PSO's 'Smart Meters' May Restore Power More Quickly

By 2016, every PSO customer will get a new smart meter; that's a half-million customers in all. During an outage, those smart meters could help the electric company get the power back on faster.

When the lights go out, you usually have to pick up the phone and call the utility company. Now, new smart meters will tell the company when you don't have power.

It seems like everything's getting smarter these days, utility meters are no exception.

The PSO smart meters have a transmitter that knows your address, and when a storm hits and the lights go out, the transmitters send information to a router that sends the information to PSO.

"If we're not at home or if it's in the middle of the night and we don't notice, it's still something that gets taken care of. It's not something that we need to call in and I think it would be a really great thing. I'm looking forward to it," said Casey Lunsford.

Lunsford lives in an Owasso neighborhood that already has smart meters. She and neighbor Dacia Lepich think they're great.

"It'd be nice to just have somebody to be able to just flip a switch and get it going for us," Lepich said.

Of course, it's not always that easy to restore power, but smart meters should always save time. Workers will no longer have to go out to read meters. Smart meters transmit everything the utility company needs to know.

"That's really great to know. I think it'll be much more efficient when we do have outages," said Lunsford.

There is ample debate over whether smart meters are smarter for your wallet, but the other option, our old meters, are no longer being used by half of the country.

Even with smart meters, PSO says they still want you to call about power outages. They say those calls are still important as smart meters won't be up for all customers until 2016.

If you lose power in the storms this weekend, call your utility company, but be hopeful that you won't have to in the future.