For those of you who have not yet met ‘smart meters’ they are, or at least they are sold as, the energy companies’ and the government’s way to help you reduce your energy consumption and allow the whole country to become greener and more sustainable. Anyone who has had an energy audit by their local council will already have been offered a version of smart meter – a neat little electronic device that will monitor your energy usage in each room of your flat or house and thus allow you to minimise your energy consumption – and reduce your bills! The only problem for those of us who are already electrosensitive (and possibly for many of the rest of you too, since our numbers seem to be growing all the time) is that the way that meter or monitoring device communicates with your energy supplier is via a wifi system running though your house.

Likewise a smart meter. In its case, it sends information about your energy consumption, on an ongoing basis, via a wifi network, to a local ‘hub’ that, in due course, remits it onward to a central database. This allows the energy provision companies to monitor your energy consumption 24/7 and to send you bills without having to send out that irritating meter-reading man to ring your door bell. (Good for their profits – maybe not so good for the employment statistics in these times of shrinking employment.) [Read more...]