Meterfax

Climate change secretary Ed Miliband met with energy companies to discuss how a £7bn national smart meter roll out can be achieved between 2010 and 2020.

The UK’s biggest energy firms – Npower, EDF, British Gas, Scottish & Southern Energy, Scottish Power and E.ON – have agreed with the government that each will be responsible for providing smart meters that allow them to more accurately measure a home’s energy use to their customers.

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Meterfax is a distributed data collection and processing system encompassing a means for capturing the display on conventional, mechanical gauge, domestic utility meters. The system electronically forwards utility meter display images, in facsimile, to a central processing facility for interpretation, and thus virtually eliminates the requirement for manual meter reading inspection visits.

It is that same remote control ability that the smart meter promises to bring to everyone. “They talk with appliances with compatible communications inside …

There are many problems associated with reading metered utility consumption data, particularly for domestic users. Generally, meters are situated within domestic properties and access has to be gained in order to take readings. This is not always convenient and can cause a nuisance. To mitigate the problem new smart meters which have the ability to transmit data to the human reader are being introduced and installed in newer properties. However, the older style electro-mechanical gauge meters deployed in millions of UK properties will continue to operate for many years to come.

The current method of manual meter data collection is inefficient and expensive. The labour costs involved in visiting over 50 million domestic utility meters in Great Britain alone is compounded by the environmental impact of delivering the meter readers to and from each customer site. The Meterfax system utilises modern information and communications technology to extract utility usage information from existing, in-situ meters and by presenting facsimile images of meter displays to centrally located readers, eliminates the requirement for readers to visit each meter.

Some states already have incentives in place that encourage utilities to deploy smart meters and advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). …