Bit nippy, is it? Hive smart home users find themselves tweaking thermostat BY HAND Brit energy company Centrica's Hive smart home devices went missing in action this morning with a major outage confirmed across much of the app estate, forcing users to tweak manual controls for heating, hot water and surveillance cameras. Login wobbles, as revealed by the status page, began at 9:44 UTC across the HiveHome …
While I agree with you about smart meters, having a cloud-dependant thermostat and other smart home stuff goes a bit beyond a simple smart meter. Nothing would stop working if you had a smart meter outage, other than the power company not being able to monitor your energy usage, at least as far as I understand the current situation.
But yeah, I have so far stayed well clear of any "smart home" gear, and if I ever did get on board, I would not buy anything that wasn't capable of working in an offline mode when called upon.
Except that a Smart Meter can turn off your supply remotely. Imagine a failing system that shut down the meters and then finally fell over.
Integration is both a strength and a weakness.
Or if you are old, 'All eggs in one basket'.
Only EVER link up things that really need to be connected. And even then, plan to cope when the linkage breaks.
"
how long do you think the pressure in the gas lines will stay up once the pumps are turned off? And how do you think those pumps are controlled?
"
Gas pressure is maintained by gasometers, which work by gravity, so pressure will stay up until the gasometer is empty even if there is a total power outage. When the gasometer needs to be filled I should think the pumps are (or can be) operated manually.
"Gas pressure is maintained by gasometers, which work by gravity, so pressure will stay up until the gasometer is empty"
There is no gasholder infrastructure in the UK at all. All the gas in the pipes is all the gas we have.
They are all mothballed. None of them are in use any more and are usually listed, demolished (the 3 that sat next to my workplace went last year :( or they get turned into flats.
Of course I think that getting rid of them is a pathetically stupid idea. You cant underrate emergency capacity, but apparently someone thought that the pipes are enough. I remember hearing during the beast from the east that the pipe capacity was being pushed to its limits, I turned to look at the gasholders being demolished outside my window and thought I was in a sitcom.
We got installed "smart meters" years ago, now recently replaced with a version 2.0, and they are quite "passive" devices. They do transmit data back to the power grid company, but they don't need continuous inputs from it to work. Actually it was "registered" using a portable device when it was installed. I guess if they can't transmit they buffer data until a connection is re-established.
For many reasons, including safety ones, I don't think they can stop power for an internal fault.
What your smart meter does depends on which generation and market it was designed for. When specs include the requirement of an active account to function you can be sure that means remote disconnection.
Shutting off power in case of a fault or fire is one of the "selling" points.
That same feature is mentioned with grow ops and theft. The power company no longer needs to send somebody to shut off power for whatever reason.
That was a major selling point for getting power companies on board. Consider the advantage when it comes to billing disputes.
A mouse click removes power until demands are met. Customers wanting to complain never have to be dealt with personally, never have to be seen or heard of by anyone with any authority to change the demands.
No longer will the company have someone see that the old couple in the house needs help and that the power shouldn't be shut off. They can shut off the power remotely and claim plausible deniablity during the inquest into the deaths after the couples frozen bodies are found by neighbours.
BTW that last bit was from an actual example just in case anyone things such things don't happen.
Yes I have, but since the insulation on the wire you'll likely be using when you run your fiendish smart-meter bypass probably has a 600 volt rating I thought someone should take the piss.
Also, good luck fiddling with the wires while wearing said gloves.
"Engineers". Pfft.
0 rated electrician gloves are 1000v hence the 1000v gloves. The insulation of the wire isn't a concern. Fidling with the wires wearing said gloves would not be an issue unless to accidentally touch to a large potential difference - which you wouldn't be doing on unless the device being bypass is faulty or has a high resistance.
