Alarmed utility meters

[Sparkdoctor]

My partner does a lot more out of town work than I and he was telling me in some areas if you pull the electrical meter it sends an alarm back to the utility company and they send someone out to investigate. Anyone run into this before? I'm curious on how it works?

 

[mbrooke]

Common with smart meters. Some have a tilt sensor, and most of them will sense a loss of power.

POCOs will send out a guy to checks wither because they dont like people touching their meters or the loss of power could indicate an outage needing to be fixed.

 

[zbang]

POCOs will send out a guy to checks .... the loss of power could indicate an outage needing to be fixed.

PoCo would send someone to check a lost-power alarm? What is the world coming to?

 

[kwired]

Most of them around this are just send a "ping" signal periodically. Should a signal fail to be received from a particular meter they may dispatch someone to figure out why. Most likely they won't send out anyone until a few consecutive signals have failed - meaning there probably is a loss of power somewhere. Should a whole bank of meters lose signal though it does tell them that the problem is likely on their distribution and not at an individual meter. Makes pre-troubleshooting the trouble somewhat easier before any technicians are even dispatched.

If you are pulling meter for just a short period - they may not even know you did it if it wasn't scheduled to send any data during that time.

 

[mbrooke]

PoCo would send someone to check a lost-power alarm? What is the world coming to?

Reliability. Some POCOs deal with outages via smart meters, SCADA reclosers/devices.

 

[K8MHZ]

I wondered about that when we first got smart meters. I thought we would have to call the POCO to let them know we were pulling the meter, but after a couple times of not doing it and no POCO it appears the answer is 'maybe'.

POCO guy says the meters do have the ability to alert in such a manner, but unless there is a trouble call, that info is not really monitored by a human person.

Unless there is a reason to do so, like a rash of electrical thefts in the area. Other POCOs may be different and send someone out right away, but not ours. I don't think they have the manpower for one thing.

 

[jim dungar]

... unless there is a trouble call, that info is not really monitored by a human person.

Across the country there is no single standard.
But in our service area, the loss is logged and a service truck is physically looking into it within an 1 hour or so. I believe the loss only has to be a few minutes, for it to be logged.
The local contractors tell me there is no more 'just pull the meter' work being done.

 

[K8MHZ]

Across the country there is no single standard.
But in our service area, the loss is logged and a service truck is physically looking into it within an 1 hour or so. I believe the loss only has to be a few minutes, for it to be logged.
The local contractors tell me there is no more 'just pull the meter' work being done.

It may have something to do with the reliability of the system. Ours uses the cell phone infrastructure. An area to the northeast of me has smart meters, but no cell service so there is no data at all sent from them. I check my use on the 'net and have seen my use 'flat line' for several hours on the net, but I never lost power. The data on the net is sent from the smart meters. The total use was not stopped though, that 'caught up' at the end of the flat line.

 

[Rampage_Rick]

We have Itron OpenWay meters, which have a small super-capacitor to enable them to transmit a "dying gasp" before they loose power. Haven't heard of them rolling a truck for a single meter yet, but it's definitely improved their outage report maps. Before when they relied on phone calls they'd have a half dozen polygons showing a bunch of outages which were actually all one big outage.

 

[meternerd]

Lots of good responses to this question...."smart meters" are not really anything new, just "smarter". Terms like OMR (Offsite Meter Reading), AMR (Automated Meter Reading), etc. have been in the utility vocabulary for quite a while. Remote meter reading has been around for over 20 years, starting with meters such as "Turtle" (Hunt Technologies), which transmitted meter readings over the power line (called Power Line Carrier). Slow and not what I'd call reliable. Readings were gathered at a substation receiver and then sent to the utility by phone. Pretty crude. Modern meters send data by radio, cell phone or network types of communication. Meters can store and record Kwh, demand, outages, loss of phase, inversions (reverse power), removal (loss of power and concurrent tilt), etc. and can also perform remote disconnects using internal relays. Problem is that the information is coming in at a fast rate and huge amounts of data have to be dealt with. Most utilities don't have the time or resources to monitor each meter and record any changes on a short term basis. Bottom line.....a utility would drive themselves nuts responding to every alarm the meters are capable of transmitting. Smart metering is a great idea, but the technology is way beyond the ability of most utilities to respond. But......I never said that, and I will dis-avow any knowledge about alarms being ignored on a regular basis!:happyyes:

 

[Fulthrotl]

Lots of good responses to this question...."smart meters" are not really anything new, just "smarter". Terms like OMR (Offsite Meter Reading), AMR (Automated Meter Reading), etc. have been in the utility vocabulary for quite a while. Remote meter reading has been around for over 20 years, starting with meters such as "Turtle" (Hunt Technologies), which transmitted meter readings over the power line (called Power Line Carrier). Slow and not what I'd call reliable. Readings were gathered at a substation receiver and then sent to the utility by phone. Pretty crude. Modern meters send data by radio, cell phone or network types of communication. Meters can store and record Kwh, demand, outages, loss of phase, inversions (reverse power), removal (loss of power and concurrent tilt), etc. and can also perform remote disconnects using internal relays. Problem is that the information is coming in at a fast rate and huge amounts of data have to be dealt with. Most utilities don't have the time or resources to monitor each meter and record any changes on a short term basis. Bottom line.....a utility would drive themselves nuts responding to every alarm the meters are capable of transmitting. Smart metering is a great idea, but the technology is way beyond the ability of most utilities to respond. But......I never said that, and I will dis-avow any knowledge about alarms being ignored on a regular basis!:happyyes:

SCE will roll a line patrolman if one is available for a single meter
going down, especially in certain electricity theft prone areas.
SCE's response time from remotely enabling a meter, to the meter
closing is around ten or fifteen minutes or so... seems that is the refresh rate.

the biggest hits are the illegal growing operations. they usually go around the
metering section, 'cause a huge electrical bill in a building that never used
much historically, is a red flag, and the usage is reported to the police.

there have been some recently that zorched the cans up on the poles with the
current flow.

http://ktla.com/2015/02/04/sophisti...-discovered-inside-vacant-santa-ana-building/


so they know if the shuttle craft fails to ping the mother ship pretty quickly.

for the last couple years, if i'm going to down a service, i get the utility bill,
and call SCE, and have them flag the account so nobody comes out. i always
offer my license number, they don't want it. just my phone number. i call
back when i'm done, and release the clearance, so to speak.