I don’t let my family spend so much time in the shower now I can see what it costs – Elspeth Kerr
Elspeth Kerr, 45, a councillor, lives with her husband and two grown-up daughters in Drumchapel, Glasgow.
Here, she tells Raw Deal about her experiences with her new smart meter…
“We’ve always had prepayment meters – they’re really useful in managing energy costs. You don’t get any unexpected bills.
“However, we’ve always found reading them and topping them up to be a pain, so when we first heard about smart meters we were really keen to get one.
“Our gas meter is located outside on the ground.
“I would have to get down on my hands and knees to read it or to top the meter up. This was particularly difficult as I suffer from a frozen shoulder, which made it tricky to put the card into the meter.
“Our electricity meter is buried in a cupboard under mountains of things, with tables, chairs and an ironing board stored in front of it. Topping it
up meant having to move everything out of the way, and then putting it all back again – not what you need when you’re working full-time and often in a hurry.
“Now I can easily see how much energy we’re using in pounds and pence on the in-home display, which sits next to the sofa, and I can also top up the credit online.
“The display has encouraged my daughters to be more conscious of the energy we use.
“They know that they can’t put the heating on if the temperature is 22 degrees or above and I’ve shortened the length of their showers after seeing how much energy they use.
“When we had our old meters, I was always forgetting to take the key or card to the shop to get them topped up, and we often ran out of credit at inconvenient times – once I was making a pair of curtains on my sewing machine and the electricity ran out.
“I really needed to get them finished that night and having to go to the shop to top up wasted precious time.
“Now, our smart meter warns us when we are close to running out of credit, and I can see at a glance how much we have left. “Being more conscious of our energy use has reduced the money we spend on electricity a month from
£80 to £60.”