Maybe your joke is just too subtle or too clever?
or use the piggyback terminals on the service head (Mine dates from the 1970s and still has that "feature")
Also don't have a smart meter, changed supplier to a tiny one to avoid the "upgrade" being forced by SSE, new supplier were quite happy to mark me down as not interested, couldn't understand why though, until I pointed out very clearly that they have serious security failings, my street is in the shadow of multiple masts and the concept of "rolling brownouts" by remote didn;t appeal to me
"A mouse click removes power until demands are met"
Unless the household has a basic line-powered land line phone I wonder how they will contact the supplier to argue.
Their mobile devices will die after a day or so of having no charge. Their wifi is dead. DECT cordless phones are dead.
Hmm the payphone at the end of the road is dead/turned into something else. Working payphones are all the way in the town centre.
Neighbors still haven't started talking to you after your cat shat in their garden and you both ended up having heated words, no chance of using their phones then.
My god, cutting off power these days would really be an effective way to force people to do what they are told, even if you are a supplier miss-selling things, overcharging etc.
I have a nice big tall prickly Yucca plant standing like a sentinel right in front of my outdoor meter. They will have to contend with that should they try and install a smart meter. I work in IT and there is no way in hell I'm having a smart anything controlling something that critical.
Citations needed.
The only plausible story I can find that looks like what your referring to is this one. In which no smart meters were involved at all, but the gas cut off after *two personal visits* by British Gas staff.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/3342059.stm
and its not telling you energy costs due to the 'server' being offline its just a useless pile of shit. I refuse to have a smart meter until I can have one that will allow my home energy management device of my choosing can poll the device to find pricing on a minute by minute basis AT WORST. Ideally I'd like one that can tell my home energy management device a moment before the price is to change.
Smart meters are indeed a bad idea with all kinds of downsides.
Their primary long-term purpose, however, is to implement load-shedding at the consumer end. When they aren't allowed to fire up nuclear/coal, and the wind hasn't picked up, and the solar falls over (nobody yet has any real-time statistics about how much solar comes into the UK grid, even those "monitoring" websites are just guesswork for solar), then they can turn off your highest-draw circuits or brown-out customers at will.
Then they can charge you more for "Electricity Prime" where they won't do that to you. Despite the fact that you're already paying per unit for everything you use anyway, and it's actually in the energy company's interests for you to burn everything you possibly can for as long as possible (which is why asking energy companies to lead the renewable energy message is just stupid... "Hey, stop using our product!").
I have to say, at that point, I will seriously consider "off-grid", whether I'm in a suburban semi or not. My base power usage is quite pathetic, and my peak can all be pushed to one particular day/time in a week/month (for which, hell, fire up a generator).
At the moment, the standing charges form quite a chunk of my bill. I don't have gas and use only about 4KWh electricity a day, averaged over the entire year (winter and summer). I think I'd rather spend the money (wasteful though it is) on kit to generate that, than give it to electricity companies who are charging me the privilege of a cable in the ground and annual price rices.
Primary long term purpose, short term purpose, and medium term purpose, is to get more money from government and the masses.
Smart meters exist for profit. All other "reasons" are selling points or sales pitches, including load shedding and grid stability.
System operators already had and have the ability to load shed, increase or decrease voltage, add or remove vars. Some of the most stable systems use 1950's tech.
But Load shedding is part of the sales pitch. Being able to handle renewable unstable and unreliable sources of generation was also part of the sales pitch. Being able to operate the grid closer to instability and failure is pitched as a good thing and it is if you do not have to pay for the consequences.
IMO we should all look at it as Lee does. What is best for you?
For many going off grid makes a lot of sense both when it comes to their own money and reliability.
Everyone around here has fossil fuel powered generators thanks to unreliable power. Some have looked at the math and determined that it would be cheaper to disconnect from the grid and run them full time. In at least one case it would be cheaper to buy little Honda generators and run them continuously to failure and replace with new.
If our power suppliers gave a damn about anything other than profit they wouldn't charge those who use the least the most per unit. This wouldn't be the case if we had better regulation and accountability to citizens but it is what it is.
