The Technology of Smart Meters (Part I)
What You Need to Know to be Better Informed
Things Have Shifted Into High Gear
Here in Massachusetts, a strong push to transition every household to ‘smart’ electrical power metering has begun in earnest. By 2026, there’ll be scant few homes that have not been updated to the new technology, which replaces the reliable electromechanical hybrid analog meters that have been in use for at least a decade.
Early indications suggest that there will be no assurance that people who have legitimate health concerns, active health issues or a disability (as recognized by the ADA) will get any dispensation to skip the meter update at their home. Instead, many (but not all!) of the Utility providers will make available for a monthly fee a so-called ‘opt-out’ solution, which does not have any active RF broadcasting antenna. So far as is known now, the monthly fee to opt-out of the RF radiating aspect ranges from $11 - $35 per month ($121 - $420, per annum), depending on the Utility company involved.
That the consumer will have to pay money to be avoid having their health wrecked is discussed in other articles at this site. The MA Department of Public Utilities completely supports this extortion and that may sadden those who expect better of our state government. With somewhat dubious promises that ‘smart’ metering will bring new efficiencies to save the planet and new features which are both desirable and necessary, the public’s health will be endangered by known injurious technologies1 that have never been safety-tested for long-term exposure and for which many hundreds of anecdotal reports indicate that their presence was directly correlated with the onset of a health crash.
In a future post, I will provide a ‘bingo card’ for you track Microwave Illness symptom onset. Likely, less than 10% of the population is apt to develop debilitating from our overall RF-overexposure, but it might be someone you know or even yourself. This is how it came to pass in our household. We cannot directly say that the new broadcasting AMR meter was the sole cause, or that it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but it surely was a contributor.
Introducing the Article Series
We are going to explore the technology behind the smart meters in a series of articles at this site.
In Part I, we are going to show the face plates for various electric meter types so you might recognize which one serves your household.
In Part II, we are going to dive deeper into the science of both the RF radiation and the conducted EMI (aka, Dirty Electricity), by showing how these can be quantitatively measured and how those measurements can be used to devise a mitigation plan.
In Part III, we are going to review all the available mitigation techniques – shielding, filtering, personal protection, relocation of the meter and so on. Here, we will also expand the treatment of ‘smart’ meters to encompass natural gas and water Utility metering, which can contribute similar health hazard to the home. Unfortunately, for some households there is no economical mitigation solution and so other options will also be discussed.
Note, that although we will occasionally mention reported health symptoms, my articles will concentrate on the technology and how to mitigate the hazards. I recommend Dr. Klinghardt’s 2012 explanatory video1 on this smart meter topic to get a medical perspective, as well as the many fine resources otherwise mentioned on this SubStack site.
Calling All Citizen Scientists! We would like to build a compendium of the Utility meters deployed in our region, with your assistance. Currently, there is no single database that contains this info so we hope to create one. If you would like to participate, please upload a clear picture of your meter, the name of your Utility and your zipcode. We’ll try to organize this information, researching each new meter from its FCC paperwork, as it is brought to our attention. If you want to provide more info about the meter, please fill in SmartMeterSubmittalForm.PDF and include it, along with a clear photo of the meter face plate and email to SubmitSmartMeterInfo@gmail.com
NOTE: People who are electrically sensitive should not stand immediately in front of a broadcasting meter, so should ask someone else to take the photograph.
Identifying Common Residential Meters
Here is the traditional Hybrid Electromechanical Analog meter, which is still common in the region. This meter does not require a meter reader to have direct access, because it has a small green broadcasting circuit board that forwards the household consumption data, usually to a passing meter reader truck. Such are a form of AMR – Automated Meter Reading. Visually, one cannot tell whether such a hybrid meter has been configured to broadcast all the time (bubble-up mode) or it is actually quietly listening for a special wakeup signal (wake-up mode) from a passing meter reading truck once a month. These meters usually run their electronics from a long-life battery, instead of deriving power from the grid. Most people with this kind of meter have not experienced any health symptoms, in contrast with the digital AMR meters.
Because the Utility needs to retire analog meters as they age, the replacement unit in recent years has often been a digital electronic AMR meter. In Massachusetts, such digital AMR meters are usually integrated into a sophisticated broadcast ‘mesh’ and send the home’s energy consumption information a few times per minute, day and night. The communication path is from the home, to local repeaters and then on to the power utility. These meters are the ones that many people correlate with their household’s poor health.
Such meters employ a strong microwave broadcast antenna (posing a Radio Frequency health hazard) and are powered directly from the mains electricity, via a switched-mode power supply that impresses high frequency harmonics onto the home’s wiring (posing a Dirty Electricity/conducted EMI health hazard).
Here is an example of a digital electronic meter that is an ‘opt-out’ rented from National Grid.
There is no FCC ID listed because it does not have a broadcast antenna. It is marked ‘NO COMS’, presumably because there are no communication antennas, but this designation is not an industry-wide standard.
Such a meter is less injurious, though it still produces just as much ‘Dirty Electricity’. Yet its effect on household health seems bearable, and so this seems an acceptable tradeoff for the monthly fee charged. When deciding about paying what seems like an unfair fee to protect your health, soberly consider the cost for the emergency room treatment for a stroke or similar cardiac attack, engendered from the incessant RF chatter.
Finally, now being newly deployed is the digital bidirectional AMI meter, Advanced Metering Infrastructure. In addition to continuously sending the standard energy consumption data to the Utility, these listen for commands, for example shutting off service for non-payment or when a tenant moves out. As far as health hazards are concerned, the basic AMI meter is sometimes no more dangerous than the digital AMR meter, but if there is a Home Network integration then there may be even more pulsed digital wireless communication signals present.
A Deeper Dive, Next Time
In Part II of this series, we will dive deeper into how these smart meters produce health hazards in the home.
As a teaser, here is a spectrum analysis of the microwave signals generated by a typical digital AMR meter. These meters confine their frequency use to the ISM band, from 902 – 928 MHz. The magenta spikes represent captured communication broadcasts which are sometimes more than 10,000X as powerful as the background energy in that band.
Ken Gartner is a certified Building Biologist in Massachusetts who concentrates on taming EMFs in the home environment. His partner has struggled with Electrical Hypersensitivity (EHS) for more than five years, and her health is slowly improving,by combing extreme EMF avoidance, clean living and gentle DIY healing modalities.
The new meters’ wireless communication signals are sent via microwaves, which are registered as a Class 2B Carcinogen by the World Health Organization’s IARC, the same as DDT and Lead.