Residential Metering 1

[burntcoil]

I am interested to know about the advancement in smart metering for residential areas which in bigger picture shall be a part of Smart Grid. If anyone have worked on smart metering projects for residential areas, please share the leading manufacturers names, applicable standards from IEC / ANSI, communication protocols used.

Thanks in advance....

 

[HornTootinEE]

Go out to a couple of local electrical distributors, they'll be selling residential meters and can point in the right direction. From the little bit I'v seen, the metering companies have done little to integrate outside of their own meter comm networks; they are using proprientary protocol. Itron for sure has not done much to allow integration into existing SCADA or comm systems, not sure about some of the other vendors. There is one out there (can't recall the name right now, sorry) that had a meter that would talk DNP3 and MODBUS but it was prohibitively expensive for a standard residential meter. Might check into the Canon (Cooper Power, now owned by Eaton) systems as well, I'm not sure what they are capable of.

 

[davidbeach]

Local electrical distributors are unlikely to have the meters. The local electric utility owns and provides the meters.

 

[dpc]

It's important to keep in mind that at this point, the communications protocols are proprietary meaning you are stuck with whatever decision you make regarding a supplier for a long time unless you want to replace every meter or comm card.

If you can define what you mean by smart grid, you'll get better answers. At this point, "smart grid" means whatever someone trying to sell something wants it to mean.

FWIW, we have seen massive failure rates for some of the AMI metering equipment. Some utilities have had to replace virtually every meter they purchased.

 

[stevenal]

Elster, Landis+Gyr, GE, Sensus, Itron, Aclara, Cooper, Trilliant, Siemens all come to mind. You will find power line carrier and RF style proprietary communications. Standards are the ANSI C12 series.

 

[stevenal]

Wrong S. Meant to include Schneider, not Siemens (who sold off their Landis line).

 

[HornTootinEE]

davidbeach-

Alot of distributors sell meters-alot of utilities do buy through a distributor rather than direct.

 

[squeeky]

I have worked with Elster Kent, Siemens and Schnieder. The later two were not Asized for sale purposes. The Elster A1700 can be programmed as a service4 quadrant meter to see input and output. You can buy coms modules for most of the common coms systems. You can buy a telemetry unit and with the software, you can read and monitor remotely. You can set them up graphically on the computer and total loads for areas etc. Once in the computer you can see lots of other values and look at load profiles etc.