@Lee D
I live 2.5Km from the nearest power line, have a 24v 11Kw Solar installation, the last two days have been cloudy and wet, I still have plenty of power for my fridge and freezer, lighting, entertainment, my workshop and, most important my kettle. I cook with bottled gas, at the moment my hot water is LPG too but I am installing a solar collector this year as well as an immersion heater, granted I live in Spain and have more sun but for the investment made so far I am more than happy to be off grid. Even my water is from a well owned by a cooperative that I have shares in, I pay about €12/month that includes watering what has been a very dry 3000sq metre garden this winter.
The only meter I have is mine for measuring how much water I use on my almond and orange trees.
My PV has been in for 5 years now. I get FIT and even in one of the wettest and hence darkest parts of the SW it will have paid for itself this year. I've looked at hive and other management systems but I've got a remote control for the immersion and storage heaters that cost about £25 which just needs a look out the window and you turn it on if its sunny and leave it on the dinner table to turn it off at lunch when every things warmed up.
My base power usage is quite pathetic
Sadly, mine isn't - one internal tropical fish tank (300 litres, with 2 filters), one external pond pump, one server and misc storage devices upstairs (and aircon in the summer) plus the heating requirements of keeping 7 cats happy (and me - t'wife is happy to just put several more jumpers on)..
All in all, our electricity use is about equivalent to a stadard family of four. Including teenagers (which, fortunately, we don't have)
"Minute by minute billing isn't going to happen. Half-hourly is the highest frequency, and currently only for high rollers"
Maybe billing that way isn't going to happen for end users at home/office/whatever.
But the miracle of 'market forces' has already created niches for aggregators who can 'demand manage' their end users loads on a minute by minute basis, and the aggregators can be paid for doing so, in the guise of 'balancing services'.
Vcharge, the US company which was bought by Ovo (them again) a couple of years ago, was an early example of such a demand management/aggregation operation, there had been others previously..
I have often wondered whether you can render the 'smart' functions of a so-called smart meter inoperable by wrapping the thing in foil. Alternatively, if you find yourself with a smart meter (e.g. by moving into a property with one pre-installed), is there anything stopping you from tearing the thing from the wall and installing a good old dumb meter?
While that cutting-edge technology is only familiar to me from past, quite occasional bouts of (allegedly) recreational retreat from civilisation, if I never again have to get awakened at dawn to the realisation that in spite of my best jenga-fu the fire has probably died down soon after midnight and I'm permafrost-levels of frozen solid even under the covers, it will still be too friggin' soon.
the fire has probably died down soon after midnight
When I were a lad, we didn't have newfangled things like central heating - we had (in a 4/5 bedroom house) a bunch of storage heaters in common open areas and one or two gas fires (bottom of the stairs - strictly prohibited from being left on overnight, one in the lounge and one in the back bedroom - also not allowed on overnight).
So by about 5pm, all the storage heaters had got cold and the gas fires didn't do much other than stop ice forming on the insides of the windows. And, in the back bedroom, ice *would* form on the insides of the window overnight.
Hence why I enjoy living in a nice, warm, centrally-heated house now. And having (sort of - it seems to spontaneously turn itself down when my wife walks past it[1]) control of the thermostat.
[1] Which is the only argument I can think of for having an IoT thermostat - she would refuse to have anything to do with it and I'd have sole control.
Good luck with that in the UK soon, given the 38% of air pollution they generate.
Seems a "house coal" and "wet wood ban" is coming very soon, not soon enough.
