How to Select A Smart Meter for Your Home or Office?

With all our everyday appliances getting the term “smart” attached to their name and corresponding features to go along with them, we don’t necessarily think about how the electricity meters can be smart and how to choose one for your specific needs.
 Let us start with the basics, what makes a smart meter and what benefits do they come along with?

What Is A Smart Meter?
Just like a traditional meter, the primary function of a smart meter is to measure the power consumption of any complex and generate usage reports for the power companies to help them charge for the same.

A smart meter can communicate with the electricity supplier for monitoring purposes as well. These smart meters generate daily reports and make the power reading on predefined time intervals which can be changed as per your needs or as desired by the electricity supplier.

Smart meters can exchange this information with the supplier either over a wireless network or through wired connections which help them maintain a record for the usage data. For wired connections, the transmission of data takes place over PLC (power line carrier).

Smart meters generally involve real-time or near real-time sensors, power outage notification and other features which were not present in traditional power meters. These meters are also capable of switching power phases when power is shifted to a different phase which significantly decreases the power outage time. Smart meters are also able to take advantage of lower off-peak time tariffs.

Since communication is critical for smart meters, each meter must have a reliable connection to the network depending on your particular situation.

Different smart meters are designed to cater to different requirements and there is no one size fits all case here.

What to Look For?
While looking for the right smart meter, keep in mind the specific requirements and the estimate to the power consumption to narrow down your choices. Different smart meters manufacturers have their respective power rating which corresponds to the amount of electrical load that they are made to tolerate. Small scale meter that is designed for your home is not to be used in a larger set up like a professional workspace. And similarly, meter designed to withstand larger power loads are not suitable for small load usage and they might end up being counter intuitive.

One thing you must consider is that smart meters are prone to cyberattacks just like any smart device that is connected to a network and this could lead to power outages both by cutting off people’s electricity and by overloading the grid.

However, most smart meter manufacturers use a high level of security to avoid this from happening, but in case it does happen you should keep a backup if your requirement is for a professional workspace.

Another reason to get a smart meter for your specific need would be that the measurements provided by the smart meters are far more accurate and might even save you a few bucks.

All in all, there are a lot of reasons to switch to smart meters and a lot of different ones to choose from different smart meter manufacturers depending on what you are in the market for!

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