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Smart Meters Wreaking Havoc With Home Electronics
wiredmikey writes "About 200 customers of the Central Maine Power Company recently noticed something odd after the utility installed smart meters in their homes: household electronics, including wireless devices, stopped working, or behaved erratically. Many Smart Meters broadcast in the 2.4GHz frequency range. Unfortunately, so do many of the consumer gadgets we take for granted these days including routers, electric garage doors, fire alarms, clocks, electric pet fences, answering machines, and baby monitors — even medical devices. The electromagnetic congestion in the home is in some ways similar to the growing electronic congestion in hospitals as they acquire more and more electronic monitors all operating within a few feet of each other. Medical equipment has been known to shut down or give erroneous results when positioned close to another piece of equipment. Such interference is not new, just getting worse — rapidly."
but what are clocks and answering machines using wireless for?
Most utilities are moving to smart meters. It's a technological nirvana propounded by PHBs and the companies selling the crap. Just think, you don't need to waste hard cash on people actually reading meters. Hell no, you can drive down a road and read all the meters with a laptop. Except you can't because some of the technology is immature and signal strength from these devices seldom reaches the manufacturers claims.
We were told by a manufacturer that their technology was secure because their software is proprietry. It's a recipe for disaster...especially given that a quick google for "security research smart meter," returns some interesting results. Welcome to the brave new world of smart metering. Minus the "smart."
If I have a smart meter I could come home to my dog roasting away under the smoldering remains of his electric dog collar???
Or Grampa break dancing because his pacemaker is trying to tap out the digits of the last hours power consumption???
Eeeeewwwww!
Do not use wireless devices. Use cable connections in all that is possible.
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Try it, bitches.
Smart meters control the power going to electrical devices... logically, these are part of the electric grid, and are connected to powerlines. Why not add another wire to carry the signal, if you need to build a bunch of powerlines anyway?
Why do 'smart' meters need to broadcast anything? If they're planning on using these things to communicate to high power devices, or any electrical device, the damn things are already wired together. Use that.
If we're talking meter reading, then use the mobile network. Powering up to send a text with the reading every 3 months isn't exactly a big deal and I'd imagine would be considerably cheaper than still having to send someone to each property.
You really do have to wonder who comes up with these ideas...
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These things are about as useful as tits on a lawnmower. The meters can't even record accurate use if your house wiring is over 20 years old. The power company where I live is having fits because not a single one of the smart meters they installed in the historic district of the town where I live (and I live in this district) is recording accurate consumption. They've found meters read 1kWh for an entire week. In an apartment building with 6 apartments. To be fair, the wiring is about ancient in these buildings. Some of it has cloth coverings. The fuse boxes in most of them still use the old "stick" fuses made out of waxed paper, etc, etc, etc. Breaker boxes? WHO NEEDS THOSE :P
Also of note: the historic district rules prevent people like the power company from installing more than a single meter per standing structure. This makes tenants very happy, as that means each and every single apartment in the district is "utilities included" when it comes to rent.
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What a surprise when it can bought and sold like a company on the stock exchange.
I'd never heard of electric pet fences before. You Americans scare me.
Firstly a lot of people in here seem to be confusing Smart Meters with Energy Monitors. The former replaces the old dial meter and it supposed to communicate with other meters in the area and/or directly with the energy supplier for billing and better tracking of consumption.
Energy Monitors are those devices which clamp around lines by your meter and communicate to a box in your house giving you an idea of your realtime energy use.
Why would 'smart' meters not use SMS or something similar? Whatever 'green' imperative has these meters requiring more than that is a fail, by definition.
This is an obvious and sensible solution. I expect that the reason comes down to mobile operators wanting to charge electric companies too much to use the service.
But a fire would create carbon emissions and also produce infrared radiation, and radiation causes cancer!
...of a problem that was first noted in the mid 1980s and termed "electronic smog" but the most general term is RFI and dates back as far radio systems in general. Not only do signals interfere with each other, but signals will interfere with ANY electronic device where pins or wires are capable of acting as a dipole. It's unusual for a machine to get scrambled due to an electronic can opener, but if said devices are improperly shielded, it is inevitable.
