Sure, so I got a smart meter with my solar panel installation and the big difference is in monitoring.
With the old meters back in the day, you could go read the meter yourself, see what the number is, then check it every day or every week to measure your energy consumption.
With a smart meter, that’s all done through an app, and it uses patterns of energy use to identify individual appliances.
dan@upvote.au 2 days ago
Smart meters automatically send usage data to the utility company (electricity, gas, water, etc) so they don’t have to come and read it manually themselves. Are you interest in any particular detail about them?
Docker@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Well yes, how do they read each appliance that we use ?
TreeGhost@lemm.ee 1 day ago
A standard smart meter can’t exactly. It only measures the energy that is getting consumed into the house or whatever is behind it. But some companies have started to develop energy profiles on appliances though. Say for instance that your washing machine pulls a specific amount of power for 5 minutes, then a different amount for 15 minutes, etc as it runs through the various parts of the cycle. It creates sort of an energy signature that they might be able to tell what it is even if they are only looking at the combined usage of everything in the house. In my experience, this kind if profiling isn’t very accurate, but it might get better over time with AI models.