I have a Smart Meter hanging on the side of my cottage. I say "hanging" because the word implies art - something ornamental. By ornamental I mean IT MIGHT AS WELL BE NICE TO LOOK AT .... because it isn't doing much else.
By which I mean, I am angry. Let me start at the beginning. Cottage, in the woods, at the end of a long dirt road inaccessible once the snow falls. Old style meter on the side of the cottage, which was read by a fellow driving a truck all the way down the road once a year, usually in July. The reading from that once annual drive was used to estimate quarterly billings for the year ahead. Every quarter I'd receive a bill stamped "Estimated,"with a demand for payment. I always assumed there was logic. The estimate, after all, was based on the usage of the prior year, and how much can a cottage's energy bill (albeit one with a heating hangover) change?
The estimated bill scenario continued along fairly smoothly, it seems, until 2007, at which point someone forgot to show up during the accessible months. So when the meter was finally read in July, 2008, the reading was high. Just about twice as high, in fact. "My, what big Watt Use You Have..."
And... wait for it... that big fat number was interpreted by the utility not as a two-year reading, but as the out-size, watt-frenzied reading for one year. Two years of bills were estimated based on that faulty reading. We paid big bills. We called and questioned. We (sadly it's true) cried. The utility company of the Great North answered, "We know there was an accurate reading... our guy was out there..." And we paid. And we paid the next year, too, because those bills were estimated on the prior July reading. You get the picture, right? Calls. "My, what big Watt Use you have." Questions. Electricians re-adjusting and freshly installing more sensitive thermostats. Lowering the temperature of the water heater. Low flow shower heads. Low flow aerators. Reduced hot water use. None of it seemed to help.
We were vexed. But we knew once the Smart Meter arrived, we'd be finished with estimated billing. Direct, precise messages would be sent from our cottage to the utility, which would bill us equally precisely for the watts we used. Except, that's not actually how smart meters work here, and our smart meter isn't actually sending any messages of any sort to the utility, because it hasn't been... wait for it... activated. It sits there, looking smart and doing exactly what its less smart predecessor did. The whole situation reminds me a bit of a Frankenstein movie... "I've got a brain. It's in that jar over there."
Which is why a nice fellow drove out the long dirt road this summer in his white Hydro One truck to read our meter, for the second time this summer. "The guy who came out in June wrote something down wrong," he explained.
And why, yesterday, I received a bill that read, "Miscellaneous Adjustment...$2,598.82CR."
Which means, "For reasons we can't quite figure (and won't really be able to explain when you call), we've over-billed you Two Thousand, Five Hundred and Ninety Eight Dollars and 82 cents."
Pause. Breathe. Um.
Oh, what could have been. I have a bank account that notices numbers of that size when they go missing.
Smart meter, oh smart meter... get thee hooked up. If not to save the driving, the gas, the inaccuracies, the calls, the estimated billing, the mysteries.... then to preserve my sanity. Hurry.
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