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Last month, we asked our kind followers to lend us their thoughts on smart meters. The technology is slowly spreading through homes as energy providers determinedly pursue us over the phone to commit to an installation date.

Basically, a smart meter measures your energy use in real time and shows it to you on a display unit. The idea is that this will allow you to get more accurate bills and see for yourself where you are spending money on energy. It also, in theory, cuts out the inconvenience of needing to read your meter manually yourself.

We wanted to find out how people view smart meters whether they have them or not. In our last newsletter, we distributed this survey. Over 50 generous people took time to record their thoughts and this is what the results were.

• Firstly, we found that people are confident in their understanding of the technology. 81% of respondents rated their knowledge of smart meters as either good or very good.
• Of those who answered the questionnaire, two thirds of them have already had a smart meter installed in their home and just under a third of respondents were over the age of 65.
• Focussing first on the 33% of respondents who do not have a smart meter, 60% of these were not interested in getting one. In fact, absolutely none of them rated themselves as ‘very interested’ and only 20% rated themselves any more positively than ambivalent.
• Similarly, this group of people also had absolutely no one with any positive opinions on smart meters. 68% of them had either negative or very negative opinions of the technology.
• If, however, we look at the 66% of respondents who do have a smart meter installed, around 50% of them have a positive or very positive opinion of them. 29% of these people held negative opinions.

Alongside these statistics, most of the respondents also provided their own insights with both positive and negative thoughts coming from people who had and don’t have smart meters.

These results are certainly interesting and we will be using these to inform how we approach the subject of smart meters in future. A huge thanks to every person who filled out the survey and shared their thoughts.

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