Suppose,you were a really, really good energy manager.You would know that almost every boiler and chiller on the planet is far too big for the job intended.
Bigness is not a virtue in efficiency circles. But how big is too big ?
Imagine that your faithful smart meter, diligently logged consumption daily and plotted it on a chart. Really smart energy managers would use kWIQly to do this. It might look like this.
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I think it is fairly clear that on two occasions in the past two years, these boilers have been maintained. Those monstrous spikes are when the boiler was being fired manually.
So are these boilers "Just big enough for the job required" - or are they "a wee bit more".
I would like to exaggerate and say these boilers are immeasurably over-sized - but they aren't. They are very accurately measurably over-sized.
The funny thing in Switzerland and Germany where they are "supposed to be" very environmentally conscious - is that they also REALLY like reliability so they make everything in the heating department way too big.
The inevitable result is inefficient operation. (Boilers are much less efficient on low load).
So if you really need to think for more than a microsecond about whether Smart meters (however badly named) are a smart idea - then I hope this helped a little !
If you would like me to explain why boilers are so inefficienct on low load - just ask - meanwhile here is a much more interesting blog post