Some mentions are made of solar collectors and battery systems for part 15 operation, and I have a few energy subjects that have arisen in conversations with associates.
I was asked about electric “smart meters”, evidently a subject on a recent Coast-to-Coast show, and a fear that they are being forced on the entire world population without choice and produce fire hazard and health risk.
That was the gist of the program according to what I was told, although I am not informed on the matter.
The smart meters are presumably part 15 instruments as I believe they have two way transmission capabilities of some kind.
What is true about smart meters according to members of this part 15 community?
On another energy matter, I notice vast amounts of vegetative yard waste disposed every week which it seems to me should be compacted and converted into useful energy by some home assembly-line D.I.Y. project.
What do we know about such a thing?
Intent Of The Dumb Meters
The intent of those meters is to precisely measure your power usage and bill you correctly for it. It allows the utility company to take the energy usage readings remotely thus saving them from having to hire people who would be driving around using gasoline to read meters, save those individuals from having to fight the guard dog to go read a meter, and other things.
It is not intrusive, nor does it tell the utility company what light your turning on or what your cooking for dinner or what you are watching on the tv..despite all the conspiracy fear mongering about the silly things.
They are Part 15 devices, and use the same Carrier Current techniques as your CC station does. They also use the GHz spectrum in some areas to send the data.
They are simply a modern method of obtaining usage data so your bill is more accurate with far less mistakes.
And they are very difficult to cheat. Those old rotating meter units with the spinning wheel and analog meters were easily fooled by adding a reverse inductive polarity coil around the meter glass, thereby slowing down or even stopping that spinning wheel from rotating, which is how those little analog meters measured your energy usage.
Not so with these modern digital meters, though there are ways to fool those as well..but not very easily, and I won’t disclose those methods so no need asking folks. :p
RFB
However…
Remote read meters produce very detailed reads. These can be pulled monthly, weekly or daily showing minute by minute usage. From this they search for abnormal usage at residential addresses.
Now what would they do with that?
Deep Subject
Having spent some time with the detailed Wikipedia entry on Smart Meters I see that the subject is very large and has many various types.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_meter
Carrier current is only one possible means of communicating with the meter, as many other RF methods are also used in differing locations, including wi-fi, paging, licensed and unlicensed RF methods.
Claiming a safety hazard is not possible without knowing much more about a given instance of a smart meter.