Roads to Joy

I’m a great fan of the mundane, things trundling along as they should, and being able to live within the constraints that make sense. My joy came crashing in, today, apparently because I managed to re-install our pair of passive antennae, so-called SlimJim dipoles, to facilitate communication of our smart meter to the electricity supplier’s hub, and back again.

This, after Storm Éowyn’s winds had torn the antenna off its perch high up on the wall outside our bedroom window. I’d placed it there so that it was pointing in the direction of the television towers, but we’d never had any communication with this strategy. So I’d begun to despair on that front, and indeed, we have an engineer coming next week to ‘power recycle’ the smart meter to try to get it talking and listening again. But a few hours after I’d soldered the coaxial cable to the dipole copper, I decided, on a whim, to see if anything had been communicated. Sure enough, apparently in one tranche of data, the last five days of readings are up on our account.

Well, we can see that our behaviour is making some sense. In the high tariff period (between 4pm and 7pm) we are using negligible amounts of electricity from the grid. We could, however, be consuming rather more electricity during the low tariff periods, and less during the standard rate periods (shown in green bars). So we’ll have to see what we can do further to reduce our energy costs. But at least we have a functioning smart meter, for the time being anyway, and perhaps we have Storm Éowyn to thank for making me re-solder the connection.

The joy when things do work the way they’re supposed to is, of course, counter-balanced when they don’t. Our upstairs thermostatic shower has a mind of its own, for example, deciding spontaneously at 4am to begin spraying water everywhere! So we’re going to try to reconfigure this particularly recalcitrant machine with a manual valve. I’m sure there are a couple of other things that should be working, that aren’t, but in my delight over the smart meter (we’ve been waiting for data since the 21st of November), I can’t quite remember what they are.

I shall just relax into the late afternoon and evening in some joy at our systems for considering electricity consumption, and live in hope that the meter will stay smart!