Volunteers sought to test commercial smart meters

Saskpower is looking for 2,000 people willing to volunteer their homes or businesses for installation of a commercial smart meter, while its residential smart meters are still being tested after safety concerns from six years ago.

In 2014, residential smart meters on 10 homes shorted and caused blackening, melting and smoke. The province directed Saskpower to remove the 108,000 smart meters it had installed across the province because of safety concerns raised by the shorted units.

Saskpower spokesperson Joel Cherry said a new version of the residential meters that initially caused issues are still being tested.

“We’re being extremely careful. We’re taking it one step at a time. We want to make sure that all the meters that are out there are safe ... Anything that we use meets our own very high, rigorous standards for meters, which is higher than industry requirements,” he said in an interview Thursday.

“It should be ready for a broader pilot sometime next year.”

In the meantime, Cherry said Saskpower wants to install the more expensive commercial smart meters on some homes to see how the meters work with their grid from a variety of buildings.

“We want to get meters out there to see how they operate on all different aspects of our provincial power network, so we’ve had meters out there operating on businesses for some time and this will give us an opportunity to see how they function with residences as well,” he said.

The commercial units are made by Honeywell while the residential ones are from Sensus.

Saskpower has installed 8,000 of these commercial smart meters across the province since 2017, and Cherry said there have been no issues. By the end of 2020, Saskpower aims to have 30,000 of its existing 500,000 customers using smart meters.

Each commercial meter costs an estimated $200 more than a residential meter, said Cherry, although he could not say how much the program was expected to cost Saskpower in total.

“A little bit of additional cost is worth the benefit here,” he said. “This way we can get our meters out there with a variety of different customer types. We can make sure that our processes are working properly, and that we’re going to have a good customer scale.”

Cherry said homeowners will not notice any difference between having a commercial smart meter instead of one of the residential ones to come later.

“The main difference between a residential and commercial meter is just that they’re built to different specifications because the commercial meters have to handle higher volumes of power,” he said.

Smart meters bill customers for the exact amount of power used each month, eliminating the potential for high true-up bills. The meters can also provide customers with detailed information about their power use, helping them find areas where they can cut costs. For those with dogs, not needing a meter reader to go onto the property is also a benefit.

The smart meters are provided free of charge.

Anyone interested in signing up for one can visit saskpower.com/ smartsignup.