Hi, I need an average electrical rate to use in some calculations. I'm aware that they vary widely from region to region. I believe the Seattle area (served by Seattle City Light) might have the lowest general rate in the USA which is 7 to 8 cents a killowatt-hour.

Can members of LG state their electric rate without going into personal details? I would like however to know the general area and if it's a residential or other type (subsidized, commercial, industrial, etc). Thanks.

In my area (Montreal, Province of Quebec, Canada) I currently have a residential rate showing:
$0.0568 per kilowatthour for up to 30 kilowatthours/day
$0.0860 per kilowatthour above 30 kilowatthours/day

That's cheap! Here, it's more like .11-.13 dollars per 1000 Watt-Hours.

Israel : https://www.iec.co.il/EN/IR/Documents/tariff_1.4.12.pdf (file not up to date, but it have not changed that much)

Most utilities here now use what's called time of use pricing.

See here for the full chart.

How is it possible for the provider & biller to know you're running AC or dryer during the hi-rated period or not? And "that's how it's done" & "oh they just know" isn't enough, details please, thanks.

Smart meters record the time of power draw in addition to the time itself. So they transmit something like :

12:00..12:15 - X KWh
12:15..12:30 - X KWh
12:30..12:45 - X KWh
12:45..01:00 - X KWh
01:15..01:30 - X KWh
..
..

The power company then can have all they need to bill you according to time of day

(that is for the basics, some smart meters also report momentary power, power factor and the likes, and can shut down power by remote command)



Other common ways of doing it common in the past (maybe still used in some countries) :

Mechanical meters that change gears by a remote command (ripple signal injected into the power line), so they get a command to switch to "high" gear when the peak hours start and to "low" gear when the peak is over

Two mechanical meters, where the 2nd is supplying something big like water heater or dryer. The power to that meter is being switched by the power company remotely with a relay that responds to ripple signal. So you leave the water heater, dryer etc on for the night, then when the power company switch on the power your devices work, and cut off by their thermostat or when completing the cycle etc. In the morning the power company shut down the power. Then you are billed for the 2 meters at different rates (its not a "full" TOU system, because what you draw from the 1st meter costs the same all the time). This system have been used in Israel in the past but abandoned at some point in the 80s

Anyone know what frequencies are used for modern meters (microwaves?)? I suppose digital frequency hopping is used like cell phones?

Asking as it seems that someone (like a hacker, an insider, or former disgruntled employee) in the know, can manipulate the signal even a little which ends up being a lot. Thanks for the info.

Its indeed microwave range. What band exactly i dont know. My guess is, maybe some of them use not only the cell phone bands but also the cell phone network itself for the transmission, others may be using their own range



The data is encrypted, and if everything is done properly, the key size is sufficient to prevent brute force breaking it in reasonable time. But it is not allways done properly, and the key itself at the power company is not allways guarded properly either so there allways is possibility of a security hole in the meters or leaked key at the power company

Without the key the only thing you can do is to blindly corrupt or jam the signal

Most encrypted data streams have some error detection bits, so "little change" to the data in the encrypted form would not change the data to something random but make it detect as corrupted at the receiving end, so ask the meter for transmission again and again untill it pass the check. Atleast that is what most other communication systems do

And yep i guess hopping would be used to prevent interference or jamming

We've been offered a smart meter here were not having one cos I think we will end up paying more for our supply I may be cynical but changes usually result in the consumer paying more. The meter transmit the billing data using the mobile fone network at either 800 1800 or 2100 Megacycles frequency digital of course.

Everything built around here in the past 20 years has smart meters.  There are a number of streetlights on the major thoroughfares that have the antenna systems connected to them to which the smart meters transmit to or we have the utility company (XCEL) has little cars/SUVs that drive around the neighborhoods with a smart antenna on the top.  Very cool, me thinks.  In the old neighborhoods, we still have the meter maids. 

Depending what you choose to believe, it's also been said that smart meters are known for adverse health effects.  To each their own but I frankly wouldn't want yet another EMF producing thing on my home or business either, which, unlike, say, my cell phone, is ALWAYS on.  (cell phones can be turned off, etc).  In a really densely populated house-house-house neighborhood you'd probably get the effects of all your neighbors' meters too.  Imagine an apartment /multi-family dwelling, with multiple meters, usually in a big bank of them.  I wouldn't want to be sleeping in the bedroom behind all those for very long!

There are, however, apparently these smart meter covers available, these little stainless steel mesh things kind of like a sink strainer, that act as a little Faraday cage and block most (like 98% apparently!) of the signal. I do wonder if that renders the smart meters useless in, say, rural areas where the other transponders or whatever are already far away from the home/business and its electric meter. 