In the case of wireless devices, you obviously can't shield the antenna. Well, not if you want it to still work. Provided interference is randomish and not overwhelming, AND provided all devices are based on packet communications, a device will be capable of repairing packets and identifying if they're intended for that device.
The first problem is that many electronic devices don't give a damn about power levels beyond being low enough to not be the target of FCC ire. The second problem is that older devices especially are NOT packet based. This means that such devices can't tell if stray signals are intended for them or not. Anything that merely detects the presence of a signal won't care if that signal is a door-opener or a WoW session.
It would be good if transmitters/receivers were a bit more directional - a garage door probably shouldn't be looking for signals coming from the neighbor's house. A door opener can afford to be very direct, since you want to open your door and nobody else's. A smart meter is designed to transmit to the road, so again it can be extremely directional. Directional transmitters and receivers mean less power is needed for the same signal strength received AND less interference off those directions.
Medical devices, except when ABSOLUTELY necessary, should NEVER be wireless. The risk of RFI is way too high and the consequences of an error are far too severe. Wireless is also lower bandwidth, which places hard limits on the kinds of sensors it's useful for and also hard limits on what innovations can be made to medical sensor technology. Inside of a hospital room, I can't think of a single use for wireless devices where wired would not be superior in every respect.
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When I fire up my 13cm amateur radio gear, I obliterate everything that uses 2.4GHz wireless for a mile or two radius until I'm done transmitting.
Don't like it? Then make sure your filthy unlicensed ISM gear has adequate filtering. Oh, you bought the cheapest crappiest wifi card you could find? Sucks to be you.
Money(SMS is extreme expensive comparatively). Latency. SMS delivery is not guaranteed by most networks. A number of other issues. Recently some of our customers decided they wanted to use our smart metering OPC server over GPRS. It is still not working (APN issues with the cell phone network), slow, and generally a pain. I'd much rather have the meters on 5GHz wifi. Even worse was the customer that tried to use 9600bps GSM. It cost them a fortune until they turned it off. And don't even talk to me about Power-Line transmission. I may kill you.
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What does this have to do with FCC being bought, lobbied, etc? This is the fault of wireless device manufacturers choosing a crowded band to put their devices on. The FCC explicitly lays out the rules for devices on this particular band saying that nobody has rights over others using it.
The problem is that spectrum is up for sale, aside from governmental implementations, there really isn't "open spectrum" for specific classes of devices unless a manufacturer has a monopoly on that area of spectrum AND type of devices. Spectrum is either assigned to organizations based off of money (auctions), or it is put up as a "free-for-all", which results in either underutilized or overcrowded communications.
I bet if the FCC started allocating specific spectrum to specific industries (not organizations) the interference could drop quite quickly.
Says the man that knows nothing at all about RF energy or FCC Type certification.
If a device FAILS because of interference then the manufacturer made a giant steaming POS. Because the FCC certification for that type states clearly.
the Device MUST accept any and all interference.
Blame the moron RF engineers at GE,Sony,Panasonic,LG,etc... for using the china cheap RF modules instead of designing their own RF stage in house.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
sooo, how did those things pass FCC testing?
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I think by "failing" it is rather meant "No connection". The big hype in medical applications are wireless systems where the sensing device is decoupled form the monitoring device. This works well for one device, but in a crowed hospital you start to get to a saturation point. Does not help that they use off the shelf wireless telephones are cheap "mobile" intercoms. Maybe a few cables where wireless is not a requirement might help allot; but that what I say about my home IT infrastructure too. I will always run a cable if that is feasible, than use a wireless link. I can sense 11 wireless networks in my apartment...
By not shitting all over adjacent spectrums. They all operate within the 2.4Ghz range and they can do whatever they want within that range as long as they don't mess up nearby parts of the spectrum. There are other regulations as well, such as power output that are part of the FCC rules but that's it. These smart meters are probably within spec but hogging the whole spectrum all the same.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Better design and manufacturing will help, but at some point we're simply running out of room in a given slice of spectrum. More complex modulation schemes, better-engineered RF stages, and things like TDMA and CDMA, along with more computing power, have resulted in huge improvements in efficient spectrum usage over the past few decades. But we're probably getting close to the limit of what can be done to shoehorn more data into a given bandwidth. Even if consumers are willing, (or forced), to pay more for better hardware, that only postpones the problem for a little while.
