Doh! Octopus & meter replacement

There's no obligation to have a smart tariff.

Tim

--

You can have a dumb meter if you with, or you can have a smart meter, but have a basic, standard tariff. Your choice, what you cannot have, is a smart tariff, unless you have a working smart meter.

Change to a smaller supplier who is less keen on smart meter installation. (I would assume the coop is just as keen as Octopus).

Does it actually say that in as many words? What does it say?

Engineers (sic) are working in the vicinity! Allegedly.

Don't answer the door?

The email says…

Your electricity meter has now reached the end of its certification period

- and that means it's time for an upgrade.

We’re installing the latest generation of smart meters, also known as SMETS2 (S2). Across the UK, smart meters are lowering costs by making the most of green energy.

Book your appointment with just a few taps here — time slots are limited and available on a first come, first served basis.

The installation's easy breezy and won't cost you any extra. Here's everything you need to know about getting your smart meter installed.

With a smart meter, there’s no more sending in meter reads. Your new meter does it automatically for you, so you can rest easy knowing you'll only pay for the energy you use.

Why do we need to replace your meter?

Just like food, each electricity meter is given a 'best before' date when it's manufactured.

This is called a certification date, which is set by the Office for Product Safety and Standards (OPSS).

We’re required by law, under the Electricity Act 1989, to replace your meter once it reaches its certification date. This ensures that your energy consumption is measured accurately and you pay only for what you use.

Why are you replacing traditional meters with smart ones?

The government requires energy suppliers to take all reasonable steps to install smart meters for new connections and replacement meters at domestic and non-domestic premises.

Traditional meters are also no longer being manufactured or refurbished.

With a smart meter, you can:

Get an extra chance to win up to £512 every month on the Wheel of Fortune.

Earn money back on your bills by joining Octoplus - our exclusive rewards programme for smart meter customers.

Save on your bills with our smart tariffs.

Love and power, The Octopus Energy Team

What's the disadvantage of having a smart meter in dumb mode, compared with having an older mechanical meter with analogue "mileometer" display?

And why would you not want a meter that is "read" every day so you will be charged for exactly what you use, without the electricity company having either to estimate a reading or send someone to read the meter?

As long as the tariff actually does charge you for the exact amount your meter says you've used each charging period (eg each quarter).

Also, check here the section "If your supplier says your electricity meter has expired" at

You'd need to check if there is a right of entry to forcibly replace your meter. I don't think that there is other on the grounds of safety or failure to pay bills.

In message snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net>, Spike snipped-for-privacy@mail.com writes

That sign off would be enough to discourage me from using them. Doesn't exactly shout "professional" organisation to me.

Adrian

-- To Reply : replace "diy" with "news" and reverse the domain

If you are reading this from a web interface e.g. DIY Banter or DIY Forum, please be aware this is NOT a forum, and you are merely using a web portal to a USENET group. Many people block posters coming from web portals due to perceieved SPAM or inaneness. For a better method of access, please see:

You are complaining to the wrong people. The power companies get fined for not meeting their targets for swapping customers to smart meters.

If the government wants everyone to have one they should have made in compulsory.

Perhaps you should ask your MP why the law says having a smart meter is not compulsory, but power companies are being penalised for not forcing them on people who don't want one.

Dave

The key issue is the old meter being out of certification. If that is correct, you need a new meter. If they no longer supply old meters you seem to have no choice.

What use you make of available features on the new meter is between you and the supplier.

However if your meter is out of certification is does need replacing. This does not seem at all unreasonable.

Cheers

Dave R

You will find that a lot more companies are becoming very informal with letters to customers.

In that case the answer is clear. Don't book an appointment.

I was with EON for electricity and with British Gas for gas. Eon started first with their "we are in your area installing smart meters. When would you like us to call on you?"

That was my alarm call, and I closed my EON account and went to a smaller supplier (which was fractionally cheaper). A few months later, British Gas started insisting I needed a smart meter. So I moved my gas account to the same smaller supplier. Because of the time difference between the fuels, I had retained two separate accounts.

That lasted a bit over 2 years, until that smaller found that it couldn't guarantee profitable operation for the following 2 years, and Ofgem shut them down and my accounts were transferred to British Gas. Despite me managing the two accounts separately because one was seasonal (I use the most gas in winter but electricity usage is fairly level all the year) I was annoyed that British Gas assumed I wanted a dual fuel account. I argued with the BG chatbot until it put me through to a human, and I explained to him why I wanted separate accounts because I had usage history going back 4 years and I wanted to continue treating them as two accounts, rather than being merged and thus making the correct Direct Debits problematic when they hadn't been before. That got me two accounts with British Gas instead of a single combined one.

