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this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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This sounds very British so it is almost certainly a "smart meter" that E.ON are installing (which transmits usage data, and can be cut off or set to pre-pay remotely)
Canadian too, well at least British Columbia. There was a big drive a few years back to modernize the meters and some of what I suspect are the types that became 5G kills you groups fought long and hard to block these new meters being swapped in.
Something about radio waves and then not being accurate. I don't think these people in this group were trying to steal hydro but more on some health grounds kick to block these new devices from being deployed. I think individual home owners can refuse the new meters much like people can refuse spraying on their road side properties.
In the end as a business person I suspect they served a few purposes for real time accuracy of data collection on the status of demand and the health of the grid, and eliminating the need to send out meter readers to manually read a odometer on a old style mechanical meter.
Unlike others I don't think they were in the Bill Gates lane of trying to microchip you with vaccines to control you and identify a person as well as your cellphone does.
About the blocking attempts reagarding accuracy; here in the Netherlands the older analog meters could only measure real power. The reasoning is that the new smart meters don't do this, but instead measure in another way, causing consumers to also pay for reactive power. In reality, this isn't true, but the urban legend is strong.
The kicker is that it's HIGHLY unlikely that those meters were 5G.
It's muuuuch cheaper to get a CAT1 LTE radio module and go 4G WITH the added benefit that 4G has better distance/signal/etc than 5G does at a trade-off of a lower speed.
Where I am in the midwestern U.S., those meters are typically in people's BASEMENTS.
5G would be a a combination of massive overkill for a few megabytes of data a MONTH and non-starter for connectivity reasons because getting bars to a tower through several feet of earth and cinder block is notably harder in the 30gHz+ frequency range when compared to the ~6gHz of 4G (or the 850mHz-2.1gHz of 3G).
These things are streaming text files full of usage data numbers. Netflix-capable connections are wholly unnecessary. Your old 2006 motorola razr flip phone could handle the data these meters are putting out without breaking a sweat.