*Got a very prompt email response back from Allegheny Power. Was surprised at the willingness to answer my specific questions. One of the most interesting I found out was that they say meters have no embedded chips and will not be a problem. Anyone have any evidence otherwise? I know, rumors abound about this. Anyway the summary of their statements were as follows (I will be posting it on our community awareness site later today) Url at the end of this :

*Mission-critical systems (these affect the production and delivery of electricity) Y2K ready by June 30. We will be 95% done by March 31.

*We are not anticipating any Y2K outages, however, we cannot guarantee service on New Years Eve any more that we can guarantee service at any given time. For example, we do not guarantee that you will have power at 6:00 p.m. tonight.

***********Electric meters do not contain embedded chips and therefore are not Y2K sensitive.

*Yes, we will participate in the Y2K drills in April and September. These drills will not cause any outages. The complete collapse of the system would involve some period of time to restore. This is a condition we call Blackstart and the exact restoration times are not known at this time. We will be conducting drills to simulate this condition later this year. Please note that Blackstart has been part of our operating contingency plans for many years and is not exclusive to the Year 2000 issue. I hope these answer some of your questions.

*end of excerpt from allegheny power

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Byte/6091/

-- jsj (y2kweirton@aol.com), February 26, 1999

Answers

jsj, Meters do NOT have imbedded chips. They work on purly electro- mechanical prinziples. Rickjohn

-- rickjohn (rickjohn1@yahoo.com), February 26, 1999.

What about gas meters?

The local gas company contacted me last week and set an appt for a guy to come out and replace our gas meter.

We have owned our house for 16 years, and this is the only time that this has happened. When I asked the gas company guy if this had anything to do with y2k, he said, "no, its just routine maintenance".

I felt like I was being patronized, but it may NOT be a y2k issue. Anyone know for sure?

-- PlaneBuilder (y2koldgeek@aol.com), February 26, 1999.

Utilities of various types replace mechanical meters on a regular basis because wear and tear eventually results in inaccurate metering in the customer's favor. Thus, it pays the utility to install new meters which accurately meter and thus increase revenue.

-- Puddintame (dit@dot.com), February 26, 1999.

Puddintame is right. The gas and water meters are changed on a regualr basis, every couple of decades or so.

RickJohn - you are correct on the old enclosed in glass meters where the voltage is across the rotor and the amperage is across the stator, very cleaver stable system. HOWEVER, there is a new generation (I wish I was making this up...) of "new improved cheaper" digital power meters out there, self reporting and everything. I know very little about them. Just one more thing to go wrong....

-- Ken Seger (kenseger@earthlink.net), February 26, 1999.

Puddintame is right. The gas and water meters are changed on a regular basis, every couple of decades or so.

RickJohn - you are correct on the old enclosed in glass meters where the voltage is across the rotor and the amperage is across the stator, very cleaver stable system. HOWEVER, there is a new generation (I wish I was making this up...) of "new improved cheaper" digital power meters out there, self reporting and everything. I know very little about them. Just one more thing to go wrong....

-- Ken Seger (kenseger@earthlink.net), February 26, 1999.

Ken is very correct about new digital power meters, I was involved in building the manufacturing system for the company which is producing them. As I recall, the digital meter doesn't have any cpmplicated devices which are in the classes of devices "normally considered" as Y2K problems.

But the manufacturing equipment just might be another story. My former employers were scrambling to convert from a non-compliant 486- based embedded PC, running a non-compliant operating system. I haven't heard if their efforts to upgrade have been successful.

WW

-- Wildweasel (vtmldm@epix.net), February 26, 1999.

I have one of their newer meters that have time of day useage features (so that I can read it for on-peak useage, and off-peak useage). It has time, and date displays, so I imagine that it uses embedded chips to keep time at the least. If so, it may fail to work.

Of course, I'm not planning on the local utility (which happens to buy most of it's power from Allegany) to be up or reliable post 1/2000, so... :)

-- Bill (billclo@hotmail.com), February 26, 1999.

I spoke personally to the head of corporate communications since I am a customer as are all members of my church.

They started 7/98

budgeted $20 million

are 1/2 done.

No nukes in the system

System is 80% analog 20% digital

Says they will be y2k ready. I pointed out that was not "compliant" he pointed out that no one will use that term due to fear of lawsuits. They have contingency plans in place. Not out of fear of a crash but just to be sure they are prepared for any eventuality.

They are testing as they go and have not found any problems that will cause the system to go down. They are going to shortly be testing "end to end" meaning from production to delivery and making sure there are no problems.

I asked him if he had a generator - NO Do you plan to get one - NO

Are you that confident that the system will stay up? YES

None of this however speaks to the interconnectivity of Allegheny with the rest of the grid. I have a call in to him on this to querstion further their contingency plans.

-- Rancherdick (angusdude@yahoo.com), February 27, 1999.

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-- fonzy (thefonztarella@happydays.com), March 05, 1999.