If that is true, nothing to be lost to my mind as it would achieve the result. The main thing would be to switch off at the consumer unit before pulling the fuse so that you are not breaking any significant current at the fuse.
Because it?s a smart meter and I?m on a ?smart?, ie variable tariff. I?m supposed to get billed different rates at different times of day. No data transfer, no accurate billing.
I am pursuing various routes including an official complaint. After 5 months of being given no clues as to when my issue might be resolved, I?m getting a tad fed up.
They ought to care as I?m on a variable tariff and I?m almost certainly under-paying them at the moment. They need the data to calculate my bill. You can?t just ?read? a smart meter manually and get months of half-hourly consumption data.
Tim
I can well imagine.
If it's to your advantage they will be able to do very little about it. If it's to their advantage then it's going to be an uphill struggle to get any compensation.
Can you get a third party logging device to work out consumption and times?
When they changed my fuse from a 60A to a 100A after the meter reader noticed a new consumer unit (back in the '90s), the guy put on big rubber gloves, removed the fuse, then used a big hammer to smash the cast-iron enclosure, before fitting a new enclosure (rather like Bakelite). Then he used a putty to seal the cable entry and fitted the bigger fuse.
When I needed access to the meter tails at the meter, the crimp was loose enough to pull one side of the seal wire out and push it back in again later.
Yup metalclad pre-war ones like:
Which depending on the prospective short circuit current at the installation, could result in an arc explosion (think big fireball, and lots of very hot vaporised metal laden plasma)
Each phase might be be fused at say 600A - however as with all fusing, the fuse does not actually limit the short circuit current - only the duration of the over current.
Mine did that in January. My power company OVO were utterly useless, kept sending me emails with questions about LED lamp flashing, but never actually sent anyone to sort. Then suddenly last month it burst into life again, all by itself.
It almost certainly won't. But you shouldn't have to wait long for a power cut induced by a thunderstorm given the current weather. We had a strike 100m from the house. My modem had a fat spark out of its cable and my neighbours was completely fried as were various bedside clocks.
I was very impressed that mine survived and equally unimpressed with the surge arrester that was supposed to be protecting it.
It is a waste of time and would involve tampering with the electricity board seal and risking some exciting electrical behaviour. The next fuse or cutout up the system will source a fairly high multiple of 100A.
That part, at least, might be worth testing :-)
I doubt puling the cutout fuse will reset the meter.
Chris Bacon was thinking very hard :
No, they are usually easily accessible, but sealed by a wire/lead seal against being tampered with.
Thanks for the warning about linking smart meters and variable tariffs. It sounds overly complex an issue.
The other thought that springs to mind is that pulling the main fuse could by some route or other land you with more trouble than you already have. Leave well alone, go the complaint route. It looks like you might anyway have to negotiate for the cost of your electricity over the comms blackout period, and any compensation that might be due.
The solution to your problem is probably less technical than bureaucratic.
We have never had a variable tariff but the few I looked into /all/ had provision in the contract for what happens if /for any reason/ they can't get half hourly smart meter data. Does yours?
"Agile Octopus is a beta product [...] some things may not work first time, installations and processes may take longer than we'd like, and on occasion data issues with smart meters can take significant time to fix or prevent things working at all"
you don't have the following (which is still online)?
"In the absence of half hourly smart meter data, we will charge you as we would a customer on our Flexible Octopus variable tariff, based on typical consumption patterns (known as ?Profile 1?)."
https://octopus.energy/blog/terms-conditions-agile-go/
Are you not in deep doggy doo if you brak a seal and do this? I'm sure there has to be a cheap insulated tool to do this in any case. Brian
Yes, besides it could actually have a faulty modem and that will not respond to anything orther than a change out. I guess you could get legal on them. Brian
Yes this is how many of the folk who are unaware of things get caught when setting up their pot gardening projects in the loft. Brian
I see in today's Times that Octopus had a £61 million loss last year.
It will try to phone home, but we've established that it isn't communicating so I'm not sure that will work.
Pulling the cutout is something electricians do when doing a consumer unit change when there's no isolator. It doesn't result in a SWAT team descending from the DNO. In theory you are supposed to get the DNO to do it, but life is too short to hang around on site for that.
The meter will phone home to the supplier not the DNO anyway - depending on how dozy the supplier is to respond to that. It seems like they're sufficiently dozy to not respond to you, and so perhaps too dozy to respond to a cut? I don't know what level of data sharing there is between supplier and DNO.
From the meter's point of view it can't tell the difference between a cutout pull and a power cut - it's only the network that knows whether the cut is just you or a whole phase/substation/etc. So it's not a trivial task to tell the difference between tampering and a power cut. (since the cut could be just on your overhead cable drop).
I doubt they are smart enough to action anything based on the cut messages, although maybe the local DNO person might pop round to check everything is OK if they have nothing better to do?
Theo
Brian Gaff (Sofa) submitted this idea :
The correct equipment is thick rubber insulated gloves, a face sheild and maybe body protection, but I cannot say I have ever seen them wearing this much stuff, ever. I used to work with much higher voltages and currents, the only PPE usually a pair of 'gardening gloves'.
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