Now, for electric rates...most expensive I've personally heard of was probably Whale Pass, AK.  Small town too far away from other towns and in too rural of an area with too few people to feasibly hook onto the rest of the grid (at least so far), so the town is run  on one large diesel generator.  Sure, there's power poles and transformers along the (gravel) streets, and each home or business has a meter like normal, but it's supposedly like 65 cents a kilowatt hour! 

I did look up electric rates here (Fairbanks, AK) recently but I don't remember what they were, I'm house hunting so I was curious what utilities are around here.

Depending what you choose to believe, it's also been said that smart meters are known for adverse health effects.  To each their own but I frankly wouldn't want yet another EMF producing thing on my home or business either, which, unlike, say, my cell phone, is ALWAYS on.  (cell phones can be turned off, etc).  In a really densely populated house-house-house neighborhood you'd probably get the effects of all your neighbors' meters too.  Imagine an apartment /multi-family dwelling, with multiple meters, usually in a big bank of them.  I wouldn't want to be sleeping in the bedroom behind all those for very long!

If you are afraid of this, then you should move somewhere, where is even no radio, nor TV signal. Because what the normal receivers need as "just above the noise floor" is stronger than the ZigBee just few meters away from the transmitter. And unlike the Zigbee, the radio/TV are really on 100% of the time, while the meters only sends just few packets awhile, so the transmitter is ON just few percent of the time, even with "very dense" communication (when acting as a relay node)...

There are, however, apparently these smart meter covers available, these little stainless steel mesh things kind of like a sink strainer, that act as a little Faraday cage and block most (like 98% apparently!) of the signal. I do wonder if that renders the smart meters useless in, say, rural areas where the other transponders or whatever are already far away from the home/business and its electric meter. 

I('m afraid adding such covers would be treated as tampering with the meter...
And given how the ZigBee works (if the communication still works with the mesh; transmission signal strength control), it will make the situation just worse (in some direction)...

And for meters in rural areas, I doubt they use the RF for communications, I would rather guess for some power line communication system. Or the meter itself may be a ZigBee, but there is some relay box (translating the data onto some other medium, most likely the power line itself) placed somewhere on the pole or so (so quite nearby to the meter).

Now, for electric rates...most expensive I've personally heard of was probably Whale Pass, AK.  Small town too far away from other towns and in too rural of an area with too few people to feasibly hook onto the rest of the grid (at least so far), so the town is run  on one large diesel generator.  Sure, there's power poles and transformers along the (gravel) streets, and each home or business has a meter like normal, but it's supposedly like 65 cents a kilowatt hour! 

I did look up electric rates here (Fairbanks, AK) recently but I don't remember what they were, I'm house hunting so I was curious what utilities are around here.

Meters really need to transmit only a short burst (meter Serial Number + KWh + Date Time) once in a while, and this while can be as long as the intervals at which the customer is billed. All the TOU stuff and the RTC setting can be programmed into the meter itself and updated periodically (only when changed), so it does not need to communicate each time its switching between rates. This would be very safe choice in regards to EMF health effects. Even communicating once in way shorter intervals is still safe

If they make them transmit very often (once in few minutes) its just "because they can", probably to keep more data on everyone's power use pattern

Cellular phones transmit with the minimum power it takes to establish link. I'd expect the same being applied to meters, especially the ones that use the cellular network ? If so, the cages or other tinfoil devices are useless as they will force the meter to put out more power, so what reach out is still about the same signal level

But as any such device change the directionality of the transmission, and usually not in favorable way (none of the users installing such device knows in which direction is the peak EM output now, it may for example be through the back of the meter into the house wall and room...) so this sort of device may actually increase EMF where the user dont want it, while maintaining the same signal level with the remote station

In the most extreme case, the device will affect the transmission so bad that it will corrupt the data at the receiving end, therefore not pass integrity checks, and the meter will be asked to repeat the transmission several times before the data is received correctly. So the amount of EMF exposure would be increased by several times then

Firstly EMF effects oh please come on guys think about it the meter puts out maybe a watt or so of RF once in a while its a digital signal so peak power is only reached relatively infrequently the whole burst lasts only a few seconds anyway. Secondly you live in say a reasonable sized town how many kilowatts of RF does your local broadcast station put out. The real power of VHF/UHF stations are hard to find out because there usually say the ERP figure not tx power but all the same a VHF broadcast station maybe say 10 kilowatts if its a big station and that's continues not pulsed and you happily live near those so come on EMF not a big concerns it doesn't matter RF can't hurt you unless you did what my mate did and touch an aeriel with around 400 watts on it ouch!!

I think it's a cumulative thing.  I do, however, live not far (maybe a couple miles at most) from the transmitters for umpteen 100Kw FM stations, and the antenna for another radio station is on top of the building next to me. It's however only 3Kw.