The meter upgrade provides you the Member with numerous benefits by helping SEC:

• save money by reducing the labor and transportation costs of monthly in‐person meter reading– a savings we pass on to our Members.
• improve billing accuracy by eliminating misreads or estimated bills.
• help our Members troubleshoot high‐bill questions by providing information about power consumption patterns, outages and voltage information. The new system will give the cooperative hourly and daily meter readings, in addition to typical monthly readings.
• promote the overall safety of the cooperative employee team.
• provide our Member Service Representatives with real-time accessibility to the meter information to aid in answering your questions about your energy usage.
• monitor the health of our overall electric system better.

No, new meters will be installed at all active locations. SEC is embarking on a system‐wide program that will change 100% of existing residential and commercial meters.

Information from the meter is transmitted back to SEC over our power lines. Transmitting this information electronically means that a meter reader no longer comes to your house except annually to verify readings.

SEC’s billing computer will communicate with the substation‐installed equipment, which collects the meter readings. The information is then sent back to SEC via a secure network over our existing power lines.

The new meters can be read at any time to obtain both a real-time reading and a history of account information. However, for billing purposes, the meters will be read on monthly schedules.

Yes. A meter reader will come out to your home once a year to obtain a physical reading. Also, if the SEC experiences a communication error with your meter, a meter tech may have to troubleshoot the issue on site.

So reasonable access to SEC’s equipment still must be maintained. This allows SEC personnel to either read or maintain the meter if necessary, at reasonable times or in case of an emergency.

Routine inspections of all meters and services will continue to look for safety hazards, theft or other problems.

No additional equipment is required. However, if something is identified as faulty or hazardous with your equipment, you will be responsible for replacing it.

The new meters are digital electronic devices while the old meters were an electro‐mechanical device. In most cases the new meters are the same as the old meters, just with updated communication technology.

The new meter records an electronic kWh reading, the date and hourly energy usage, the overall peak demand of the electric account, and the number of times the meter has experienced a loss of power for any reason.

NO. Research conducted by the Electric Power Research Institute, the Utilities Telecom Council and others has revealed no health impacts from digital meters. The electromagnetic field (EMF) emitted by digital meters falls well below the maximum recommended level found in federal guidelines. A digital meter equipped to send and receive data has an EMF density hundreds of times less than the EMF density of a cell phones – and the meters are installed on the outside of your house, not next to your ear! See graph below for the EMF levels of typical household appliances and the new digital meters.

TWACS EMF Readings Graph.pdf

*TWACS-(Two-Way Automated Communication System) TWACS utilizes existing power lines to transmit readings from meters to the utility substation and then back to the utility for processing. This is done via a TWACS module within the new digital meter.