Powerbill will become accurate. Most of the people that have them put in and have sudden massive bill increases have been freeloading with a gunked up analog meter for years and going on about how they only have a $70 power bill blah blah blah and then the accurate meter goes in and BAM $400 bill and they blame the smartmeter.

Remember that there is now a significant cost saving for the power company not having to ready your meter, will they be passing this saving on to you?

Wouldn't exactly call it a smart meter, there are no smarts the consumer can take advantage off such as real time monitoring of power usage, basically it just enables the power company to automatically receive you power usage, this has been around for many years for a lot of commercial and industrial sites

They primarily benefit the power companies, and as richms notes if your current meter under reads (quite common) can result in bill shock. I suspect you won't have a choice however, last time I was in a house that didn't already have one, and the power company wanted to put one in, it was very much "it gets installed or your power gets cut off".

You have no choice in the matter, but there are no downsides.

Means you can use electric kiwi with the hour of free power each day, and then you can automate it to max it out for that hour.

We had one fitted a couple of months ago. Have not seen much change one way or the other to be honest.

The available information is pretty top level - it lacks much detail.

Lias:

They primarily benefit the power companies, and as richms notes if your current meter under reads (quite common) can result in bill shock. I suspect you won't have a choice however, last time I was in a house that didn't already have one, and the power company wanted to put one in, it was very much "it gets installed or your power gets cut off".

I got annoyed since I had 2 meters, with one doing the shed and old spapool feed and the other doing the house, with a 63A breaker for the house and a 30A for the shed/spa one. Totally seperate and downstream from the 80A pole fuse.

Then they swapped it out and re-did it so the shed was on offpeak rates, even tho it was on all the time. Then after a while of that said it was wrong and I had to go on some non-controlled plan since the shed wasnt an offpeak load (they are the ones that decided it was when swapping the meter). Swapped meters again to get onto a composite plan since that was needed for a controlled hot water load. Which they made uncontrolled when the pole was replaced and the pilot wire was not connected properly. 

But worst of all, they redid it all so the whole lot is on the 63A breaker, and then the 30A comes off after the meter. Apparantly no way to go back to how it was before where I had a 63A breaker for the house only that I could trip and the shed would stay on. If I had known the hassle that would have happened I wouldnt have bothered. Not that I had any choice since a smart meter had to go in when I got the solar.

We had ours done a few months ago, ours is inside the house so it is a big advantage for us as we didn't like just leaving a key for the meter reader to let himself into our house.

We are with PowerShop, and we can look historically at power usage down to 30 minute increments which is very good for seeing where you are using your power. Unfortunately this is not updated in real-time so is generally a day or two behind, but useful none the less.

If you are in an old house with an old internal meter they may tape up a bunch of plastic sheets and dress up in a space suit as apparently the old black switchboards can contain asbestos and they have very stringent rules now. That's what they did at our house. They didn't test anything, but when it's one of the old ones they apparently just work on the basis that it may have asbestos in it. Made the job take a lot longer.

Aredwood: Ask them which model of smart meter. The EDMI meters are better than the Elster meters. As they can display more information. Also as far as I know. The Elster meters don't support 4 quadrant load measuring. Which means they may over read for harmonic loads.

Although a big plus with having a smart meter is that you can then switch to Flick Electric. Or Electric Kiwi.

@Aredwood are those the only two kinds, mine says Intellix SM110?

Consumer NZ says this:

"There’s no law requiring you to have a smart meter. However, most retail power contracts say the provider can replace the meter at its discretion.

If you don’t want a smart meter, ask if you can opt out, or look at switching to another provider. But bear in mind, many meters’ certification expires this year so most, if not all, retailers will be opting to install smart meters."

Since the government did not require power companies to install meters with IHD (in Home Display) or HAN (Home Area Network) capability they are actually not that 'smart' at all - their principle benefit is to save the companies having to pay meter readers as far as I can see.

Ours gets the data out so slowly and so messily that when I look on line there are often several days weeks old that have yet to have their full data received.