Smart meters generate more questions — and more confusion — than almost anything else we test. The confusion is understandable: a smart meter is a radio transmitter bolted to your house, often near a bedroom wall. The good news is that it's also one of the easiest sources to measure well, if you know one key fact about how it behaves. This checklist walks you through it.
The one thing to understand first: bursts
Smart meters don't transmit continuously. They send short bursts — typically on 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz — on a schedule, commonly a couple dozen transmissions per day for basic usage reporting, with each burst lasting a fraction of a second. Utility documentation typically puts the cumulative transmit time at under one minute per day, though meters in mesh networks (which relay neighbors' data) chirp more often.
This changes how you measure. Glance at a meter's RF reading for five seconds and you'll probably see almost nothing — and wrongly conclude the meter is silent. Use peak-hold mode and give each position several minutes, and you'll capture the bursts. It also changes how you interpret: a brief peak a few times an hour is a very different exposure than the same number sustained continuously, which is why we always publish peak and average as separate values.
The checklist
- Identify your meter. Note the utility, meter brand and model, and whether it's a transmitting meter at all — some homes still have analog or non-radio digital meters. A photo of the faceplate is the easiest record.
- Measure at the meter face. RF peak-hold, several minutes. This is your worst-case number, and nobody stands there for long — treat it as a reference point, not an exposure estimate.
- Step back: 1 ft, 3 ft, 10 ft. Same procedure at each distance. You should see the inverse square law in action — roughly a 99% drop from 1 ft to 10 ft. Write down peak and average at each position.
- Measure inside, through the wall. Go to the room on the opposite side of the meter and measure at the interior wall, then at 3 ft into the room. Exterior walls attenuate RF meaningfully; this is usually where the numbers get reassuring.
- Measure where people actually are. The nearest bed, desk, or sofa to the meter — at head height, several minutes of peak-hold. This is the number that actually describes your exposure, and the one worth comparing against our bands.
- Repeat at a different time of day. Meters transmit on utility schedules, and mesh meters relay at night too. A morning and an evening session gives you a fair picture.
- Log everything. Date, time, meter model, distances, peak, average, and your meter's model — the same fields every record in our database carries. Six months from now, "I measured it once and it seemed fine" is worth far less than a page of numbers.
What the numbers typically show
For context, utility and independent measurements consistently find that a transmitting smart meter at 10 feet produces far less RF exposure over a day than common sources people hold much closer — a phone in active use at the ear tops the charts by a wide margin, and even a microwave oven at 2 feet outproduces a smart meter at distance. Independent analyses, including work reviewed by the WHO and research finding absorbed energy substantially below FCC guidelines, have concluded there's no convincing evidence that smart-meter signals at these levels are harmful. As always: we publish measurements, not medical claims, and the bands below are for comparison only.
| Rating | RF (µW/m²) | Typical smart-meter finding |
|---|---|---|
| Low | Below 500 | Average readings at indoor living positions, most homes |
| Moderate | 500 – 3,000 | Peaks near the meter wall in some installations |
| High | Above 3,000 | Peak bursts measured close to the meter face |
If your readings are elevated
- Distance first. If a bed sits against the meter wall, moving it to the opposite wall is usually the whole fix — the drop-off with a few extra feet plus the wall is substantial.
- Rearrange before you shield. Furniture layout is free and doesn't create the signal-boosting side effects that DIY shielding can.
- Know your options. Many utilities offer opt-out programs (usually keeping a non-transmitting meter for a monthly fee). Whether that's worth it is your call — our job is to give you the numbers to decide with.