The cost of living... what can we do?

They can do that without a smart meter.
It's called a power cut.

 

Reminds me of the 3 day week in the 70s.
Looking up the rota to see what time you would be cut off each day.
You couldn't get hold of a candle for love nor money.
I think they were being nicked from churches.

 

I think it would be prudent to be prepared for power cuts. I don't mean panic and prepare for an apocalypse, but I think we'd all be well advised to make sure we have working torches, and maybe a small portable camp stove and kettle.

If that seems a bit over dramatic, last winter, when there was no war in Ukraine, and energy supply seemed stable, hundreds of households went two weeks without power simply due to a storm. That risk always exists but now we've got actual warnings of possible outages so I think some basic kit for power outages would be a good low cost investment.

 

Source, please.

 

Found it. The Mirror.
They are not suggesting they will switch off the supply but may switch off high-consumption units with the customer's consent.
The plans, tabled by Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN), would give networks the right to decide when the grid is in a state of 'emergency' which would allow them to switch off your supply.

It would give firms permission to temporarily turn off appliances with high usage, such as heat pumps and electric vehicle chargers.

The proposals would be voluntary and any appliances would be switched off for a maximum of two hours per day.

 

Sounds like the beginning of "big brother electric" is watching you.

How would they only turn off some appliances in your house and not all of them.

 

I saw an advert for broadband and it was going on about wifi being dependable, not like the alternatives.
It showed the lights going on and off because the wifi was on the blink.
Its just crazy.

Why is your boiler connected to the internet @JWK , does that mean if the internet goes down it wont work?

 

My microwave is WiFi enabled. I can't fathom why. I still have to walk right up to it to put things in and take them back out.

My fancy infrared heating is also WiFi enabled, but I did that on purpose. It means if we're out somewhere and it's freezing, we can switch the heating on remotely about ten minutes before we get in, then we come into a warm room. It also means if we go out and forget to switch it off, we can do so as soon as we remember. With the ability to control it from our phones, coupled with the fact that it only takes a few minutes to get going, means we get very high levels of efficiency with the living room heating. The bedroom ones are not yet internet ready. I'm thinking of making them so, so that we can program up a timer so they shut down through the night and come back on just before up time so we get the benefit of warm bedrooms but without running them when we're asleep, when the duvet is doing a perfectly good job.

 

What I cant understand is that everyone seems so against letting anyone have access to their details when online.
But then they use some product that gives the big companies info onto how they run their daily lives.
Do you need to get, and pay for, security for your washing machine, just incase someone hacks into it online.

I really dont like any of this, it tends to stink, quite badly for the future.

 

The same people that value their privacy so much will use their bank cards and loyalty cards for everything, drive their fully registered cars past ANPR cameras, and post their life on Facebook, but get outraged at the suggestion that the phone they carry everywhere is sending anonymous, aggregated data to Google to enable it to work out how busy somewhere is.

This is something I ponder a lot, given that my career is all about software and data. I think things like, how much less co2 would be emitted by transport if only car manufacturers were allowed to capture real world data about fuel consumption and speed etc in the real world. Imagine the value to road planners if all the data showed that at some specific point along the road, all the drivers come off the throttle then accelerate again. We have the tech now to gather the data to inform really good planning and design decisions but if such a suggestion ever appeared in the mainstream media, everyone would rant about it on Facebook, and the reactions they'd get would tell Meta (the company that owns Facebook) all about who their friends are, what they think, how close you are etc.