Comments by "Scott Franco" (@scottfranco1962) on "RECESSIM" channel.

I wrote software for two of these types of meters. They have two basic functions, to meter the power being used and to send it upstream to the power company. The former you can easily do without messing with the meter simply by hooking an ammeter arrangement up to (say) a Raspberry PI. You can even do that without breaking the circuit (non-contact ammeter). If you are interested in verifying your power bill is correct, that is the way to go. The other purpose would be breaking into the billing part to scam the power company. It would be a lot of work to do, and the power company can do things like tally the individual meters against the power consumption for the whole neighborhood to trace down who has broken into their meter, resulting in anything from having your power cut off to jail time.
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The problem I had with the meters is that you can't get your own power readings directly. You have to wait for a power bill. So you paid for a meter whose information you don't have access to.
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The REAL reason people would want to hack meters is to get free power. The power company has monitors for how much power is fed to parts of the city. If the tally of all the meters in that part don't match the total power, they will start looking for you.
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@mrmotofy Not PG&E.
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That book scanner is ridiculous. The right way is to cut off the spine so you get just pages, then put it through an automatic feed scanner like most copiers have.
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@potential900 There are few books that rate that treatment (the Torah?) Books can be rebound after scanning, and after scanning the book can be recreated from the digital copy as required.
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