Smart meters, smart questions.

They used to tell us in school that there were no dumb questions - usually right after someone asked a really dumb question. During the introduction to small carnivore (cat and dog) anatomy, one of my classmates asked a question about horns. Given the small number of cats and dogs that have horns, I filed that under dumb. But I don’t mean to set myself up as smarter than the next dummy since I’ve personally asked some seriously dumb questions over the years. To the best of my knowledge there really there aren’t any dumb questions. There are, however, inappropriate questions. The above being an example. And recently at a local governmental meeting, there was another.  In the near future, San Miguel Power Association will be swapping out our old meters for new ‘smart meters’. The question was raised whether the resulting new radiation would make many people sick.

But how is this inappropriate? To demonstrate, try this experiment at home. Take a 10 foot rope or string and have your partner hold one end while you hold the other. If you don’t have a length of rope or a partner, go get them - the rest of us will wait. Now, pull the rope snug and snap your end up and down making a big ‘wave’. The wave patterns created by the rope look alot like the wave patterns that they draw to represent the electric current in your house. We call this type of power Alternating Current (or A/C) because the wave goes up and down when the electric alternates from going up one wire to going up the other. Electric lines do this 60 times a second or 60 hertz (Hz). Just at the point when the electric changes direction (your rope is straight across) we can say that the voltage (the difference between electricity and no electricity) is 0.

Imagine that. The lights in your house actually turn on and off 60 times a second as the ‘direction’ of the electricity alternates. You can’t usually see it because it happens too fast but if you go to some third world countries the indoor light sometimes looks weird. That’s because some places try to get by with only 50 hertz (or even less) and your eye can start to notice the flicker. Conversely, the batteries in your smart phone always run in the same direction. This is D/C direct current. Interestingly, back in the beginning of commercial electricity, there was a rivalry between the Edison Company that wanted to use D/C (the older form of electricity) and a different company that wanted to use the new fangled A/C. This rivalry was so strong that in 1903, Thomas Edison (in an attempt to prove that A/C current was deadly) publicly electrocuted an elephant named Topsy with A/C. But despite Mr. Edison’s dramatic and arguably inhumane efforts, A/C has proved superior for lighting our homes and eventually Con-Ed switched over to the more reliable and controllable method.

But let’s get back to our experiment. Ready? Every time your rope gets near zero volts, have your partner twitch the rope just a little bit. This small wave inside the big wave is like the smart meter signal going back and forth through the power line from your house to SMPA. The little wave can be patterned and used to send information both ways across the power line. This is called TWACS or Two Way Automatic Communication Systems.

Do I have a point? Yes. The point is that it is inappropriate to ask whether or not the new wireless radiation is harmful and to ask for proof that it is harmless - because there is no new wireless radiation being created. The wave is already there. SMPA is just adding a small (1 volt or so) wavelet to the larger 240V wave that already goes in and out of your home. SMPA will not have access to what appliances you use in your home only how much total power you use, and you can choose to ‘opt out’ of the program for a fee which, presumably, pays for the time the technician takes to come out to your place and read your meter the old fashioned way. I remember my spinster aunt Tillie used to dance in her pajamas, just hoping for a meter reader. But most of us don’t. In any case – what it comes down to is that we are often leery of change. In the case of Edison, he was afraid for his company’s market share. In our case, we fear (rightly so) for our health and our privacy. But unlike Edison, our fears are groundless and there are plenty of other issues in this world that require us to ask the smart questions.