All the retailers who jumped on this solid fuel fad should face financial penalties for the air pollution they supplied. The stove industry - a group that makes double glazing salespeople and used car dealers look saintly in comparison, should be hauled over the coals ala VW, for their misleading advertising, their claims of being "carbon neutral", "green" "sustainable" were dubious at best and downright lying in reality
My solution - anyone with a solid fuel appliance is required to have a yearly safety inspection -say minimum £200, burn permit (expensive to "nudge" people in the right direction and escalator charging applying for the most dirty stoves), regulate maximum woodpile size (again "nudge" theory - tiny woodpile size to make it more of a hassle and thus "nudge" folk to cleaner fuels), requirement for keeping of accurate records of wood held and its moisture content) and require it to be say 10-15 metres from nearest home as per wooden structures as per building regs. (yet again "nudge" theory, make it a hassle)
Also prohibit sale of new solid fuel appliances
Why? Because if we are essentially banning any diesel vehicle made pre 2015 from any city and transport only accounts for 12% of air pollution and said air pollution is localised to within a few metres of the road, then surely we should be prohibiting the use of solid fuel appliances, when they generate over 38% of air pollution and can contaminate a wide area, particularly on damp and cold nights where the emissions sink to ground level. Sick of not being able to go out on walks after dark due to faddy wood stoves belching out smoke and thus coming back coughing and stinking of smoke, far worse than any bar pre smoking ban.
Sick of not being able to go out on walks after dark due to faddy wood stoves belching out smoke
Luxury! Just wait 'til your neighbour gets one and your own home suddenly becomes uninhabitable for many hours a day, six months a year. Extra points if it's a neighbour somewhere between west and southwest and a little downhill from you[1].
[1] Adjust to prevailing winds locally if different to Blighty.
So you don't like the idea of people burning dry wood then?
OldestBrother owns a tree-surgery company (free wood - unless the client wants to keep the bits of tree, he & the tree gangs split it between them. The good bits he saves for wood turning, the rest goes into his wood shelter to dry off) and recently upgraded his existing wood stove to a bigger one with a back boiler.
It suits him and the fuel is free. And, since he lives out in the country and burns seasoned wood, low pollution.
"Good luck with that in the UK soon, given the 38% of air pollution they generate."
Define "pollution". In terms of global pollutants like CO2, woodburning stoves are neutral. Trees do grow on trees, after all, and there's plenty of managed forests here in the UK so no reason to specially import endangered rainforests or anything (unfortunately it does still happen, but enforcing sustainable wood would not mean banning fires). When it comes to local pollutants like the currently popular NOx, that's only relevant in places where it actually builds up. As you note yourself, vehicles get restricted from operating in cities, not in the Scottish highlands.
So why should it be any different for things like stoves? There are plenty of remote rural buildings that don't even have the option of gas heating and are forced to rely on either solid fuel or oil. Crippling them just because central London is stinking shithole is hardly a sensible or proportionate response. Local restrictions in places that actually have issues with things like NOx, and have sensible alternatives available, probably make sense. Blanket bans on everyone, even in places where wood is easily the cleanest and most sustainable option, would just be stupid.
Hive is shit.
It overshoots the target every morning, meaning if you don't want to boil in your bed you need to set it to come on in steps. It doesn't learn. If it's cold out, it'll undershoot rather than overshoot.
It makes no effort to work out that it should start turning on earlier or later based on the weather, nor does it learn that if needs to turn off before the target temp because the temp will continue rising afterwards.
I'm sure they just have one overworked but lazy developer working on it.
I wish I'd bought a Honeywell.
and the pi doesn't have to be connected to a cloud server either. You can have a little app that tunnels in via ssh and just gives it commands on cue, in addition to the automated timers you would put on there.
Wouldn't be too hard to connect to a public weather service if you want it to be a bit smarter too.
They had a problem where if you had lights as well as heating, your heating would stop working. Here's the thing - they knew this full well, but if you called them they just went through the tedious process of reinitialising everything.This went on for months.Eventually I worked it out and took out the lights and waited for them to come up with a fix, which took a few more months. Amateurs.
I have a Honeywell thermostat. I can vouch for the fact that it works fine if internet-disconnected. Honeywell test this as their servers/systems go down regularly 'please check your internet connection'.