Additionally, although the FCC says a device "must accept any and all interference", it does NOT say it "must accept any and all interference AND CONTINUE TO FUNCTION TO THE USER'S SATISFACTION". The FCC may have the power of law, but it has no power over the laws of physics.
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The issues is that the frequency bands we use day to day aren't separated enough. A few years ago trying to cram 10 devices in the 2.4 GHz spectrum inside a house was fine but now everything and your grandmothers rolling pill is broadcasting over 2.4 GHz. Newer routers are going into the 5 GHz band but it's not really a great solution.
The problem with everything using the 2.4 GHz band is that almost no devices are smart about how they make sure of that band. This is a problem we deal with a lot when it comes to sensitive embedded systems. You need to make sure that the signal you want isn't the raw signal you send, you need to encapsulate the single into a modulated and coded scheme. Using techniques like:
Channel Coding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_code
Phase Modulation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_modulation
The more "secure" or encoded the signal the smaller the chance that any other signal will play off it and alter the key data. Now I'm not saying that this is a perfect solution but it is a start to smart design. Amount several other option such as not letting your embedded solution be sensitive to every other signal in the air. I know there are FCC regulations and all that jazz around this but it still all boils down to smart design. As more and more devices are occupying the 2.4 GHz band smarter and smarter encoding methods are going to have to be taken into practice, this might even boil down to editing the FCC regulations on wireless devices.. I would hate to think my wireless pacemaker is going to short out because my gas meter wanted to log 1 KilloWatt.
If anyone is interested it's a good idea to read:
http://wireless.fcc.gov/index.htm?job=rules_and_regulations
I'd be curious what smart meter provider they use. While there are some very sophisticated/expensive models, most of them only send very short data bursts every 15 or 30 minutes. Because of this, I suspect this article is just another consumer-paranoia attempt to blame smart meters for anything they can think of.
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Even if consumers are willing, (or forced), to pay more for better hardware, that only postpones the problem for a little while.
Except that the perfectly usable 5GHz spectrum which the cheap-asses who make gadgets and lowball consumers who buy them seem to ignore entirely has enough non-interfering channel space to make that "little while" into a matter of a decade or two.
Someone had to do it.
Because smart meters are probably using some sort of zigbee or other 802.15.4. It makes sense for smart meters to run in a mesh. That way they do not have to have direct connection to the data collection unit. They can use the mesh network to hop over multiple nodes to get the data to where it needs to go.
Considering your machine will be compiling 90% of the time, it won't affect you much at all.
According to BC Hydro, the new smart meters we are getting only broadcast twice a day with each broadcast being less than 30 sec. I have no reason to not believe them, and have not had any wireless device issues in the 4 months since my neighbor hood got the smart meters. I suspect there are a lot of different models with a lot of different broadcast patterns and levels which makes this article way to general to be of any true use.
I think you actually fail to understand the concept of interference. Hardware that isn't physically damaged in any way by the interference and goes on with its day still may not be able to maintain a high enough S/N ratio to function as the user desires.
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Well 2.4 is not up for sale. It is a "relatively" worthless band. Due to it being on the edge of the interference caused by microwaves.
I think the name should have tipped you off :)
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FCC certification does not mean the devices should be able to cope. The line 'the device must accept any and all interference' means 'it is not the FCC's problem if this device operating in unlicensed spectrum is interfered with'.
That line does not mean what you think it does. It means that you can not complain to the FCC about interference with the device, not that the device must continue operating normally. That is as opposed to licensed spectrum, where you CAN complain to the FCC if you are interfered with.
Initial accuracy of the chinese multimeters are good. I have both. For the Fluke there's more to it than just a name. They have much faster update rates, their least significant digit is actually worth being displayed on the screen, and most importantly they seem to hold their calibration over a wider range of temperatures and for longer.
At my work they have someone come in and calibrate our equipment 6 monthly. My Fluke meter typically comes back with "no change" written on the test cert, and my Protek has some significant number if you're doing any kind of precise measurements.
Mind you for the home the cheap chinese ones are fantastic.