I got Smart Metered Today

I'd say they mainly reduce the latency of data collection.

You'll always need some guy in a truck to go look at things.

IMO, ( and I looked at this as somebody having to do work in that market in the late '80s ), meter readers don't cost much. They're mainly just unreliable.

-- Les Cargill

I suppose that's a one-time increase in revenue.

No one in the truck needed. They can (not all do, yet) report directly back to the utility.

Every employee is expensive, just in benefits, payroll taxes, and other government mandates.

I'm curious, how do those smart meters report directly? BPL? As a ham I object to that. Or is it cell based?

The Brits had a Mars lander. Last heard of, descending on target.

Then nothing.

--
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence 
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
                                       (Richard Feynman)

In places, it's much steeper. Hence the Loop.

--
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence 
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
                                       (Richard Feynman)

It varies but often ISM from meter to meter. From the meter mesh to CO it can be radio, cell, or Internet. The city is putting an Internet system so they're tagging along on that (or perhaps verse visa is a better way of looking at it). They already had the system for water meters. Adding the electric meters was a piece of cake. They've already got the right-of-way.

I have no actual idea what value it has. Probably just better accuracy.

But if it goes offline? Maybe after a number of years, it'll pay for itself, but for now, no.

Cost *per reading*, if you had a perfectly reliable workforce, was not much. Cost of AMR systems was prohibitive until small, cell-modem based transmission dropped enough.

Notice all the dancing in the line items. The system that works is on a 17 year payback, half an order of magnitude more expensive than the target 3-4 years.

That's one city. I dunno what the finance cost is, but the deployment cost per meter is substantially more than labor cost for a year or four.

I also recall that labor costs were completely recoupable by the utility*. Whether that's true or not now I don't really know, since there's been some measure of electrical deregulation.

*labor as a line item in negotiations with the Corporation Commission on the state of Oklahoma went through without comment every time.

-- Les Cargill

from

Offline? I don't understand this point.

I'd like to see the numbers from a city (and a private company) that's already installed them. It's hard to believe their labor costs are so low.

Utilities often are more of a cost-plus, rather than a normal corporation. The higher their costs the higher their profit (there's a reason so many employees end up on Unite Way boards).

y

Well, I'm envious to my next-room colleaque who has constructed some stuff which is now onboard Cassini, orbiting Jupiter. But that was launched on a Titan/Centaur, as it is a collaborative NASA-ESA mission. Many (if not most) of them are nowadays.

If a launch on an Ariane is what counts, the Herschel and Planck missions come to mind (they carry stuff designed by colleaques): those ended to the L2 Lagrange point, which is beyond the moon. The EU contribution to the human made debris on the Moon surface is called SMART-1, but admittedly that was rather recent. The Rosetta mission made a Mars flyby in 2007 as a part of its voyage to the asteroid belt.

There are lots of smart guys and great people both in the NASA and ESA. But of course ESA is much younger and has roughly 1/4 of the NASA annual budget, not much argument about which one is a bigger player.

Regards, Mikko (a.k.a Okkim Atnarivik)

(...)

Oil leak?

--Winston

Lucas electrical system.

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technology,

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By "offline", I mean there's some sort of catastrophic failure that keeps it down for a while - a critical base station gets hit by a truck, backhoe, yadda yadda. You could even have very hard to identify RFI problems that knock stuff out.

For fixed/wireline systems, there's even more "opportunity for difficulty".

Not really. One reader reads certainly hundreds and maybe thousands of meters per month.

I had the same reaction - I could have been given bad info, but what I was told is that sensitivity to labor cost is very low.

Exactly. That is changing, though.

-- Les Cargill

No, it was wired by Lucas.

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At least some of them use a self-healing mesh topology for the local interconnect. Redundancy in the "head-end" isn't that difficult, either.

I don't see the issue. You're assuming the electrical system will survive but for some reason a data system can't. If that's a worry, add redundancy. It's a lot easier than adding redundancy to the power system. ...and if it can't "call home", it just does it when it can. What happens when the meter reader quits?

...and makes $4000 (up) per month. Many of these jobs are union so that's probably light.

That's not what we were told.

How do you do anything else, with a public monopoly?

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Data systems always have single points of failure.

More cost... you'd have to know the expected Erlang type figures, yadda...

See my comments about "reliability" above ( wrt labor ) .

already

Meh? They were $10 an hour jobs. A quick Google shows $38k for Union New Jersey.

Okay then. I am taking what I was told by somebody who was a consultant used by the entire industry. And again, I was surprised.

Beats me. 17 year payback. Woohoo!

-- Les Cargill

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How did you come up with that universal truth? A meter reader can get run over by a bus, too. All of them can in the same minute.

In any case, it doesn't matter. Data is not lost.

Some. With your attitude no system would ever work.

So there is NO DIFFERENCE.

already

Municipal, right? Union readers get far more than that. Now add benefits, employment taxes, and all the rest. It'll be double that, at least.

Again, not what we were told, by such an expert.

Not believing it. Ten, I can.

but

Erm, ever work on one? it's extremely unusual to find a backhaul to a store and forward system that ain't got one backhoe-ready day-ruiner.

"You guys really need a diversity link for that." They almost never do.... although to be fair, it's usually not that hard to add one after the fact. These days, a wireless backhaul is very easy and not that much money.

There was a gas station in Plano I finally stopped going to after they were down for three visits in a row over a three week period. I bet it was a $50 to $100k a day station ( 20 fueling points, always busy ) made useless by a "business class" DSL backhaul with no doubt lousy media... I looked - it was a DSL modem.

Hopefully.

Then yer mom! :)

I am just making idle conversation. There's no "attitude" here.

yes, there is. A meter reader outage is much smaller than the Big Concentrator going down.

I dunno - do you have cable? I bet it's close to 1% outage annually, and that's something we pay more for than what an AMR node could afford.

already

Not sure.

yeah, could be. Still... union meter readers? Oy. I did not know that.

I would not be surprised if there were a complete spectrum of such experts... a consultant is somebody you hire to tell you what you want to hear.

That was the figure for the non-wireless Itron system ( which looked like the only one that met spec ) on the PDF I linked to. 17 years.

If it goes into wider deployment, then yeah - I bet that bends the cost curve a little. Depends on how nimble the vendor is.

-- Les Cargill

Is his stuff among the devices that are growing tin whiskers and causing failure modes to arise?

but

Non-answer noted.

Usually, almost,... Now there are some real absolutes.

Good grief.

If by some small chance it is, it's not like the end of the world. It's not even critical data. No lives are hanging by a thread.

No, you're making no sense. You seem to just be looking for something to argue. Your absolutes ain't cutting it.

reader

Good grief. You've never seen redundant systems?

Not buying that one either. Outages aren't anywhere near 1%. An outage some time during every 100 days, perhaps.

market

already

Just full of information, huh?

Certainly. Most utilities in collective-bargaining states are.

...but you're immune. Figures.

From one estimate.

This stuff isn't new.