Sorry, my homenet and links to ourside world are fine - your servers are cr***ed.
would prefer if it had option for ethernet link rather than 2.4Ghz wifi....
Seemed least connection-dependant smart thermostat I could find without learning & buying Rpi system+software....
I can understand that there are some people for who such technology makes a big difference to their life -ie. those with disabilities.
But for most people, WTF.... And then they sit around whining they have no heating or hot water - and ask British Gas what is going on? Perhaps they should have given a bit more thought before they installed such PoS - or maybe work out where the manual overide is.....
Have we really started to breed a race of incompetent morons......
Maybe it's just me, but I tend to adjust my thermostat about twice a year. Last week in fact, I turned it right down as the heating was coming on whilst I had all the doors and windows open. Assuming this current cold bit this week doesn't go on for more than a day or two, I'll probably next adjust it in October.. Why do people insist on overcomplicating their life for the sake of it?
Pretty sure it started with using fire.
Digging around and hunting for food is far simpler than having to cook everything with fire.
Fire complicates everything. Making it, keeping it, transporting it and keeping it fed is complexity we can do without.
Well, when I say we.....
"Pretty sure it started with using fire."
Actually fire is generally considered by anthropologists to have contributed to humans being able to grow a bigger brain by virtue of the fact that humans cooking needed less time foraging, could eat more efficiently and do more with a smaller digestive tract allowing them to fuel a bigger brain. Fire was a much bigger event than coming up with the wheel. In spite of what Audi drivers think.
Have you heard of storage heaters? If you've got PV on a day like today which is mostly sunny then you can have free heating in the evening with them. I'd imagine as wind and solar keep growing there will be times when you will want to use the cheap electricity for warming up your storage heaters (or heating a large hot water tank) too as it could well be a lot lot cheaper than your oil or gas heating. I dont mind it complicated if I'm in control and it saves me a lot of money.
Electric Storage heater are utter shite and I speak from dealing with the stupid things growing up and in several houses after I got my own place, your either too hol (and windows wide open) or shivering.
Always had condensation in houses with them, current place has gas central heating and its great and costs about 1/2 as much to tun despite living in a house twice the size in an exposed location vs previous tiny house in a very sheltered location.
Useless terrible things that should have been banned years ago (and thats without mentioning a lot of the old ones are loaded with friable asbestos)
and thats without mentioning a lot of the old ones are loaded with friable asbestos
Yup. All the ones we had when I was a kid did. We were strictly forbidden from taking them apart but, being the youngest of 4 boys, such instructions were treated as merely advisory.
It's amazing that we survived childhood.
I actually turned off my boiler (combi boiler, and I put it in summer mode, so no central heating, but it will do taps and showers). I have a lodger who kept turning the thermostat up to near 30 because "it wasn't warm enough" (-degrees C outside, and ~24 inside, but with the thermostat up that high, it just didn't turn off)
Now I don't have the boiler running 24-7 (next to my bedroom wall -_- ) and the temps are staying stable at ~20-22 degrees, no matter what she sets the thermostat to.
(It's underfloor heating, so isn't very aggressive at heating, and it was recommended to have it enabled all the time to maintain a temperature. But it's also in a flat, so I can leach almost as much heat off my neighbours most of the time.)
incompetent morons...
Remember, a lot of people are not IT or IT security savvy - they get sold these devices as the 'next greatest thing' without any mention of the downsides.
Yes, to us it's foolish (cloud == someone elses' computer and all that and subject to the whim of the provider) but most people won't have the time, inclination to training to realise that. And things like Nest *do* have benefits for some people - it's just that we know a lot about the pitfalls of those devices too.
I'm really struggling to understand how a product exists that can *only* be controlled via some kind of remote service.
Are the people saying they can't control their heating correct, or are they just the app generation and have no idea how to press actual mechanical buttons any more?
