible, they just leave you alone. You can voluntarily upload a picture of your meter while submitting the reading, but I've never bothered and they've never requested it. Probably there are random spot checks, but personally I've never been subjected to one of those. They might also catch you when the meter finally gets replaced at some point, but power meters seem to be relatively long-lived, so they probably won't rely on that alone.
        mnw21cam 3y ago
        It also really doesn't help that some of the power companies have started sending letters/emails to their customers saying "your meter has reached the end of its life, we have a legal obligation to replace it, please arrange an appointment to fit a smart meter". They're lying to try to force you to allow them to install a smart meter, and they're only doing that because so many people have said that they don't want one.

jojobas 3y ago

One could mandate a modular design so that the communication pcb could be replaced, i.e. less e-waste. I wonder if smart meter manufacturers stay in business long enough for it to matter.

bayindirh 3y ago
The one I saw used BT4.2 to talk with the meter, and cellular network to push data to cloud (IIRC). The video is at https://youtu.be/G32NYQpvy8Q?si=YjQfnY9Ag7YUGJAd https://youtu.be/G32NYQpvy8Q?si=YjQfnY9Ag7YUGJAd
Haemm0r 3y ago
Our local suppliers smart meters communicate over the grid (provided the next substation with a beacon is near enough).

raverbashing 3y ago

I'm not sure how modular they are, if they're just replacing a transmitter or something, I've seen some places transmitting only locally (zigbee or other) then a module on the street syncing upstream But let's say even $500 (it's probably cheaper) for something that lasts 8 years is still much cheaper than sending people to get the readings

sokoloff 3y ago
Here they drive a car/truck around which reads the meters via a signal on the ISM band. I listen to these and other automated meter broadcasts with an RPi, a TV dongle, and this software: https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr
phaer 3y ago
> But let's say even $500 (it's probably cheaper) for something that lasts 8 years is still much cheaper than sending people to get the readings Probably true, but only as long as one can continue to externalize the cost of handling the resulting e-waste to future generations or at least current-day taxpayers.
- xxs 3y ago
  "e-waste" is, unfortunately, mostly a term used to deflect from the real issues with all the garbage produced. Shipping and installing the meters likely generates more waste than producing the meters, themselves.
- matt_kantor 3y ago
  I don't get it. Wasn't the cost of sending people to get readings externalized also?
  - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
    It was paid for out of your monthly bill.

coldtea 3y ago

Nobody cares about e-waste. If they did companies would stop producing new products at breakneck speed and consumers would stop buying them. Instead they care about the optics, so you get the ocassional Apple video about how they replaced foo material with bar, while creating not servicable BS - oh, and things like paper straws. Recycling is also mostly BS (things in the "recycle" bins just end in landfills abroad). So this is just another drop in the huge ever increasing pile.

yterdy 3y ago
Nobody with money cares about e-waste. Those of us on a tight budget value our devices and lament the difficulty of repair. My phone is 6 years old, and I'm hoping to be able to pay someone to replace the screen and battery at some point (knock on wood). I specifically bought a gaming laptop to replace my hoity-toity Surface-with-the-dead-battery-base, thinking it would be easier to repair. Come charge port issues, I happily tear it down only to find that it's soldered in (my 2008 HP laptop did not have this problem). Even when consumers are forced by circumstances to reduce, and make efforts to reuse, companies essentilly force recycle (which, as you said, is essentially "trash").
- coldtea 3y ago
  >Nobody with money cares about e-waste. Those of us on a tight budget value our devices and lament the difficulty of repair. People on a tight budget are more concerned about the budget impact of repairability far more than the waste too (which makes sense). And the hundreds of millions with not so tight budget, still buy all kinds of crap, like "fast fashion" and the latest gadgetry.
  - yterdy 3y ago
    I disagree. The difficulty of replacing tech changes one's relationship to one's devices. Things that I see people throw away as "e-waste" are really, "Things someone couldn't be assed to repair or repurpose." For example, broken TVs could be repurposed as large light panels (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrqH2oOTK4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrqH2oOTK4), or their main boards could be hacked for fun and profit (https://hackaday.com/2022/11/14/a-single-board-computer-from-a-tv/ https://hackaday.com/2022/11/14/a-single-board-computer-from...). When I see a broken TV, even one I don't own, that's where the pain comes from. Same with phones, laptops, etc. We throw away so mny perfectly good general-purpose computers, it's insane. When we run out of a necessary resource for their manufacture, will we just be scavenging them?

