Coin Operated electricity meters

[MIPS]

I already have a few North American locale kWh meters I attach to things (more reliable than a kill-a-watt for long-term logging) for fun but I wanted to see if I could get hold of a pre-pay meter.

I guess back in the day in some regions the electric company would supply a master meter for one building or a group of buildings and if the landlord wanted to rent out the spaces wired to the master meter separately but either the rental times were very short or they didn't trust the tenants to pay the bill they could install these in each location. You set the cost per kilowatt unit and then you just fed money into the meter to keep the lights on. Later versions used stripe cards then it was chip/RFID cards that could be topped up. They are also apparently not well loved because often the landlord would bill at a rate notably higher than what the utility company was billing the landlord.



Interestingly it seems they were/are only really popular in the UK. They seem to be increasing in popularity in southeast Asia but in countries like Australia or the United States they are not are were not really popular or their assets were controlled to the point they could not be found surplus. As such I had to order two Smiths meters from the UK for $50 each and they should arrive next month. They will work as long as you run them on 220/240v service but being wound for 50hz they will run faster than they should. Were 120/240v 60hz meters just not that common postwar?

[Phil]

I have never even heard of such a device. I'm not sure such a thing would even be legal in the US.

[MIPS]

Prewar they were, apparently. Google can scrape up no more than two different prepay meters manufactured by General Electric and dates them to between 1900 and 1910, with the last one selling in 2014 for $600. True antiques at that point. The meter style above you can still buy rebuilt and certified and they're 60 years old.

[Electronic M]

Interesting that this was ever a thing in North America. Used to be that we touted cheap electricity for cheap lighting and heat. Old Ready Kill-O-Watt is waiting to put you out of your misery and whatever other ad slogans they had.

These days I hear the CEO of my company complaining that electricity is going up 16% and start to wonder if these meters are the wave of the future...Please insert credit card to power your house and car.

[MIPS]

There's a lot of news articles on them. Mostly it seems to be that they are often forcefully installed.
Now I am also noting there's context here that might explain more why these are being forcefully installed: Deadbeats and idiots.

It wasn’t until I had sat through six hours of hold music – none of the energy companies wanted to take responsibility for our situation – that we realised the installation had been triggered by a £1,000 debt on the previous tenants’ account.

“We didn’t pay our bills for about nine months because we sort of viewed bills as imaginary,” says Achille Crawford, 22, a Goldsmiths graduate, who also had a pre-payment meter installed in 2013. “Someone came in our house and changed our meter while we were out. We had a huge bill to pay later for having it changed.”

Source on both of those gems is - https://www.theguardian.com/educatio...tricity-meters

I mean if there is anyone who can design a better way to make people pay-up for non-compliance the brits seem pretty good at designing devices for that but sometimes I do genuinely wonder if something they made was a solution looking for a problem or it genuinely was a solution to an otherwise dumb problem.. :/

[Telecolor 3007]

Some I think where used in U.K.
Looked on a 1931? book and they where avaible in Germany too.

[ChrisW6ATV]

Originally Posted by MIPS

if there is anyone who can design a better way to make people pay-up for non-compliance

Almost certainly, we already have that all over the USA right now: The "smart meters" that likely most power providers have installed.

Since one big function of those meters is presumably remote-controlled shutoff, it would be trivial to set up a credit-card-controlled online account system to buy power in bunches of kWh, including accounting for the cost differences of day versus night and so on.

The only "catch" would be local or state laws that prohibit turning off utilities if it will endanger the lives of the customers (think of electric-powered heat in North Dakota in the winter, for example).

[MIPS]

It's interesting actually that here in BC at least there is no prepayment of electricity. I contacted BC Hydro and inquired if historically it was a thing and they have never issued prepayment electricity meters for light commercial or residential properties.

[MIPS]

Okay. The damn things arrived in the mail. Both using Ebay's Global Shipping Program and both the polar opposites of what you would expect of "well packed"




Okay, so two identical units. One setup for 50p coins and the other setup for pound coins. The terminals are like I've seen with older postwar KwH meters here in North America where it's terminals for four beefy wires.



Everything is screwed shut with fasteners that let you put wire and lead crimp seals on them. The coin box also has an additional post for a padlock. When you take the coin box out you can remove the lock ring on the coin dial and that comes out as an assembly. I'm assuming this is how you interchange coin types. The coin acceptor has no sort of a protection against slugging beyond it goes into the coin box and your landlord busts you when he goes to empty it. The 50p one will take a Canadian Loonie. The 1P unit will fit a Canadian quarter with a tiny amount of filing. The correct coin pushes down a spring loaded plate which extends a catch. Then as you turn the knob a gear in the back of the cavity turns and this adds "units" to the meter and advances the coin counter by 1. The coin acceptor is notched around the edge so that you can control how many units of energy you are paying for, then use the lock ring to keep it set.





When the unit counter is greater than 0 a contact is closed and AC power is allowed to flow through the meter from the LINE side and out to the LOAD side. The mechanical assembly for counting units paid for and the contact mesh into one of two gears on the meter side and by turning one screw lets you set between two fixed rates, depending on how much or how little energy you want to make people pay for.





The meter side is just a plain old mechanical KwH meter where the lower coil is for the main load and the upper coil (I guess it's called a Field winding) just has the line voltage as reference. Supposedly this is the part you have to tweak if you ever wanted to run this at a different AC line voltage but the line frequency is fixed.

[dieseljeep]

Originally Posted by Telecolor 3007

Some I think where used in U.K.
Looked on a 1931? book and they where avaible in Germany too.

There was a Mr. Bean skit that showed a pre-pay electric meter. I think it was a light-housekeeping room. It was an episode of his just acquiring a TV.

[MIPS]

Yeah he comes back to his apartment with the TV and the lights don't work so he puts a coin into the meter and the lights turn on. He spends the rest of the skit setting the TV up and as he's about to relax the meter runs out again.

[dieseljeep]

Originally Posted by MIPS

Yeah he comes back to his apartment with the TV and the lights don't work so he puts a coin into the meter and the lights turn on. He spends the rest of the skit setting the TV up and as he's about to relax the meter runs out again.

How do you like the job that he does connecting the plug!

[MIPS]

I wish it was that easy! :P

[dieseljeep]

Originally Posted by MIPS

I wish it was that easy! :P

We don't have to do that in the western world. The item has a plug already installed.
I understand, the UK still had different receptacles used!
In the US, the same design has been around for at least 100 years.

[dieseljeep]

Originally Posted by Electronic M

Interesting that this was ever a thing in North America. Used to be that we touted cheap electricity for cheap lighting and heat. Old Ready Kill-O-Watt is waiting to put you out of your misery and whatever other ad slogans they had.

These days I hear the CEO of my company complaining that electricity is going up 16% and start to wonder if these meters are the wave of the future...Please insert credit card to power your house and car.

Do those charging stations for electric cars have credit card access, just like the parking meters have?
I'm guilty of living in the past!