What is Smart Prepaid Meter?
A smart prepaid meter is a device that helps track and monitor the energy consumption of any household or commercial complex in real time and automated manner, providing stakeholders with real time updates. As compared to conventional meters, smart meters help provide greater transparency, clarity and optimizing consumption. Since it works in Prepaid mode, it has to be charged before energy can be consumed.
Disadvantages of Conventional Meters
Previously, a dedicated person was assigned to manually take readings from electricity metres. The Utility had to invest a lot of money to maintain these resources, leading to increased costs but still had to face severe problems in terms of slow turnaround time, reading inaccuracies due to human error and other malpractices. All this resulted in significant commercial losses for the utilities and was further coupled with delays in revenue realization due to a lot of manual effort. With Smart Prepaid Meters, revenue realization happens in advance.
How Smart Prepaid Meter Works?
Smart Prepaid Meters can measure the energy consumption of consumers in an automated fashion and using the communication capabilities built inside the smart meter, are able to communicate the data in real time to a back end server, generally referred to as a Head End System (HES). The HES after initial pre-processing and validation passes the data to the Meter Data Management (MDM) which further does the required processing and analysis of the data in a form that is suitable for consumption by various stakeholders. The data can be accessed through user-friendly web portals or mobile apps anytime and from anywhere. The data is fed to the billing engines and can be easily integrated with other IT systems also for required usage. Current consumption and detailed historical reports can be obtained from the data being captured and is of immense help for transparency and optimized usage.
Benefits of Smart Prepaid Metering Solution
The main advantage of installing a smart prepaid meter is that you won’t have to take manual readings for your gas and electricity. With a smart prepaid meter, all of that information is automatically transmitted to your stakeholder in real time. A smart prepaid meter has a built in display which can help the consumers to track their energy consumptions. These smart prepaid metres notify stakeholders of any faults that have occurred so that the fault can be corrected as soon as possible.
Conclusion
A smart prepaid meter not only saves consumer’s money, but it also saves the utility money by eliminating electricity theft and faster revenue realization. This smart system is based on IoT (Internet of Things), which allows these devices to be connected to the internet and offer consumers online payment options such as credit/debit card, UPI, and Paytm. These smart meters are extremely safe and comply with all safety certifications to prevent data hacking. Smart Prepaid Meters have transformed the power industry. Smart prepaid metres, whether for electricity or gas, are a must for houses and apartments.