Garvi 3y ago

> and yet another few million pieces of e-waste are generated That's money generated while the e-waste is not factored in. I know I'm stating the obvious. But it's a problem with being realistic, as you start seeing idiosyncrasies everywhere: I run my household on 4g as I can reach realistic speeds of 100Mb/s. Theoretically that goes up to 150Mb/s. A 4k stream (compressed without visual loss) requires 15Mb/s. So 10 people in a household could simultaneously watch 4k content. Did I fail at math? Why does anyone need 5g? What for?

hotpotamus 3y ago
I felt the same way during the 5G hype phase. There were all kinds of sales pitches about how it would enable new applications, but I never really got what more bandwidth was supposed to accomplish.
- bombcar 3y ago
  5G boils down to “cell phones will continue to work in dense cities” and not really anything consumers care about beyond that.
rcxdude 3y ago
Well, ironically, 5g is much better designed for such small devices to connect to the cell network: it can support lower-power devices and they take a lot less network resources. 5G is an infrastructure upgrade more than a consumer upgrade (consumer benefit is incidental: the network is less congested, especially in denser areas)
- bonton89 3y ago
  Basically it is so your smart TV can upload all your watch information without getting you to cough up your wifi password. Soon when you buy a toilet seat it will have a 5G modem in it and upload your bowel movement information to the cloud automatically. The possibilities are endless.
andmarios 3y ago

LeifCarrotson 3y ago

I'm dealing with this in a slightly different context right now - installing cellular remote access/VPN appliances in industrial manufacturing equipment. The equipment is required to have a lifespan of at least 10 years. Our adjacent equipment regularly lasts double that. Some of the equipment is built around castings and transformers that are 4-10x that age. But they also want me to be able to dial into the equipment later, and won't give me WAN access. But no cellular vendor in their right mind will certify that the adjoining towers will have any particular frequency available for more than ~5 years, typically limiting it to a warranty of 3 years. This isn't the only pain point - what about the licensing server that the proprietary IDE for the PLC calls out to? The operating system on which said IDE is installed? Security protocols on the SCADA uplink? Replacement parts and critical spares? Good luck! Unfortunately, a huge amount of industry is effectively subsidized by breakneck investment in consumer smartphones, automotive, and PC equipment. People don't care or don't understand that their choices on the showroom floor for the glossier, flashier, 'smarter' gear result in painful, expensive obsolescence just a couple years in the future. Manufacturers are only incentivized to sell new products and ignore old products, we need a massive shift in consumer preference if we want to avoid this.

SteveNuts 3y ago
The IT side of manufacturing is a total nightmare. My employer just bought brand new CNC machines which shipped with windows XP controllers. I have no idea why the industry hasn't converged into some sort of Linux platform by now.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Because customers demanded Windows.
mindslight 3y ago
Add a wifi radio operating in AP mode with a well-known username and password. </s>

N19PEDL2 3y ago

I guess that at some point they will make a deal with Amazon to use their Sidewalk system to provide connectivity to meters.

theonlybutlet 3y ago

I think in reality it is a more efficient use of bandwidth using GSM. The alternative means your utility would have to maintain infrastructure and use up alternative bandwidth. In reality I think there should be regulation to keep some really basic form operating like 2G with GPRS or something on all networks.

vel0city 3y ago
Meters are already hardwired to each other. There's little reason to need it to be wireless to begin with. But either way, it's common for them to also chirp at 915MHz. They don't need their own band to operate, they can participate in these same bands used by other devices. They're not sending that much data.