Edmonton Power Corp (Epcor) is switching all the meters for customers serviced in Edmonton with smart meters.  One of the new meters  features is remote power disconnection.

A convenient feature

The ability to “open”or “close”the circut to your house remotely from a central office is probably nice for Epcor.  Maybe not so much for the delinquents that can now be cut off without a site visit.

Hopefully there is some notice involved.

As well these meters let Epcor monitor your power consumption hourly and so are building a very useful data store. This monitoring apparently enables Epcor to identify power outages sooner.

Of course sharing this data with the actual user so they can make intelligent decisions about their usage is not on tap.

Heavens, personal usage data might result in us changing how much power we use, perhaps even use less.  Good for the environment but not so much for Epcors bottom line.

When technology goes wrong!

You might be wondering what triggered this post about smart meters.  If you had the thought there was a personal story in here somewhere you would be correct.

We came home from a vacation late Monday and I had booked an extra day off (Tuesday)  to unwind ( We had attended our only son’s wedding after all -nuff said about needing an unwind day)

On Tuesday at a little after 3:00 pm our power went out. For some reason, instead of just waiting for it to come back I decided to check Epcors web site, to my surprise there were no outages reported.

So I called Epcor, making a long story short, they sent out a crew who advised our smart meter had a fault (apparently there have been a few of them).

I guess the meter decided on it’s own, even though Epcor had not requested it, we were a bad risk and shut down our power – that is it went into “open” mode while still reporting to Epcor that it was “closed”.

So much for the smart meter informing Epcor, in fact this was just the opposite.  I sure hope we did not get one meter replaced with another faulty one.

Oh the pain

So a power outage yesterday fixed by a temporary bypass followed by a power outage today for a permanent fix.  My multi router, server, switch and smart technology infrastructure all require power and did not appreciate the interruptions,  to say the least.

To Epcor I say upgrading to the latest technology is great but power is critical in a cold dark place like Edmonton, so please, make sure the equipment works before installing it.