A man with a lanyard stood on our front path at 10.20am on Tuesday 8 April, peered into the gas meter box and said, "That one's older than me." Matt sent me a photo of the box from the doorway, captioned "ARRIVED". It was the second morning of his Easter holidays and I was at my desk at work, so I followed the whole install by text.
Two meters, two hours
We booked it through the supplier we switched to in March, for a slot between 8am and 1pm, and it cost us nothing. We said yes. Friends of ours haven't, and that's their call. The gas meter went first, the one in the box on the front wall: gas off at 10.30, new meter in, gas back on by 10.55, and a check that the boiler and the hob both lit. A neighbour from further along the row stopped on the pavement to ask Matt whether it was free. He said it was. "Funny, that," she said, and walked on.
Then the electricity meter, which lives under the stairs. We had been told to clear the cupboard and had not done it, so Matt spent twenty minutes on his knees pulling out the hoover, the ironing board and a box labelled XMAS in my handwriting while the engineer politely examined the wall. The power went off at 11.20 and came back at 11.45. Everything in the house blinked at once, and the oven clock, the microwave and the router all needed a minute to decide they still lived here.
The engineer fitted a small grey box onto the new electricity meter, the comms hub, which is what talks to the gas meter and to the display. He tested the signal by phoning someone who said it was fine. He also looked at the consumer unit next to the meter and said, "Someone's been tidy," which is the first professional review our electricians have had. He accepted a mug of tea and a biscuit, then a second biscuit, and left at about half past twelve.
The first numbers
The in-home display sits on the kitchen windowsill with a cable to the socket underneath. When I got home at six, the first thing Matt did was put the kettle on. The display jumped from about 0.2 kW to 2.9 kW and dropped back when it switched off. A full kettle costs us roughly 4p, so it isn't the money. It's seeing the number leap like that every single time, as if the house were gasping. For the next hour we boiled water for no reason, which is a cheap way to spend an evening.
On Wednesday I put a tray bake in the oven for forty-five minutes. The element cycles on and off, so the figure climbed to about 2.4 kW for a few minutes at a time, and the total came to roughly 1.4 kWh, around 35p at our rate. A Sunday roast with the oven on for two and a half hours is going to be a bigger number, and I haven't dared find out yet.
The gas figure only updates every half hour, so the morning's shower turns up on the display around lunchtime, like a bill arriving after you've forgotten the purchase. That took me a day to work out.
No more estimates
The real change is that the supplier now gets our readings itself, so there will be no more estimated bills. I had quite enjoyed my meter-photo habit since the photos I took at 3.10pm on completion day, and I feel a small pang about retiring it. My spreadsheet has a new tab called "meter log" and I have already put in four days of numbers.
What I'd do differently is empty the cupboard first. The engineer was lovely about it, but twenty minutes of Matt carrying an ironing board up and down the hall is longer than it sounds when someone else is waiting. Maureen came across on Wednesday to see the display, pressed the button twice, asked why it said 0.2 when nothing was on, and said she'd think about it. In Maureen's language, that's a no.
