Hurricane Matthew

[HarryN]

In somewhat related news, I saw a post on another forum that "smart meters" had prevented millions of people from loosing power in FL. Of course there was no data or even conjecture of how this is possible. It seems more likely that they were promoting smart grid / smart meters than anything else.

My own experience with smart meters, is that they put noise and glitches in the line, so much so, that I had to put a UPS on the DSL modem to clean up the power or it constantly disconnected.

 

[PhotonWrangler]

I don't understand how a smart meter can prevent someone from losing power in a storm. A tree blows over, takes out some power lines on the way down, and you have no power regardless of the type of meter.
:thinking:

 

[bykfixer]

I don't understand how a smart meter can prevent someone from losing power in a storm. A tree blows over, takes out some power lines on the way down, and you have no power regardless of the type of meter.
:thinking:

Exactly.

Maybe smart meters have short circuit prevention like the delay built into modern comfort systems. In flickering situations somehow maybe that prevents 'fuses' within the grid itself from popping off?

Once I lost power in an all electric apartment in winter. When the power line was fixed and they energized the line it kept blowing their fuses because 65 apartments all had their heaters still turned on.
After 10 days without power most had left their apartment and gone to hotels or relatives. Naturally they didn't think of turning a heater off in a 45° apartment before leaving....
I suppose smart meters somehow help in that type of scenario as well.

 

[PhotonWrangler]

My understanding of smart meters is that they just report consumption back to the utility for billing and outage reporting purposes. They have no means of actually regulating consumption within a home.

I can see how automated outage reporting helps a utility to respond to an outage faster, helping them to localize the cause of the outage and dispatch repair crews more quickly. I just dont' see how it can prevent an issue, including the problem of an apartment building full of electrical heaters that are all turned on. That's an awful lot of inrush current.