Just after that conversion, I had the gas main in my road updated with a big yellow pipe, and my gas meter was just inside my front door, above head height. The replacement pipe from the new main to my existing meter couldn't be fed past two right-angle bends, so my old meter was removed and a new one installed outside my house in a white box beside the front door. It was a brand new meter, bit still old style with mechanicals clocking up the usage. The next gas bill was the sum of the reading on the old meter and the reading on the new one, so everything was being done correctly.

About 15 months later, BG sent me an email saying that my meters were out of date and they would be replacing them with smart meters. I managed to get their chatbot to connect me to a real person again. I explained that the gas meter was brand new just over a year before and it couldn't possibly be out of date. I acknowledged that the first number on the electricity meter was showing 9 so it probably was reaching an end of life condition. However I was under no obligation to accept a smart meter and I didn't want one. The man on the phone explained that the older style meters were not being made any more and smart meters were all they had. He said he would remove me from the smart meter list. I pointed out to him that if they are replacing existing meters with smart meters, some of the ones removed would be relatively new and still serviceable and if my electricity meter really did need to be replaced, I would have it replaced by a reclaimed serviceable old style meter. I haven't heard anything since.

My electricity meter went from 99999 to 00000 just over 2 months ago and the bills since have correctly assessed the amount used, so that has been trouble free. It does show that the "out of date" claim made originally wasn't true.

I'm not sure but there may be a sort of contradiction here. The utility company is, I believe, legally required to offer the customer a replacement meter if the old one is out of certification, but the customer is not legally required to accept it. It's probably similar to companies being fined if they don't install enough smart meters but customers can refuse installation.

That may well be the case, but it doesn't change my opinion.

Adrian

But energy companies are also obliged to record and charge for the correct usage. Suppose an old meter can no longer be guaranteed to record correctly. You'd be happy if it under-read, but you'd be the first to complain if it was recording more than you had actually used. That's why old meters need to be replaced.

I ask again: what is so bad about having an old meter replaced with a smart one? You are not (AFAIK) obliged to have a smart-meter tariff (with a meter that reports usage every day to the "mother ship") just because you have a smart meter.

Spike said "What action can I take to avoid having an allegedly smart meter installed (even in dumb mode)?" as if he didn't want a smart meter *even in dumb mode*.

I wouldn't go back to a dumb meter that had to be read periodically by "the meter man", because I like to get automatic figures of the midnight-to-midnight gas and electricity usage to spot any sudden changes. But other people may have a different point of view, which I accept as being valid, whether or not I agree with it.

My only criticism is the horrendously long wait between the cutoff time for a day (midnight) and that previous day's usage figures being available on the Octopus app or website - it's often about 15 hours later that the figures come through, when I would have expected them to be available within a minute or so of the cutoff - or by 8 AM when I get up, at least.

I did find an app (geoHome) that interrogates the meters directly rather than waiting for Octopus to report them on the app / website, but it has a bizarre bug: although it gives correct results when the clocks are on BST, as soon as they go back to GMT, the gas usage is for the wrong day: on 20 January you'd expect to see the figures for the previous day, 19 January, but the gas one is reported to be for 19 Jan but is actually the one for 18 Jan ;-) The electricity readings are fine. And the company who "support" than app claim that I'm imagining it all, even though I've sent them screenshots of their app and the Octopus figures for successive days.

Yes, energy companies like to embellish the reasons why they want to fit a smart meter, but at the end of the day you *do* need to have a meter that's within calibration, and if you try to be awkward about it they can get a warrant to break-in and fit a replacement, or cut off your supply, you can't insist on what type of meter they fit ...

If they can demonstrate the existing meter is out of calibration, it's time to play ball.

Just to follow up on one aspect of smart meters…

I have running an old British Gas minim electricity monitor. It tells me my consumption:

- currently

- since midnight

- yesterday

- last seven days

- last 30 days.

There is a choice of readouts: kWh, £, or kg CO2.

Its only drawback is that it over-reads by 17%, so if I need accurate data that is easily obtained.

I also log meter readings every month.

So…I would gain no useful advantage from having a smart meter’s readouts. I’m not interested in ‘smart’ tariffs, so would gain nothing on that aspect of smart metering.

The only ‘gain’ from this futile exercise is that I might not be paying for electricity that I’m not using. In the context of the rip-off prices imposed by the Renewables robbery, it hardly amounts to a hill of beans.

Oh! And today, the radio news tells me that Ed Millibrain is to squander £15bn over five years giving grants for solar panels, batteries, and heat pumps, to cut bills by £500. It would be better just to divide that money between households, and cut out the cowboy installers from the scene.

We have the most expensive electricity of any industrialised country, and this futile gesture will do nothing to ameliorate that for businesses.

The legislation regarding forced entry is somewhat complicated to say the least (see

I'm not sure what would happen if you got your own meter expert in who could show that the meter was within calibration (in Sch 7 there are “agreed margins of error” and “prescribed margins of error”!). According to

One in five?! I wonder how many are inaccurate, or if the "don't work as they should" refers mainly to other problems.