this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2025
-23 points (17.1% liked)
Technology
70995 readers
4791 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Won't load without a login and the X alternatives, xcancel, unlace, don't recognize grok content yet.
What do you want to know?
The full url got shared now. The entire conversation can be read l had with Grok. Basically, l wish to figure out how exactly a smart meter more advanced than the electricity meter we used to use 30 years ago.
Smart meters automatically send usage data to the utility company (electricity, gas, water, etc) so they don't have to come and read it manually themselves. Are you interest in any particular detail about them?
Well yes, how do they read each appliance that we use ?
A standard smart meter can't exactly. It only measures the energy that is getting consumed into the house or whatever is behind it. But some companies have started to develop energy profiles on appliances though. Say for instance that your washing machine pulls a specific amount of power for 5 minutes, then a different amount for 15 minutes, etc as it runs through the various parts of the cycle. It creates sort of an energy signature that they might be able to tell what it is even if they are only looking at the combined usage of everything in the house. In my experience, this kind if profiling isn't very accurate, but it might get better over time with AI models.
Sure, so I got a smart meter with my solar panel installation and the big difference is in monitoring.
With the old meters back in the day, you could go read the meter yourself, see what the number is, then check it every day or every week to measure your energy consumption.
With a smart meter, that's all done through an app, and it uses patterns of energy use to identify individual appliances.
Which app is this ?
I should say too, that was almost 12:30 last night so you couldn't really see what solar was doing.
Here it is at 9:45 this morning:
Sense - https://sense.com/