Quote:
Originally Posted by redpoint5
30W does not seem reasonable to me. Where did you get that number? I would expect somewhere closer to 1W, or not much more than a mechanical meter.
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I'm guesstimating 30 W based on that fact that if
Ryland's parents disconnected their smart meter because the meter was causing them to consume more energy than before, it must have been much more than a single watt.
This item cannot simply go to sleep, as it is monitoring household electrical power consumption. Even posing the existence of a timer-based wireless transmitter that only turns on once every 15 minutes or so to transmit for 10 seconds, that's still a noticeable amount of power being consumed.
Let's postulate 1 W, though. That's still a constant 1/2 a megawatt of power being consumed for 500K homes. That's 1/2 a megawatt that's going into the atmosphere. That's more than would have been consumed with a stupid meter.