OT: Scottish Power, E.on, smart meters

Nov 18, 2021 Last reply: 4 years ago 5 Replies

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newshound 4 years ago

Now having both gas and electricity on Suppliers of Last Resort (E.on and Shell) I was quite surprised to be cold-called by Scottish Power this morning with an aggressive "We can beat your quote" phone call. When I complained about being cold-called the response was "you signed up for it" which might have been true once, because I was with them a few years and a couple of changes ago. They eventually gave up when I declined to say how I selected deals, or why I have to date refused a smart meter.

E.on are currently pestering me by email to book a Smart Meter fitting, even though their web site says they only do this for dual fuel customers.

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Information here may be outdated?

Harry Bloomfield, Esq. 4 years ago

newshound was thinking very hard :

Lucky you...

I had the SMETS 1 installed, which have not been smart for a few years and I have been pestering them ever since, to replace them with the SMETS 2.

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Brian Gaff (Sofa 4 years ago

That is a bit odd, as EDF put a talking system in for me, electric only for nowt. I'm not really sure how a smart meter is supposed to do what it says, ie save you money. true, if you listen to it daily you can track your usage and costs, but we all know its gone up, so you either budget for it or be stupid and go into arrears. . Very little you can do to reduce the usage as you need to keep warm and cook. Brian

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alan_m 4 years ago

I'm not sure that they are advertising that it will save you money any-more. More like it will save the National Grid. Initially they were claiming large amounts in monetary savings but a bit later they had to admit it was more like a short term saving of £15 per year - and that may have been for other reasons such as people changing to LED bulbs or getting subsidised insulation.

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Theo 4 years ago

Two reasons:

It helps you understand your usage and how much it costs you to run appliances. For example if you have a vented tumble dryer that takes 3-5kWh per load, it might make sense to switch to a heat pump tumble dryer that takes 1kWh per load.

It enables Time of Use tariffs - like Economy 7 but with times more flexible for different usage patterns. For example Octopus Go Faster where you can pick the cheap period to start at 8.30pm.

Theo

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newshound 4 years ago

It's a all bit complicated, isn't it. Eliminating manual meter readings should eventually save money, but I don't know how long the payback period might be. Letting you know what you are spending in real time could provide a helpful prompt to some.

In the fullness of time a system that manages demand smarter could be a good thing, and there are various ways that might be done. That might be by variable pricing: a message saying "your price will quadruple between

17:30 and 19:30, good idea to stop charging your car, switch off washing machine and tumble drier". In principle with IOT maybe SMETS-37 could switch off devices that you had selected that were on your network.

Like it or not, even with a decent number of nukes on the system grid stability management is going to become more of an issue (also failures become less tolerable once the whole economy is held together by the internet). Demand side management would be no bad thing.

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