Coin Operated electricity meters

[MIPS]

There's a lot of news articles on them. Mostly it seems to be that they are often forcefully installed.
Now I am also noting there's context here that might explain more why these are being forcefully installed: Deadbeats and idiots.

It wasn’t until I had sat through six hours of hold music – none of the energy companies wanted to take responsibility for our situation – that we realised the installation had been triggered by a £1,000 debt on the previous tenants’ account.

“We didn’t pay our bills for about nine months because we sort of viewed bills as imaginary,” says Achille Crawford, 22, a Goldsmiths graduate, who also had a pre-payment meter installed in 2013. “Someone came in our house and changed our meter while we were out. We had a huge bill to pay later for having it changed.”

Source on both of those gems is - https://www.theguardian.com/educatio...tricity-meters

I mean if there is anyone who can design a better way to make people pay-up for non-compliance the brits seem pretty good at designing devices for that but sometimes I do genuinely wonder if something they made was a solution looking for a problem or it genuinely was a solution to an otherwise dumb problem.. :/