Communicating ‘smartness’: smart meter installers in UK homes

There is growing interest in ‘middle actors’ as influences on energy use in the built environment. This paper reports on novel research with four focus groups of meter installers, employed by three major energy suppliers, two in Great Britain and one in Northern Ireland. All the participants have been involved in installing smart meters or semi-smart keypad meters in homes. The Smart Metering Installation Code of Practice requires installers to be trained to communicate to householders the uses of, and potential benefits from, smart metering, along with any health and safety issues. Installers are also required to demonstrate how to use the in-home display that is offered to all customers, and to be able to give basic advice on energy efficiency. The smart meter rollout thus offers an opportunity for a representative of the supplier to go into every customer’s home and talk about energy with household members. Using transcripts from the focus groups, we analyse what the installers have to say about their work in terms of training, support, challenges, rewards, household priorities and concerns, and organisational issues. This material illustrates the social learning that can take place during and around the time of installation, for the utility and the installers themselves, as well as among households and their social networks. It highlights issues for policymakers when planning and evaluating smart metering programmes in terms of customer benefits from demand reduction, particularly those relating to installer training and working arrangements. To set the focus group material in context, the paper draws on findings from the UK Smart Metering Early Learning Project, published in 2015, which included a large-scale household survey