energy in UK

Mmm. Dunno. I hope they last 5 years, but it is their problem.

:-D

I think mine (mechanical) while it was installed inside my garden, I looked and could measure down to litres. But the times I took the reading in a card provided by the company, they did not care for decimals (I think the unit is cubic meters). As you say, it doesn't matter, goes into the next month.

yeah, technically it is your water. But...

Heh :-D

Indeed.

Absolutely.

Yes, mine is outside now, they moved it a month ago. But they did not move the one of my neighbour, which was identical. incomprehensible.

I can not think imperial units :-P

The smart gas meters around here are powered by batteries with a 10 year life. They only have a short range wireless link to the smart electric meter in the same house that can then have a much longer range link to the utility transceiver on a nearby utility pole.

Since it has plenty of power, the electric meter provides updates every few minutes to allow time of use metering. The gas meter only provides once per day updates, presumably to conserve power.

kw

Only in climate change denial propaganda. The logic seems to be that people should only use energy that has been bought from the fossil carbon extraction industry, and that that is the only possible energy source.

That's the fossil fuel financed climate change denial propaganda machine, of which you are a mindless acolyte.

You should take your meds more regularly.

To do that, the electricity meter has to be designed for that usage from the start, maybe a decade before (here).

At apartment buildings, if the meters are bundled together in an utility room, maybe they can handle a single transmitter with more power. But at the sites I have seen the gas meters are not joined in a single room, they are either close to each apartment, or grouped in a cupboard at each floor.

I am remembering that the water company they said they would use gadgetry with SIM cards, so some sort of data connection by mobile phone.

Electricity meters here use some kind of PLC. At the big transformer (several cubic meters) there is hardware to collect the data from each home and either send by another network, or pass somehow to the high voltage side of the transformer. Surely the transformer is remotely controlled, so the data network is there.

That is the same as in small rural villages in the UK except that each house is only on one of the two phases at 240v. ISTR US and Japan put their aircon across the antiphase pair to get the power handling up.

Our village hall has both phases present on 100A circuits 240v. There are warnings and duplicate distribution blocks for each phase.

And also warnings for using mixed old Black/Red/Green and modern Blue/Brown/Yellow-Green mains cabling.

Earth is mandatory in UK installations often a local earth copper spike nailed into ground at the premises and the shield of the underground cable. My electricity actually comes in as two overhead wires. This is now actually quite rare in the UK and only happens in rural villages.

Quite possibly. It seems to work fine. It can be fun if the phase that isn't one of ours drops out completely and ours stay good. So much kit today works fine on 100+ volts that you only notice there is a problem when you try to boil a kettle or put on an old fashioned filament lamp!

One of them, Rishi Sunak (my MP) was a perfectly good candidate but the Tory *membership* voted for Liz the Lettuce and so well deserved the total annihilation they suffered at the polls for their stupidity.

I don't doubt that the grass roots rabid Tories would have voted for someone even more deranged than Liz the Lettuce if given the option.

That simply isn't true except for a handful of truly bent ones. Retired politicians doing lobbying using parliamentary passes is another matter.

All of the serving MP's that I have encountered and on both sides of the house have been good people trying to do their very best for their constituency and for the country. The bad apples are few and far between.

The problem is that too many read PPE or are bean counters and lawyers and not enough scientists or engineers. ISTR about a dozen are on the innovation science and technology group (almost all that qualify). I was quite impressed by Chi Onwurah (Labour) Newcastle MP the current chair.

I don't know - I imaging a couple of tens of meters. They use ~450MH for the gas meter link and ~920MHz for the electric meter.

Where the network coverage or location of the meters precludes the usual arrangement PG&E have various RF bridges that can be used.

For our local utility and many others in California the same company distributes both gas and electricity.

For us the same company distributes both gas and electricity so they can do them together (although different companies actually supply the equipment).

Cellular is one of the communication options if there isn't a transponder on a utility pole within acceptable distance.

Right.

In Spain we now have a new gadget that will be mandatory soon, the V16 beacon. It replaces the reflective triangles we used to signal a broken or accidented car on the road.

It is a lamp on batteries and a magnet that we put on the roof of the car, without needing to exit the car. It emits a relatively high power orange light, and communicates the site of the accident to a centralized site a minute after being powered up. It means it has an internet connection of its own, that will work for 10 years without having to pay again. Some internal SIM.

I already had to use it once, I had a puncture.

AFAIK, we don't have those smaller transformers.

Noblesse oblige went out the window many moons ago. Time to get rid of such parasitic anachronisms.

No it has three wires coming in but they are just like in the US but

Here anything with external metal parts should be earthed by law. Double insulated things or with no metal surfaces to touch do not have to be and can be on two pin plugs. Mains electric razors for instance.

Most UK ring main sockets *require* an earth pin to be present on the mains plug to open the mechanical cover over the live and neutral terminals. It was not always so. Previous round pin plugs you could poke a piece of metal or screwdriver in there and touch live!

Last time it happened was the coldest day of the year and it was the milk tanker hit black ice and took down 2 poles and 30' of hedge. There is no way he was doing 30mph! Engineers had us back on by nightfall.

Life peerages effectively repurposed the anachronism into something decidedly useful. My younger brother got to deal with Seb Coe from time to time, after he became Lord Coe. He approved of him.

The code requirement for an earthed system goes way back in the UK. I can't recall how far back but pre-WWII. My second year college room had old 3 pin round sockets in and they were already rare in the 1980's.

BS546 was published in 1934 and quickly adopted. Prior to that every regional electric company had their own random shaped plug & sockets. The odd one even supplied DC! BS1363 was introduced just post war 1947.

That is essentially the same rectangular fused plug that we use today. Modern ones are much less well made with less conductor than the old ones. 13A plugs have been officially derated to 10A now.

His insurers would be. Having insurance to drive on public roads is a strict requirement in the UK and relatively well policed by ANPR.

In difficult cases a bridge direct to cellular can be installed.

In general gas lines and electric lines are not allowed to share trenches for safety reasons.

A tree fell up the street from our cabin. It hit the wire in the street, sent a shock wave down the block, and tore the power line off the front of our cabin. It lay on the ground, still live.

It cost $400 to fix the mess, mostly carpentry. The local utility took down the wire first and put it back up after the woodwork was fixed. That was free.

It is anonymous, that's an important feature so that people don't get paranoid. But you can register a phone app that talks to it, if you want.

So the authorities get information at somewhere about all active beacons at a given time, and they can dispatch the police to go have a look. There is no promise that they do. But those electronic panels on the roads that tell you "accident ahead" should activate. Also information on car navigators like a TomTom (I did not see it).

I don't know if that emergency room is yet built and active.

Certainly. Just my case.

But there have been a bunch of people killed while they were just setting the triangles. The authorities thought that the beacon would help with those.

I have seen them in Canada. But we don't have them. In my block, we had

On modern neighbourhoods, they are subterranean.

A freezer should last two days if you don't open it. Duration depends on size.