Northwood News ♦ October 2012

Smart Meters Come to Homes in Our Neighborhood

By Jacquie Bokow

Probably everyone in the neighborhood now has a smart meter on their homes.  (For the record, officially these meters use AMI, or Advanced Metering Infrastructure.)  The new meters allow two-way communication with Pepco.  The meter records your daily energy use — hourly, in fact — which, by the end of the year, you should be able to monitor yourself online (“in easy-to-read graphs”!).

Pepco’s website claims that the energy information we get from our new meters will “help us make decisions about our energy use and help us target ways to save.”  The utility plans to use “dynamic pricing” or different rates during the day, which the smart meters will help us to monitor.  The utility’s hope is that we’ll conserve during peak usage hours to save ourselves money, but we can only monitor this if we have a smart meter showing us our hourly usage.

Pepco also claims the meters will give it better insight into customer usage, improve customer service, and allow outage detection automatically, although this is not yet available.  (So don’t stop calling in those frequent outages!)

Crews began installing the smart meters in June 2011 and all Maryland customers should have received new meters by the end of this year.  Pepco is (perhaps only) doing this because the change was mandated by the Maryland Public Service Commission.

AMI meters allow “net metering,” in which the meter runs backward if your home hosts technologies — such as solar or wind — which generate electricity; Pepco must now credit you as much as it would charge you for each kilowatt-hour of power you pump into the grid.  (This wasn’t always the case, they used to pay you much less than they charged.)

As you might guess, the new meters will start at zero. Pepco alleges online that it will “take the reading from the old meter to calculate the use prior to the exchange and add in any additional use from the new meter subsequent to the exchange to calculate the next bill.” Yet — judging by the chatter on the NFCCA listserv and my own 100 percent higher bill (not as bad as the guy with a 400 percent increase!) — this hasn’t happened for many of us.

If your estimated bill is outrageously high, Pepco has a service, called Photo Meter Read, where you can submit a photo of your electric meter online for a reading.  Take a photo of your meter and submit it using the form on www.pepco.com/contact/ photometerform.aspx.  Make sure that the picture clearly shows the entire face of the meter, including the meter number, and that the amount is clearly visible.  Include your contact and account information in the online form.  Processing takes five to seven business days.  You should be notified once your account has been reviewed and any adjustments have been made.

If you’ve contacted Pepco and not gotten satisfaction, you can file a complaint with the Maryland Public Service Commission (webapp.psc.state.md.us).

Although smart meters catching fire has happened in both Philadelphia and Chicago, it hasn’t happened here (yet ... but our meters are of a different kind).  You can always opt out of having the new meters installed, but you may not be able to permanently defer replacement of the old analog meters.   ■