Let there be Light?

I was talking with my sister last night about things going on back home. One of the things she mentioned in passing was that Georgia Power is replacing the electric meter at her home with one that sends data from the meter via satellite directly to their offices, thus doing away with the need of a meter reader. In one fell swoop, the power company does away with the expense of all the vehicles needed to read all those hundreds of thousands of meters, the fuel consumption, not to mention the reduction of the carbon footprint of all those vehicles. The matter of the employment of the meter reader is not something this post will dwell upon.

What our discussion did do was to turn to my description of the utilities here in the UK and how they differ from my sister's present experience. When I first moved here to Gateshead two years ago, It took me quite a while to find the utility meters for our house. The reason being that they were not anywhere near where I expected to find such meters. No, indeed I would challenge any American, upon their first visit to the UK to find the electric and the gas meters! After a while, I had to ask my wife about these matters. She then took me to our pantry, which occupies the space under our stairs, moved several boxes on the floor of the pantry and showed me the meters. There tucked away from sight and any source of light sat both meters nestled in the bottom corners of our pantry!

Naturally, my first question was how did the meters get read each month, because to the best of my knowledge, no one had been in to look at either meter since I had moved in. She looked at me with a funny expression on her face and said with the tone of voice that conveyed what she thought should have been obvious to everybody with a lick of sense, that the utility companies " estimate" what the meter readings should be. Estimate? Yes! They guess at what the meter should read and then bill the customer on that assumption. Oh, the meter gets checked every once in a while, maybe even once a year or so, just as a back-up. They also want accurate readings if and when you change your utility supplier. Even at this, they call up the customer, or send a mailing, and depend upon the customer for an accurate reading on the meter. Honest! This ain't no joke!!! When I tell people over here about how all the meters in America are outside and easily accessible, without fail, they wonder in amazement why nobody thought of doing that over here. I guess some solutions are just too obvious to be noticed. :-)

Over the course of the two years I've been here, I've had opportunity to check the locations of the electric and gas meters in several houses and it seems that in every case, the most inconvenient and inaccessible place is found to install the meters. In one house, I had to go down into the basement, open up a small door and crawl under the other part of the house to find the meters. So why would I go to all that trouble? Well, it's customary to find the breaker box next to the electric meter - in a manner not too different from the way houses are wired in America. But in America, the breaker box is usually mounted on the inside wall (normally at a convenient height too) opposite the meter on the outside wall.

As you can imagine, this practice of "estimating" the meter readings can lead to all kinds of confusion about billings. We are in the process of a dispute arising from this very situation over a bill about a year and a half ago. Since that time, we have changed utility companies a couple of times and have been very diligent about keeping a record of the meter readings at the time of change-overs, to avoid just this kind of confusion. While such cases like ours come up often, for the most part, the customers abide with the estimation of the utility companies, to the various companies' huge profit!

This last Monday night, I watched a report on the evening news about a gentleman in a city down in the Midlands, who challenged a well known utility company which has spent tremendous amounts of money advertising their eco-friendly nature and their supposedly cheaper rates over their competitors (like who doesn't advertise such things nowadays). His challenge was that this company were secretly charging a lot more than their advertised rates. He had detailed records of his meter readings going back for more than a year, showing that not only had the company significantly inflated their estimations of his power usage, but that they were also charging more per kilowatt/hour than what they were supposed to be charging. The regulators took notice of this too and now the power company, in order to limit the damage to their reputation are voluntarily giving all their customers major rebates on their power bills! I guess they are hoping this voluntary operation will impress the government regulators and thus save them massive fines.

Here in the UK, television is looked upon as a utility also. I'm not talking about cable TV or satellite television, but any kind of television. If you have a television here in the UK, you have to purchase a license to be able to watch that television. It matters not if you are watching BBC, satellite television or even your DVD player. You must have a license! If a family has two or more televisions in the same house, all the sets are covered by the one license. But if two unrelated people are sharing a residence, you know, roommates, then if each person has a television in their bedroom or something, each person has to purchase or pay for a license. Since we haven't purchase another TV since I've been here, I haven't seen how the government keeps up with all this, but I suspect that it's all dealt with at the point of purchase, that is to say, the store files the paperwork on every TV purchased.

The purpose of this license is to pay for BBC and to keep it commercial-free. As such, BBC resembles to some degree the PBS network in America. However, you'll still find regular programing on the BBC channels such as game shows, sitcoms in addition to the excellent dramas and documentaries. But what if you don't watch BBC? What if you only watch your own programming from your DVD player? You still have to make those monthly payments for your TV license. What a strange way of doing things!