Hunting for coins for gas/electric/TV meters.


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they are still being used these are on sale on ebay the one on the left is converted to £1 coins and the one on the right is for 50p's - i guess landlords can have these installed for tentants and the likes

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This is the new £1 coin. It's designed like this so it can be extracted from a Yorkshireman's hand with a spanner.

According to the news, there are 200,000 £1 coins recently put into circulation that were actually a trial run, and subsequently are dated 2016, although the official release date is 2017. I've just c

I love being one of the bad lads.

When my son was in a student house in Loughborough they had a card meter, think they had to go and top up the card at a local shop. Quite often the lads forgot to do this and ended up with no electricity. My son got up in the middle of the night before an exam to do some 'cramming' and finding the lights didn't work he got a chair and went out and sat under a streetlamp to revise!

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Haha! He was absolutely intent on enjoying his 3 yrs there and drinking too much but he did come out with flying colours and with liver intact.

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One Sunday night all the shops were shut & we couldn't find a 2 bob for the telly, Dad removed the back of the telly & bypassed the meter: Result free telly for rest of the night. He made sure he un-bypassed it before the bloke came to empty it to make sure enough money was in it, naughty Dad didn't want to get into trouble. :) .

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Somewhere i have a photo of a gas meter thief, taken in the mid 70s. I shall try and dig it out tomorrow.

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Remember in the mid 80's booking a "Delightful cabin, set in beautiful pine forest, overlooking the Helford river, on the Lizard peninsular, Cornwall" for the Easter break.

When we arrived after traffic chaos down the M5, was shocked to find a breeze block building (single skin walls) in a field with a few lleylandi bushes scattered around.

Was pouring with drizzle and rain and everything was damp inside includiing the beds, so trying to sound upbeat I said "no worries get some heat going and it'll be fine"

Found the bloody thing was all electric with a coin meter up on the wall ! cannot remember whether it was 50p or 1 pound coins, but put a couple in and they lasted about 2 hours !

Wife and 3 kids all moaning and going mental at me so got up next morning, complained bitterly to the owners, who would not give a refund and drove home !

What a disaster it was, that was my final and last time I ever went to Cornwall.

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5p in the German slot machine and phones, lead 5p into the coffee machine and removing the back of the TV to bypass the meter. You are a rum lot on Nottstalgia...lol :laugh:

But Michael, you are a participant in Nottstalgia too - surely you are not distancing yourself from the rest of us? "YOU are a rum lot on Nottstalgia..." indeed ;)

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5p in the German slot machine and phones, lead 5p into the coffee machine and removing the back of the TV to bypass the meter. You are a rum lot on Nottstalgia...lol :laugh:

I love being one of the bad lads. :)

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Dem gas meters are what's known as sub meters, biggest landlords fiddle ever. He pays the quarterly bill via the primary meter and those are installed in bedsits and the like.

The fiddle comes from the fact that when unlocked the landlord can set the amount of gas you get for your £1 or 50p just by rotating the dial where the coin slot is.

So if the landlord is paying a £1 for 50 cubic foot then the tenants pay a £1 for 30 cubic foot nice little earner.

Whilst on about gas meters does anyone remember metropolitan meters just off Hyson Green? they made them by the hundred in the 60s.

Colin

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we still have prepayment meters the landlord likes them so when tenants leave he is not landed with the bill for gas and electric bills but they can only be changed by the gas and electric companys, not coins but microchip key for electric and a microchiped card for the gasits the dearest way of paying still but you dont worry about paying the bills when they come. and if they do happen to go out there is 3 pounds emergency on the meter enough to manage you the rest of the night at least , but you have to make sure when you top up you put the 3 pounds extra back on.

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:secret:

Here's a confession of guilt: In the 70s I rented a flat with a "Sub meter". The landlord set the meter at an extortionately high rate. An aquaintance of mine sorted it out. He picked th elock and reset the meter to something around proper rates. Went from using ten bob a day to ten bob every few days.

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colly0410, It's nice to see that we have a sense of humour (#35). :laugh:

My sense of humour got me into trouble when I was a squaddie: I was laughing on parade, of course I got spotted & put on a charge (that stopped me laughing I can tell you) I was fined £5, that was a lot of dosh in 1977. I phoned Dad to tell him what happened & he said "serves you right for getting caught." Lots of sympathy of Dad, NOT. :):)

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Talking at work t'other day on how serious liberating cash from gas/electric meters was viewed by the police. Someone said "as soon as the bob/2 bob/50 pence coin went in the meter it belonged to the gas/electric board & the police classed it as theft & criminal damage if the cash was nicked!" Someone else said people got "sent to prison" for it. I can't see anyone getting locked up for such a minor crime. What was the normal punishment for borrowing gas/electric meter cash?

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I think it was regarded as a fairly serious crime - my guess is that it wasn't necessarily the cash theft, but the damage to the Gas Board's equipment, and the potential dangers that posed. I do remember reading items in the NEP fairly regularly of folk in court for meter theft, but I can't remember the punishments - I suspect, if it made the paper, there may have been some jail time. However, I seem to think the topic slowly went away as coin operated meters tended to get phased out. Does anybody still have coin operated meters?

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I recall the central heating "meters" in St Anns, Mum and Dad had a new house that was heated from the central system...Didn't take Dad long to work out how to get heating at minimal charges, he simply used cellotape over the evaporative radiator "metering"..

No problem telling this, both long gone....

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There used to be a refillable gauge on the radiators that registered the amount of heating used via a liquid that evaporated.. My late Dad soon learned how to defeat it, their house was as warm as toast over winter and it didn't cost them a fortune to heat...LOL

Of course, they knew what day the feller who took the readings and topped the gauge up was coming, so a day or so prior to that, he took the cellotape off the vents.

That's about all I can tell you on them, didn't get to go to their house often as we lived at Clifton and I worked many hours of overtime back then.

Maybe we have a member who lived in St Anns during the district heating scheme at the beginning??

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People who tried to save money by switching off their heating and using electric fires and convector heaters found they were paying twice.

First for electricity use, then for the evaporation in the gauge which still took place!

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I believe there was also one on the water heater... When the bloke used to come to read the guages he must have thought my parents suffered in the cold and were filthy, as they hardly used much heating or hot water.....LOL

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I knew someone years ago who used to rob her own gas meter. Then she'd tell the police someone broke in. For effect she used to pour pepper behind her eyelids to make it look as if she had been crying.

When we first lived in Glasgow, we lived in digs which had a gas meter to work the cooker. I could not understand why when I put a shilling in we got no gas. We told the landlord and he laughed. It was an old meter and you still put pennies in it.

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  • 9 months later...

Talking to a Lady at work t'other day & she puts pound coins in a meter on her TV, the bloke comes once a month to empty it, takes £16 for the rent & gives her the rest back. I said "but you can buy a TV from Aldi for about £130, that's a lot less the you'd pay in a year!" But she couldn't see the economics of it..

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