This video is presented for its technical merit only. Do NOT attempt to do this. Modern meters will flag tampering like this, and the actual act carries a high risk of electrocution or burns.
In the dark past, devices called "retarders" were sold on the black market from shady vendors in pubs, from car boots and from under dodgy market stalls. These devices were indiscriminately sold to non-technical people by equally non technical people to make their meters run backwards. The idea was that you hooked this thing up to your meter by jamming wires up its terminals, and it could be used to wind your meter backwards to reduce your electricity bill.
The downside (and it's quite a big one) is that the units were not really suited for non technical people and if you either put the wires in the wrong place or connected them in the wrong sequence, you would either end up getting a shock or severely burned, with the possibility of taking out the supply authorities fuse - or even the whole street.
These things were also quite severe in the current they passed through the meter, and would often leave scorch marks on the terminals, burn the insides, or in the case of misconnection, completely destroy the meter. All things the supply company would look for when you opened the door to them while whimpering quietly with the charred remnants of your skin falling off your hands.
Latterly devices to detect this activity were added to meters in the form of non-resettable flags that would move out if the meter ran in the wrong direction, or in the case of digital meters a tamper indicator.
In the dark past, devices called "retarders" were sold on the black market from shady vendors in pubs, from car boots and from under dodgy market stalls. These devices were indiscriminately sold to non-technical people by equally non technical people to make their meters run backwards. The idea was that you hooked this thing up to your meter by jamming wires up its terminals, and it could be used to wind your meter backwards to reduce your electricity bill.
The downside (and it's quite a big one) is that the units were not really suited for non technical people and if you either put the wires in the wrong place or connected them in the wrong sequence, you would either end up getting a shock or severely burned, with the possibility of taking out the supply authorities fuse - or even the whole street.
These things were also quite severe in the current they passed through the meter, and would often leave scorch marks on the terminals, burn the insides, or in the case of misconnection, completely destroy the meter. All things the supply company would look for when you opened the door to them while whimpering quietly with the charred remnants of your skin falling off your hands.
Latterly devices to detect this activity were added to meters in the form of non-resettable flags that would move out if the meter ran in the wrong direction, or in the case of digital meters a tamper indicator.
Even tho I’m English I can’t understand a bloody word of what you saying mate
Would a sort of variac have made this safer and more controllable?
Given the 'shady' nature of this device, I am not sure I would have felt good about it having direct access to the electric devices inside my home. Cheating the power company out of a few tens of dollars a month at the cost of all my electrical devices? No thanks!! And rather than going inside and unplugging everything, it seems like it'd make more sense to flip all the breakers to off for protection. But then attaching it to the pipe…yeesh…that's often used as a common grounding source to everything inside the house!! So maybe I would have to wind up unplugging everything — including electric water heater, etc… Screw that. I value my sanity a bit more than that, not to mention ethics. And here in the USA (at least in my state), if you have a sudden and substantial decrease in your monthly metered usage beyond what they have on file as the home's 'average use', you're likely to get a personalized special visit. When I was a child, my mother got one such visit about two months after moving into a fairly old two-story 3br home she was renting.
As I understand it today (I was like 13 when it happened), the owner of the property (or previous renters) had a bypass line installed that was essentially causing metering of only half (maybe less?) of the load!! They had it so that the electricity coming in had two paths in — one through the meter, and one on the other side bypassing the meter — so pretty much roughly half (maybe more?) the load was unmetered. The path inline with the meter, however, had SOME resistance (from the meter itself) compared with the other direct path, so I doubt it's exactly 50/50. I do remember very distinctly that the power company did make my mother pay twice what she was billed for those initial two months, however. I have no idea if the electric company legally went after the actual homeowner who wired up the bypass, or the previous renters — probably too hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. I know for certain it wasn't my mother, because she is terrified of even using the breaker box. She's afraid of electricity…paranoid, probably. And at 13, I could only understand it from what the power company told my mother. And even today in my 50s, I will flip a breaker switch, but I don't trust myself to do anything more than that. I won't take that outside breaker-box panel off to do anything inside — even to 'just' put in a new breaker!!
tl;dr Better safe than sorry.
Msny of us especially now the energy companies keep uping the price need someone to work out a work around for digi meters. They rob us …..
have an idea. this TC can be saturated with EMI/RF? without external transformer?
I saw once a very elegant gas meter fiddle it looked perfect and worked but if you checked the pressure after the regulator it was far too high , looking about under the floor was a second regulator the customer had drilled a hole through the diaphragm on the first regulator making the Meter work at line pressure, as it was a volumetric meter it worked fine but the gas was undercharged the second regulator corrected the fix so appliances worked fine, I was very impressed at the elegance of it
Nuclear power stations got the vote of the public as they said "electricity will be too cheap to meter!" I contacted the power company to come and remove my unnecassary meter, but never received a reply -electricity, another scam!
One BIG error:
This is AC system. What makes meter go backwards is that current coil has reverse polarity compared to tension coil.
This meter can legally work when consumer has power generation at home.
One more thing – In former Yugoslavia at least, it was very common to have 3 phase meters. But they were under lead seal, which must be broken in order to access them.
Main theft of electricity occured by tapping into cable that goes from utility to meter.
This is not mitigated, as new meters are always installed at public property.
6 years on from when you posted this video))).
Last place i lived in the U.K had a coin meter , yes a coin meter in 1919 .
about a year before i moved abroad the meter was giving me grief about accepting coins , really hard to turn the knob so i gave it some wellie and it took the coin ,great thinks i but at the same time thinking crap, have i broken it . Well it turned out i had broken it but in a good way . Something had gone wrong inside it and wedged the mechanism so all i had to do was turn the knob without putting coins in , it would wind up the credits , just had to be careful about how far i wound it . Free electricity for just over a year . Dont know what happened after i left as i did not give notice of leaving , just moved with two suitcases and emailed the letting agents telling them i was not coming back ))))
Done well nobody could see the use of these `black boxes` typical cost about £50 back in the late 80s Liverpool…very common devices, just an inch each end of the copper wires needed to make contact with the wires, just pushed up behind the live wires to the meter and earthed to the gas pipe and the meter ran backwards , depending on the windings different speeds, people used to lend them to each other to reduce bills that had got too big in cold weather etc , a friends…. son claimed he sold between 5 and 10 per week for some years. Eventually the electricity companies started fitting a big bubble of perspex around the meters and fitted meters with a red led that stopped flashing if the meter ran backwards ever.
Smallest hole you can drill in the side, piece of fishing wire. Take the fishing wire out overnight, leave it in during the day. Cheap bills, and if you get caught you just say it was like that when you got there. I also know people who got the supplier to take their meter out and just put their own on. Don't do it though, less time for fiddling kids in this country than ripping off an extortionate energy company.
why not just bypass the meter entirely if your going to the trouble of jamming wire in there