I didn't have any room thermoststat(s) in my heating system; have all rads with TRVs on, except for bathroom & toilet.
Worked fine.
However, the heating was either on or off, so if you were away in the Winter, and a really cold snap kicked in, you could in theory get burst pipes at coldest point.
With a smart thermostat, rather than an off period, you can have a minimum temp period (such a 7C), so no burst pipes.
Currently got a Drayton Wiser system installed, and it runs to schedule when Internet connection down (as designed).
Probably a good thing, as not been able to get access to mine remotely.
Drayton has 4 daily on/off pairs (essentially) for CH, same for HW.
Hive only has 3 daily pairs, so not enough for what I wanted.
Both makes have physical buttons for boosting/switching off CH & HW. First version of Hive didn't apparently...
System worked fine without room thermostat - the boiler switches off when the return water is at bolier's inbuilt thermostat setting. So boiler might be set to be on for an hour say, but you can hear it cut out after 20 mins and stay off for 10+ mins before kicking in again.
"I didn't have any room thermoststat(s) in my heating system; have all rads with TRVs on, except for bathroom & toilet."
I still have that set-up. Unlike you the boiler has a time switch with individual settings for each 15 mins so it would be a doddle to set up a short burn every few hours to keep frost at bay.
I have room thermostats, but also a simple timed thermostat which overrides everything. It sets to either 20 degrees when I want it on, or 12 degrees when I want it "off". So the house never gets colder than 12 degrees, which means (a) no chance of burst pipes and (b) quicker to get to temperature.
The boiler time switch is on all the time; the timed thermostat is the one that does most of the work.
I was using a Grasslin Towerchron QE2 programmer, which has 28 program slots and is pretty flexible, so could get CH to come on for a short burst early hours as you say. Just need to program before trips away, which is easily forgotten (in my case :-\).
BTW Hive CH & HW on periods are multiples of 15 min, so not that flexible.
For me 20 mins HW twice a day enough for me, 15 too little, 30 too much.
I have one of those too. It only gets used for HW and the 1 hr CH boost. There's an overriding programmable thermostat which does most of the work. Three set point temperatures which can be allocated to any 15 minute slot of the whole 24 hours of 7, 5, 2 or 1 day patterns. Day, Night and Frostguard temperatures.
I've had one more recent boiler that had very basic protections built in. It had a wireless thermostat and timer but nothign cleverer than that. It had a safety system to kick the heating on if the temperature dropped below 7C. There was also thermistat inside the boiler to do the same. The boiler lived in the garage so in a cold winter the heating would come on wether you liked it or not as it tried to save itself from freezing.
I don't really think you need anything cleverer than that.
With a smart thermostat, rather than an off period, you can have a minimum temp period (such a 7C), so no burst pipes.
So does my 15 year-old CM 67. It also has optimum start so it wakes the heating up earlier/later as required in order to meet the programmed deadlines.
The system I have (installed 2004) has the boiler in the loft, and inputs for frost protection; the one in use is a pipe thermometer, fitted just before the boiler inlet.
Even if you switch the timer into holiday or "off" modes, the system will still protect itself from freezing.
Even if you switch the timer into holiday or "off" modes, the system will still protect itself from freezing.
The system, yes. However your living areas will just have to fend for themselves by the sound of it. To be fair unless you live on high ground somewhere in the north of the UK or go on a long winter holiday there's probably little to no risk of internal temperatures dropping to zero. Although if you have house plants some of those might be at risk during a particularly cold snap without heating.
But the frost 'stat on a boiler - which should be fitted by default on all installations and is often built-in to the boiler these days - is only concerned with protecting the boiler itself. Typically it triggers the pump to run for a while so that the boiler can warm up but it's unlikely to run long enough to put significant heat into the radiators. Half a minute to a minute is likely enough to ward off any frost risk to the boiler.
Duh! Every bog standard mechanical room stat has a little snowflake legend printed on the low end of the dial.
