lousy food and frying electric company customers

This evening I learned that it's not worth buying Chinese food even if you tolerate it because it's so salty that it just tastes like salt. I have that at home.

In other news, I got curious about smart meters because there's such an uproar about them in the electromagnetically-sensitive (ES) subset of the EI community, and last I heard, PG&E (in the SF Bay Area) wanted to charge people something like $20/mo to opt out and have a dumb meter. I was, before I got sick, a radio frequency (RF) engineer, so I thought maybe there would be some thing you could do to filter out frequencies entering the house or cut down on electrical noise. We'll get to that, but here's what I learned:

• You can have a one-way or two-way RF network connecting the utility company to people's houses. With one-way, meters throw out information at some interval to a local collector, which then sends the information to the utility over the phone or the internet. Two-way communication lets the utility do things like send meter upgrades or turn on or off service. Either way, that's like having a small, intermittent radio station or cell tower (depending on implementation) on the side of your house.
• Another data collection arrangement is where all the local meters play telephone with their information, passing it down the line and going around any obstacles, like broken meters. That takes more power because more data gets shuffled around, and that would only make things worse on the side of your house.
• Worst case scenario, your electric company decides to use power-line communication (PLC), where they send an RF signal over the local power lines, seeing as they own them and all. This kind of thing really, really upsets the ham radio guys (ARRL) because it makes a lot of interference, and I cannot imagine something like that going over at all well with people with electromagnetic sensitivities.

So what's the solution? A mediocre solution would be to put the transmitter out on the end of a wire as far as possible from the house, and then you'd need to put a bunch of chokes or something in there to keep it from acting like an antenna and bringing the signal right back to the house. A really lousy solution would be to build a nice Faraday cage in your house to hide in, but then you'd be caged, which sucks. A better solution, which I'm sure they would have thought of and must have rejected for some reason, probably expense, is to have meters call in using the household phone line every night at 2 am or something. Sure, it's not data at 5 minute intervals, but you don't have to send somebody out to peer at a dumb meter.

Seriously, if PG&E is expecting about 150,000 households to opt out, it seems likely that, given economies of scale, someone could come up with a phone-home meter for a semi-reasonable price.