Not really relevant for most people, but just to comment on the water meter thing, water meters can sometimes significantly increase costs even for a very frugal user. I used to live in a terraced house with no meter and a tiny water bill, due to the house's low value in 1990 (which iirc is what affects water bills for people without meters). I remember looking up water tariffs at the time and even if I, as a single occupant at that time, used the lower end of estimated figures for water usage I'd have been paying about 50% more if I'd had a meter.
Your point about smart meters influencing behaviour and giving information to the electricity generators etc is one way I've heard smart meters advertised, but it's never made sense to me. If you want consumers to shift demand to off peak times then you need to have two-rate tariffs or some kind of live update on cost per unit. In reality that's just not happened. Last time I changed supplier none of the two part tariffs were available to me because my smart meter is an old model. However, even if they had been they wouldn't have made sense for me - would need to be able to move a significant amount of demand to the off peak time to out weight increased costs during the rest of the day for things like cooking, watching TV, lighting etc, washing if you want to do more than one load a day tk take advantage of good drying weather etc, which aren't so easily moved. Only seemed to make sense for people charging electric cars at home or with old fashioned storage heaters etc.
And as far as I could see there was nothing even close to the sort of live update pricing which some touted as a benefit of smart meters - only seemed to be set time periods which would be 'off peak' and charged at a set rate.
Maybe some people turn their lights out because they can see a number ticking up on a little screen (which probably uses more power than is saved...), not sure how much of a long term effect that is though...
All the articles about smart meters seem to emphasise this data for suppliers being really useful too, but honestly don't see what difference it makes... The grid as a whole has the established feedback of frequency drops / increases to allow generation to be controlled, and has very good data on historic usage patterns. At a more local level companies can collect data from substations to show variations in local demand. Maybe I'm missing something, but this explanation has never made sense to me, given the other feedback mechanisms available which don't rely on millions of electronic widgets costing hundreds of pounds each, with expensive data connections...
Overall it seems like in theory there are all sorts of useful things you could do with live updates on pricing, automatically switching appliances on and off to reduce peak demand etc, but in practice it's just not materialised, and most impacts they have had on electric car chargers etc could have been achieved with old style economy 7 metering at a lower cost... Maybe it's all coming soon, but makes no sense why you'd start this expensive roll out of smart meters and then wait so long before actually using their supposed capabilities.
