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A bad idea for you. A great idea for the power company.Papabravo said:What a stupid idea. Who wants to keep recharging the meter, or worse have to go down to the electricity to store to buy a new one, and have to change it with the expired one. Electricity is no damn good, if it is not immediately available on demand.
Well that explains it. Excuse my cultural insensitivity. I've never had trouble paying my electric bill and I've never been to an RV Park. Someone mentioned cards; like SIM cards on a cellphone? I previously envisioned haveing to detach the meter and take it to a payment location. What would happen to your power while the card or meter was being changed. It might be most inconvenient to have the power off while changing cards.Oznog said:Actually people have been pushing around the idea for EV charging stations. Otherwise, billing people is difficult.
One legal complication is that most states have laws preventing you from profiting from reselling the power in a submetering arrangement. For example, an apartment complex might pay $5000 for power one month. There are a number of different billing schemes that they can use to pass the cost on but at least Texas law prevents them from billing in a way where the sum is over $5000. So the meter scheme has some trouble paying for itself.
Well, RV parks aren't subject to submetering law. In fact they have some trouble collecting from people using the outlets. A parking meter-type arrangement might have to charge like 10x what the power cost to pay for itself though. Still, it's not a bad project at all.
What I think is weird is that this is exactly what the OP wrote 2½ years ago.A prepaid electricity meter using microcontrollers. It stops the flow of electricity when the prepaid amount is over such as in the prepaid telefone system..