Of course, I am over exaggerating, but we all know how things are working. If you have read the previous articles, the company in this case had a manager who was an advocate of creating something new, that was never ever used by anybody else, and neither since after its implementation. The company was working on this for year, from before the law changes were implemented, so they have a good excuse now to change to wM-Bus.
But this technology has never existed before in this market, and nobody else using it, meaning the market share is quite limited. Also, to have a working USB device to work with the meter, you need to go through a level of certification with the operator, because the meter would work only with those devices which are authorised. This puts an additional level of cost on any company which would develop this kind of device. And who know, the device would be available for maybe 100 PLN, but you would have to pay an additional 40 PLN per month to get access to the data, because it would be a cloud connected Wifi dongle without local access.
There are many ways to extort more money from the clients. And these companies are good at it. Like, if you want to have a Dynamic Pricing contract then you need a remote reading meter, but if you don’t have one, then you cannot use it, but you can apply for a new meter and pay for the meter replacement. It makes all sense…
Szymon, by any chance have you started to install yet the new meters which ENEA announced back in February? Those should be eligable for local reading, as they were tendered and purchased after the effective date of the Smart Metering regulation. Also it would give an idea to people what is finally the chosen protocol by ENEA, is it WMBUS or P1.
Not yet, but I’m looking forward to them, as far as I know, the first deliveries are to be at the turn of July and August, at the moment with AMI I install AM550 or Otusy from recovery but only for new micro-installations or C1xx tariffs with a power above 16KW. The mass replacement of metres with those from the new tender is to start sometime at the turn of August/September.
Thanks! Then I will hold back a bit my next email to ENEA to enable local communication… Hoping once the new meters will be out, supposedly the same models as you are installing now, with the same modules, then ENEA will start to enable the communication on the old ones as well. But it is just a hope…
As soon as I have any metre of these new deliveries in my hands, I will show it. Deliveries are to be from four manufacturers, from Apator it will probably be Otus modified to meet the requirements of Enea, and from Politech/Iskraemeco it seems to me that it will be IE.5, Sagemcom probably S-210/T210, and Landis gyr probably products from the E360 series.