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Octopus sent me the same letter, on two occasions during "Covid". I ignored them and haven't heard anything more. The thing was it was about the gas meter only (an old Parkinson Cowen (Thorn) numerical meter) I found it odd that the old 80 Amp Ferranti electricity meter wasn't mentioned.
Octopus are nagging me to have my electricity meter changed (it's due to run out of certification).
Apparently they can't fit a non-smart one as they haven't any left.
Should I finally resign myself to a POS smart meter, or is there another way ?
They could fit a smart meter, but leave it in dumb mode ...
You do not have a right to a meter with a spinning disc.
You do have (according to Ofgem) a right not to accept a smart meter.
Solution seems simple: tell them to fit a smart meter without the comms enabled. Though you may then find they aren't that bothered about certification.
We had smart gas and electricity meters fitted in June by Octopus, who have been our supplier for several years. We'd been asking for smart meters for a while but were told that they weren't available for our postcode (maybe due to poor mobile internet comms, if that is how the meters phone home with their readings). Finally they said yes.
Everything worked fine for a couple of months, then the gas meter stopped reporting its readings (via the electricity meter, so I'm told) to the "in-home device" (the console which gives live meter readings) and to the Octopus database that their app and website use.
They fixed the problem remotely by rebooting something which re-established the gas-to-electricity-meter comms, but only for a few days and now it's failed again. An engineer is coming to investigate. Could be interference from some other device. The tech support email that I had said that the inter-meter comms was on 50 GHz (sic), which may be a typo for 5 GHz, unless
50 GHz is available for short-range comms, like 470 MHz is for weather stations communicating with remote sensors. The meters are about 30 feet apart through a couple of thick walls (that bit of the house dates from the late 1800s) but the meter fitter was evidently happy that he'd got good comms at the time. The IHD reports OK for the various links in the chain: for each meter, for the IHD, for "phoning home", so I suspect it is not given a true picture and is reporting OK even though there is a fault - duff diagnostics!For now, I still read the meters manually each day and log the details in a spreadsheet, as I did with the non-smart meters. It's not much effort to read the gas meter at its own display, rather than reading in at the IHD console, as I do for electricity. I also record the midnight-to-midnight usage that the app tells me - but only for elec since the gas readings have stopped working.
There is an annoying bug in Octopus's website whcih means that the lack of recent meter readings (or very rare sensible readings amongst silly values or no values) causes the site to display *no* readings, even the earlier ones from before mid August when things suddenly stopped working.
Depends where you live...
South and it's O2/Teleonica mobile signals.
North and it's Arqiva dedicated metering network (with special frequencies required e.g. near Fylingdales etc).
As an alternative, they can use their own mesh networking between your smart meter and a neighbour's smart meter if that will "bridge" a gap, not sure how many mesh-hops are allowed?
Including the ability to remotely cut it off ?
Mine is the other way around. My gas meter works smart, but my electricity meter stopped reporting years ago. As the gas reporting goes via the electricity meter, I'm guessing it is a problem at their end, but they have shown zero interest in fixing it.
Probably not as bad as the scottish power usage graphs. In the day when I was a customer and providing monthly readings to them.
I was a week late in providing a reading so the usage showed their estimated reading. When I gave the late reading it was lower than their new estimate and produced a negative result for the usage between their estimate and my actual reading. Their software for the usage graph couldn't cope with negative values* and interpreted as a very large positive number. As a result the y axis was scaled from zero to the largest 16 bit positive number rather than amore sensible scale, say from zero to 100.
Their software seemed to regarding FFFF hex not as - 1 but as +65,335
Although this is possible the way most of the gutter press and media have treated this has just been conspiracy theory scare tactics.
With a shortage of power the whole district is likely to be cut off at the same time rather than individual houses one at a time via the smart meter.
On non payment of bills they could remotely convert the meter to pre-payment faster than obtaining a court order to do the same by physically entering your property to swap the meter.
More likely to happen is variable tariffs based on the time of day to a resolution of half an hour. The chances are that if this becomes common there will be no cheaper deals for those not on a smart meter. Until the "energy crisis" a some of the cheaper tariffs were based on you having a smart meter, or having one installed within a short period from the start of your contract.
I don't know any technical details about the way the readings reach the supplier but having both electricity and gas working for many months the gas reading ceased working. On phoning my supplier they arranged for the meter to be updated/re-booted but this didn't work and after several more attempts the problem was escalated up to second line technical. I was told that there were two different intermediate methods for the supplier to get the smart meter reading, both via a third party. I was informed that my supplier would request a swap between methods and this could take up to 1 week.
I have no way of knowing if any of the customer service info was BS but both of my meters have worked flawlessly since 3 days after that final phone call.
Depends if they fit it without a SIM, or fit it with a SIM and promise not to use it ...
Its only in the south they need a SIM. Up north not needed.
Brum counts as South :)
Their inter-meter comms uses Zigbee (2.4GHZ I think shared with wifi and bluetooth, and microwaves! -- mine is next to the microwave and can lose comms while it is on), external as above.
The gas meter uses a low energy zigbee mode once eveery 30 minutes to preserve teh battery to get >10yr life.
Stephen Potter said the opposite! Quote: "But not in the South".
Why not? You don't have to take any notice of it. It's nice not having to go outside and read it, otherwise just forget it's there.
Central! The other SM region that uses mobile or mesh.
DCC only seem to speak in terms of "Central and south region" v.s. "North region".
Were they originally bid for as three separate regions and Telefonica just happened to win two of them?
When I had a house of my own, before I got married, I was offered two alternatives:
- pay periodically (either monthly or quarterly) by direct debit, using an estimated amount on a budget scheme
- pay the actual bill (either monthly or quarterly) by manual means (ie not direct debit): so I would receive a bill with a counterfoil which I had to take to the bank together with a cheque and pay
The company (I think it was Southern Electricity/Gas) did not have the technology to deduct a *variable* amount (according to meter readings) by direct debit.
When I sold the house (when we got married) I had a lot of money owing to me, and the company was very reluctant to refund it: the tried to pressurise me into transferring the account to our shared house. I persisted, threatening the ombudsman, and they paid up.
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