Leccy and Gaz

[A-Four]

Those of us who live in the U.K. and have a television, have been inundated with adverts informing us with the use and format of a couple of cartoon characters similar to the likes of Tom and Jerry, which I am sure many of you on here will remember from childhood.

The two central characters in this televising advertisement are known as Leccy and Gas. What I find strange is that I cannot identify who has paid for all these such adverts, which in fact date back to around June '16. We learn from these adverts that this so called 'smart' meter will cost us nothing to instale, and will benefit all of us. Further to this, I was being contacted on a daily basis by my own electric and gas supplier, EDF. On each occasion of this company contacting me, their agents were becoming desperate to get me to fix a date for installation,......I begun to smell a rat, and started to investigate.

Be warned, until 2020 your current supplier will ONLY fix a smart meter (known to the industry as SMART 1) that is only compatible with your present supplier. From 2020 so called SMART 2 will become available and compatible with all suppliers.

A golden rule in the U.K savi, if someone is giving you something for nothing there is as in this case a SMART catch. .

[Horus]

This problem has been around for years ever since their introduction. They all still work as normal meters but can lose their SMART function if you change suppliers, but ONLY if the other companies technology does not integrate with your previous suppliers. There is supposed to be a roll-out of a centralised system that would make all meters compliant with a common technology that all providers would be obliged to use, when and IF this happens then even the earlier meters would again become functional.

Of more concern is the technology behind these meters which in theory report your usage back every 30 minutes to your supplier and can be used to determine your gas/electricity usage. This may seem innocuous enough until you consider that they can also see a pattern to your life, what hours you work, when you are out of the house, when you go on holiday, how efficient your kitchen equipment is etc. All this can be put through sophisticated algorithms and easily build up a personal profile of you, so they can target you for things like replacement boilers and other stuff.

Where it becomes more insidious is that currently all these meters come mainly from one supplier and are leased from them. Currently each energy supplier monitors their own customers meters, but there are proposals to hand over this monitoring to one centralised business, that would be a worrying prospect and give one company the ability to set up profiles on millions of users and we all know how valuable this sort of information is to commerce.