Thread by @grymoire

OK gang. Here's the story of how I used a #SDR to prove that the power company was overcharging me for 7+ years due to a freaky faulty power meter.
1/21

https://twitter.com/grymoire/status/1416827263614689289

Our electrical bill spikes in July/August. Every year! Some times our usage tripled! Our usage would be 700KWh in July and 2100KWh in August. WTF!
2/21

We questioned the bill, and was told it was our fault. We could NOT figure out why. Next year it did the same thing. And the year after that.
3/21

4/21 Still, we turned off our freezer in the garage during the summer, and replaced our frig in case that was the culprit. We rarely use an air conditioner.

5/21 What could it be? We turned off lights, fans and computers when we weren't using them.

6/21 It didn't help. Next year - the same thing. This has been going on for at least 7 years.

7/21 And when we complained, they say "your August usage is similar to last year. So it's typical." Grr.

8/21 I measured by eye and wrote it down, but it's hard to be consistent.

9/21 So I finally set up a cron job using a #SDR (a rtl-srd.com dongle) and ran rtlamr to collect KWh. At first it didn't work, until I tweaked the frequency.

10/21 I wrote an sh/sed/AWK script to convert the data into a spreedsheet for the google. For 2 months my maximum usage was 4KW/hour.

11/21 Then one night it jumped to 20KW/hour. That's a 5X increase. It spiked the next night as well. Here's the plot showing the usage per hour. I was taking the difference in KW-hr/difference in timestamp

12/21 I called customer service and explained the problem. I was ignored. Since they measure once a month, they saw no spike.

13/21 I tried to explain that 20KW per hour was 140 amps, and that if we had anything that used that much power, it would trip the 20A circuit breaker. So 140Amps was impossible.

14/21 But consumer service ignored my explanation. Now only did she not understand my issue, she said I couldn't possible know my usage - only commercial accounts have that kind of meter.

15/21 And they only consider a meter defective if they can't read it. I finally raised a complain to NYS Department of Consumer Services.

16/21 Someone knowable called me, listened to me, and was skeptical, but did schedule to have someone check our meter. She made sure I was home for this.

17/21 They plugged the meter into a jig and then plugged the jig into our house, and ran some tests. In particular, they were testing to see if it was a "galloping meter" - which is how they describe the problem.

18/21 Sure enough - my meter was faulty! Guy said he's only seen this problem once in 20 years, and that mine was much worse! If you google for galloping meter, it shows me poetry terms.

19/21 So it's a 1 in 10,000 problem (1 in 100,000?) and I had atypical skills to detect and document the problem. Heaven help those with similar problems without the knowledge to dig further.

20/21 I now have a new meter that has 0 KHh displayed. The old meter is going to Syracuse for further testing.

21/21 We were told we should be compensated for the overcharge. This shouldn't be a problem. BTW, if you google "galloping meter" - it goes to poetry terms.