According to metrological guidelines and specific legal requirements, every smart electronic electricity meter has to be constantly verified after pre-defined regular time intervals. The problem is that in most cases these pre-defined time intervals are based on some previous experience or empirical knowledge and rarely on scientifically sound data. Since the verification itself is a costly procedure it would be advantageous to put more effort into defining the required verification periods. Therefore, a fixed verification interval, recommended by various internal documents, standardised evaluation procedures and national legislation, could be technically and scientifically more justified and consequently more appropriate and trustworthy for the end user. This paper describes an experiment to determine the effect of alternating temperature and humidity and constant high current on a smart electronic electricity meter’s measurement accuracy. Based on an analysis of these effects it is proposed that the current fixed verification interval could be revised, taking into account also different climatic influence. The findings of this work could influence a new standardized procedure in respect of a meter’s verification interval.

This paper proposes three methods of the optimal smart meter selection for acting as a data concentrator in the automatic meter reading last mile network. The study explains the reasons why the selected smart meter should also act as a data concentrator, in addition to its basic role. To select the smart meter, either the reliability of communication or the speed of the automatic meter reading process was considered. Graph theory is employed to analyse the last mile network, described as sets of nodes and unreliable links. The frame error ratio was used to assess the unreliability whilst the number of hops was used to describe the speed of the reading process. The input data for the analysis are qualitative parameters determined based on observations in the real, operated last mile networks as well as their typical topological arrangements. The results of the research can be useful in the last mile network migration process, which uses concentrators to the networks without them, or during the process of newer last mile network implementation, where data concentrators are no longer applicable. The efficiency of the proposed methods is assessed measurably.