If you're going away, set the heating to be on 24hrs a day and turn the dial to the snowflake. Your heating will come on at 6°C and stop the pipes from freezing. It will turn off when the house is a few of degrees warmer.
I quite like the idea of 'smart' heating controls, but I really really can't see why you would want to put the programming logic on someone else's server. It's not as if they are doing anything that couldn't be achieved with 20 lines of Basic. Give a thermostat the brain power of an Arduino or RPi and you should be able to devise a smart system that's cloud independent, remotely accessed, and does what you want it to when you want it to. If you want 15 mins slots great, if you want minute by minute control fill your boots.
You wouldn't want to put the controls on someone else's server but there is money to be made by others if they can get you to do just that.
It isn't in your interest to share your personal data or control but people can be sold anything given the right circumstances.
It is all about creating those conditions and making the right sales pitch at the right time and people will sell their life for cheap.
This couldn't have happened at a worse time for app happy users, what with an incoming polar plume from Iceland set to cause temperatures to tumble to as low as -5°C in parts of the UK. Those that can will be forced to intervene manually.
Why would it require intervention at all? Is the thermostat really that reliant on the server that it can can't even carry out basic time-controlled switching? I can see that being cut off from weather forecasting might slightly impact its efficacy but surely without the server it's no better/worse than a standard 'dumb' thermostat.
Of course for me that's an academic question. My 15 year-old 7 day, Honeywell digital will continue to function as it always has done :)
It is in fact desirable to have "smart" load shedding. If implemented sensibly it means that at peaks when the grid is at risk of being overwhelmed, the power company can switch off only your immersion heaters and other non-essential items. Houses can be wired to have an "always on" circuit and a "load shedding" circuit.
The alternative is to load-shed by shutting down substations on a round-robin basis.
"If implemented sensibly it means that at peaks when the grid is at risk of being overwhelmed, the power company can switch off only your immersion heaters and other non-essential items."
More likely all those electric-only cars the greens seem to think are a good idea, seeing as they are usually the largest load in any given house. Today's rolling brown-outs are going to be looked upon rather fondly unless we can stem the tide of plug-in cars ...
You might want to look into the concept of "vehicle to grid" before too long. The electric vehicles already have big batteries, and big inverters to drive the electric motors, it's not that big an extension to use the same gear to produce a few kW of 50Hz domestic-style mains rather than powering the motors.
e.g.
https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/electric-cars/vehicle-to-grid-technology.html
(goes back as far as 2016 in Nissan's case:
https://www.enel.com/media/news/d/2016/08/energy-on-wheels-v2g-innovation-renewables-and-grids)
"vehicle to grid" is a wishful thinking, at best. Marketing bullshit at worst.
Consider when my buddy plugs in his Tesla when he gets home around 8PM: All he cares about is that it's fully charged by 6AM so he can get to work and back without worry[0]. Selling power back to PG&E doesn't even come into the equation. His commute is Five Corners (Central Valley) to Mountain View (Silicon Valley), a round-trip of over 150 miles, much of it stop and go traffic. His commute is considered "normal" here in California.
[0] Yes, 14 hours away from home, five days per week & some weekends. Again, this is considered "normal" these days. Now ask me why I worked my ass off to get out of the rat-race ...
'Houses can be wired to have an "always on" circuit and a "load shedding" circuit.
The alternative is to load-shed by shutting down substations on a round-robin basis.'
Erm. Shirley at least one other 'alternative' is to have adequate generating and grid carrying capacity?
I would agree that waste is not to be tolerated and recognise that efficiency is a means to reduce waste, but cutting off some service because it's getting too popular right now points to a problem with the service - not with the consumer.
for the eco loonies......
hey lets reduce everyones emmissions by hacking hive and changing their thermostats to 10C....
Or maybe HM government will be doing that to cope with the coming fuel crisis due to brexit when customs inspectors have to inspect every molocule of gas coming into the UK......
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