SMETS2 meters have a lot to offer small businesses. Once installed you’ll never have to read your meter again, offering certainty you’re paying for your actual consumption and not an estimated figure calculated from your historical data. This is particularly important if a business is making genuine efforts to become more energy efficient – if their older meters are not read regularly (as they often are not), they will not see the fruits of their efforts reflected in their bills until their meter is eventually read again.
On top of this, having a Smart meter allows your business to integrate with technological products which use the innovative technology of the SMETS2. For example our new mobile App Fluttr – ‘small actions – one movement’ – an app designed to help small hospitality businesses, which traditionally do not have dedicated on-site energy management staff, reduce consumption and costs. Its features and design consider the unique requirements of both smaller businesses and hospitality operations, such as restricted budgets and time, as well as the significant variation in daily business levels.
One of the means by which Fluttr achieves these goals is through providing the user with granular half hourly data. One of the key obstacles in engaging the hospitality sector is apathy – small businesses tend to view energy as a fixed cost they can do little about. From our other technological product Con-Serve™ we know the power of providing more data. It helps to engage the user by allowing them to examine their consumption in more detail – once this is provided to the user savings often come seemingly automatically due to this increased engagement.
As evidence of this we examined three hotels from our client base, each broadly falling into different size categories, which had switched between monthly readings to a meter allowing half hourly reads, analogous to a SMET2. Looking at the twelve-month period after the installation of the new meter in comparison to the twelve-month period before installation there were significant consumption and therefore cost savings as shown in the table below:
| Hotel Size | Small Boutique Hotel | Medium Sized Hotel | Large Hotel |
| Consumption reduction | 6.10% | 9.70% | 3.30% |
| Associated Cost Savings | £628 | £15,785 | £124,537 |
With savings such as these it’s clearly a no brainer to install a SMET2 for your business. Thankfully the process of acquiring a SMETS2 meter is not cumbersome – almost all suppliers have a section on their website in which you can register your interest for a SMETS2 installation. After this has been done, your utility supplier will get in touch with you regarding an installation date. And that is all – no really – that is all. Importantly if you switch supplier in the future, you won’t need to have a meter exchange and you won’t lose your smart meter features unlike with some of the first generation SMETS1 meters. Don’t miss out on the benefits of data and register your interest today!
