Coin Operated electricity meters

[MIPS]

There's a lot of news articles on them. Mostly it seems to be that they are often forcefully installed.
Now I am also noting there's context here that might explain more why these are being forcefully installed: Deadbeats and idiots.

It wasn’t until I had sat through six hours of hold music – none of the energy companies wanted to take responsibility for our situation – that we realised the installation had been triggered by a £1,000 debt on the previous tenants’ account.

“We didn’t pay our bills for about nine months because we sort of viewed bills as imaginary,” says Achille Crawford, 22, a Goldsmiths graduate, who also had a pre-payment meter installed in 2013. “Someone came in our house and changed our meter while we were out. We had a huge bill to pay later for having it changed.”

Source on both of those gems is - https://www.theguardian.com/educatio...tricity-meters

I mean if there is anyone who can design a better way to make people pay-up for non-compliance the brits seem pretty good at designing devices for that but sometimes I do genuinely wonder if something they made was a solution looking for a problem or it genuinely was a solution to an otherwise dumb problem.. :/

[ChrisW6ATV]

Originally Posted by MIPS

if there is anyone who can design a better way to make people pay-up for non-compliance

Almost certainly, we already have that all over the USA right now: The "smart meters" that likely most power providers have installed.

Since one big function of those meters is presumably remote-controlled shutoff, it would be trivial to set up a credit-card-controlled online account system to buy power in bunches of kWh, including accounting for the cost differences of day versus night and so on.

The only "catch" would be local or state laws that prohibit turning off utilities if it will endanger the lives of the customers (think of electric-powered heat in North Dakota in the winter, for example).

[MIPS]

It's interesting actually that here in BC at least there is no prepayment of electricity. I contacted BC Hydro and inquired if historically it was a thing and they have never issued prepayment electricity meters for light commercial or residential properties.