Interesting info on meters.

Pertaining to metering street-lights, does a municipality or town get a bill from the utility with explicit details and the breakdown meter by meter for street-light consumption? Do they still get to see such a bill if the town just pays a rental fee? I think a detailed bill would aid the town in finding faults, day-burning or even such things as failing PCs (increasing on duration).

I suppose nearly every curbside switching box has a meter. And last time I checked the meters clearly visible behind a window pane in the metal box are smart meters.

I don't remember seeing any on any control boxes.
But there are meters in internet switchers.

For any broadcast you'd want the signal to be as uniform as possible through all the area where your recipients are. It is not possible, the signal strength goes down with square of the distance from the transmitter : To get good signal at significant distance, the signal strength closer to the transmitter must be high. Atleast with our local commercial radio station (FM around 100 MHz, dont know the transmitter power), the solution they found (when the station was set up sometime in the early 90s) is to place the transmitter tower in distance of few km from all nearby towns/villages, so they can transmit at high power there, but the signal in the towns and villages is low and uniform - Nobody lives near the transmitter

One meter is no biggie, but some there was raised the question of what happens when a panel with few 10's meters of the whole building is behind the wall from your bedroom. If in addiion the transmission interval is set insanely short (5 minutes for example...) that would easily be equivalent of one meter transmitting all the time, and that allready is jsutified concern



Any health effects are cumulative




Here the towns do get the bills from individual meters. But some meters may be shared between lighting and other stuff like wireless meter reading equipment, security systems (electric gates which are common in villages, cctv, ..), fountain pumps and so on



Some meters are transmitting over the cell phone network, so they dont have specific control boxes for them

With regard to powers of VHF radio broadcasts the 100Kw you said about is the ERP power not the real power a 100Kw ERP TX may actually only be 5 or 10 KW transmitter AM radio stations always give the power delivered to the areal so the power quoted is the real power

I should correct myself; my observation is for newer boxes or I see extra boxes with a window and a meter behind it.

My question still remains: Do municipalities get a detailed bill? Or do they just pay blindly a summed amount without knowing how much a stret-light string consumes?

In towns that use smart meters for that, they can request the power use recordings from the meter in intervals of 15 min. The lighting is switched in groups so you can notice from there what are the non lighting loads (that are active in the day too) and what is the lighting. Tho the non lighting loads are not exactly constant either - for example the gate is getting opened at different frequency in different times of the day

My question still remains: Do municipalities get a detailed bill? Or do they just pay blindly a summed amount without knowing how much a stret-light string consumes?

Here the law requires the real metering. in any delivery point (utility -> city wiring).
But in the real life, there are many installations without any consumption meter installed (maximum a "run time hour" counter) and the power is estimated based on the installed power.
But the experience shows, the differences are within the tolerance of the meter, so I don't think it makes that much sense (well, unless someone starts cheating).

The stupidity of the law (advocated as to enforce energy savings) becomes even more apparent, when it requires a separate meter (which uses to consume about 2W or so) when the only supplied thing is some remote IT router consuming just 3W...

Here they get billed based on the number of lights are known the working hours are known because the power company knows all the photocell setting so they know all the details and just work out a bill from there errors caused by dayburners and EOL tubes etc are just ignored

ERP and transmitter power-depends on the "gain" factor of the antenna and losses in the transmission line from the transmitter,up the tower,too the antenna.For FM this could mean just about any Tx power.For low gain-wide beamwidth antenna high transmitter power.For High gain-yes, low transmitter power-but narrow beam.For 100 Kw or even 50Kw ERP the Tx power can range up to 40Kw.Worked a station that was 50Kw ERP and used 40Kw-two 20Kw transmitters into a combiner.This same sort of thing applies to TV as well.Knew a 100Kw station that used a 5Kw transmitter the antenna was center fed with 12 bays-took up a 200Ft tower!

Here they get billed based on the number of lights are known the working hours are known because the power company knows all the photocell setting so they know all the details and just work out a bill from there errors caused by dayburners and EOL tubes etc are just ignored

Dayburners ignored ey..

A string of twenty-five 100watt HPS street-lights will consume (25 x .130kw/light x 2280hours x 0.12$US/kwhr) $889 for the extra daylight hours in 6 months at 12 UScents/kwh. This is ontop of normal night consumption

I calculated 365days x 24hr/day - 4200nighthours x 1/2year = 2280 extra hours in 6 months.

I've seen dayburning strings for well over a year and these were 150w HPS. This is the reason I asked if a municipality sees detailed consumption bills.

Tolivac here in the UK I know that the crystal palace TV transmitter in London had before digital switchover 4x 1000 kW ERP channels that had only 40kw txs a VHF radio site ran at 160 kW ERP with 7.5 kW txs conversely the old 3rd programmer tx on 647 kilocycles radiated 150 kW but the tx fed in 165 kW due to 15 kilowatts feeder loss on a 1.5 mile feeder cable. I think here the difference between ERP and real power is greater than in the US

I would not be concerned about the rf power and it's effect of smart meters. The power levels used are still pretty minimal. In 2g I think the max is 2w and in 3g even less. I would guess the powerlevel of different kind of meter to meter meshnets to be not any greater than that. Also as standart requires, devices only use smallest amount of power to establish connection. There's also no undisputable studies about the effects of long term exposure of small power rf fields. I would also be much more concerned about using cellphone that is right next to your brains if you dont use handsfree or speaker and many homes has nowadays lot's of wlan cabable devices that also generates small rf fields.

One meter is not a health problem, but panel with 50 of them behind the wall, when some executive in the POCO set polling interval to once every minute, may be one

Same as with every other RF thing. but there if it is your appliance then its you who chooses how much to talk on the phone, or whether to wire LAN in the house and not use WLAN for heavy uses (desktop computers, HTPCs) and so on

Atleast here, if there is more than one meter on same space they use wire to communicate each other and only one "master meter" has radio for communicating outside

And what comes to wlan at least in my neighborhood there are half dozen of wlan networks from my neighbours

The master meter may have to do all the handshaking etc only once, but it would still transmit data from each of the others. So its less transmission time than with individual meters, but more than with one meter

I would think your system might be exception rather than rule - From the POCO point of view its much easier and more reliable to just plug in all meters with RF capability and enter them into the system, than to connect the wire inbetween. Cant see why they would do that unless required by some regulation

Your neighbors WLANs are usually more far away vs a computer in front of you and router somewhere nearby. And if the walls are concrete or the like then they attenuate the signal more. Overall, i think that everyday big data transfers (streaming media, downloads, OS updates, ..) are better to do on wired LAN both for health and IT reasons