GREENSBORO, NC -- Duke Energy is currently phasing out its meters and replacing them with "smart meters" that allow technicians to turn homeowners' power on or off within minutes of their request.
The smart meters don’t require a technician to go out to a customer’s physical address in order to complete the order.
If the company has succeeded in goals it set for itself, Duke Energy's should have about 200,000 North Carolina customers who currently have the smart meters.
For those who don’t, the process to get power on and off can take time.
After a customer makes a request, it’s then processed, and a work order is generated.
“Local office will kind of review it and see what all it's going to take and make sure it has everything it needs to have, and then they will put it into a queue. Obviously if you have called the day before, and we have scheduled you, and you're counting on us to be there today, we're not going to interrupt that queue,” Davis Montgomery, a Duke Energy district manager explained.
An average Duke Energy technician could have just a few orders for that day or about 50 or more homes to get to before a new order.
That’s why Montgomery says the company generally asks customers to allow 24-48 hours for their requests to be completed.
“We're one of those service providers that they depend on, to deliver those services when they need them so we absolutely understand and are doing our best to make sure they don't have that frustration,” Montgomery said.
Once a technician actually makes it to the location, the process is fairly quick and easy.
They cut the seal to the meter box, open the box, pull out the meter, take off the plastic covers called 'boots' and then push the meter back into place.
Lock the box and -- that's it!
“There's a lot of things about our business that folks just don't understand and they have no reason to,” Montgomery said. “Things like turning the power on at their house takes a lot of behind the scenes operations to get it done.”
He hopes the smart meters will quell some of the frustration about long wait times in the near future.
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