Rumours

[Brian Gaff]

Will smart meters alert the user of the date and time the meter is read by the energy company? I have heard conflicting reports on this one. also offgen say that if you are registered as blind with an energy company you are entitled to a talking remote unit. EDF have never heard of this, yet it was on a radio programme a few weeks back. Left hand right hand again. Since they seem unable to get their software running properly from reports and people have been getting daft bills or outlandish readings and it cannot even cope with economy 7, I predict it will be long after 2020 before its in any way reliable and out there. Also Reports suggest that hard on the heals of the take over of Yahoo, they will be abandoning pop3 from the end of the month. They quote too many people using old email clients but those who believe it suspect its more based on data collection and advertising opportunities on webmail. Are Amazon and google gearing up tho ruin their home assistants with advertising? It has been claimed Google have been running tests to see what the public think in the usa version of the Google home assistant.. Amazon also have plans of a similar sort to exploit the captive market since its being adopted by many white goods makers for control purposes.

This will ruin it in my view. People have had enough of daft poorly targeted adverts already. Brian

[Andy Burns]

I've set mine to be read once a month (I have the option of daily or half-hourly) so once you see which day they read it on, it's always that date (maybe they avoid reading on the 29th-31st of the month for the obvious reasons, or maybe you get the earliest day after)

I don't think anyone has had an enormous bill, just an overstated estimated price for daily usage on the in-home display, blame the media for inaccurate reporting.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Think is that if you pay monthly with equal payments, the company uses their own way of calculating what that will be.

Different if you pay a quarterly bill in arrears.

[Andy Burns]

Since having smart meters (and hence no estimated billing) eon have been pretty close with their DD payments, they aim for a zero balance by April, sending you any credit back at that time, they have a 6 monthly review, and let you override what the monthly amount is, presumably they have some sort of sanity check so you can't put it down to £1/month then settle-up in April.

[Graham.]

Settling an over-estimated bill can save you money if the price is going to go up.

Providing an inflated reading yourself is fraud I expect.

[Robin]

I know there have been recommendations for text-to-speech functionality on in-home displays. I have not seen anything from OFGEM or others to require it.

A quick look shows there was a report in December that the RNIB had been working with Energy UK on such meters and "development is in progress and RNIB-approved smart meters should be in the home across the country in the not-too-distant future".

So I th> Will smart meters alert the user of the date and time the meter is read by

[damduck-egg]

I used do to that 40 odd years ago when in a shared house I was the bill payer, we had a "house couple" who used more gas and electric than the rest of us, leaving the storage heaters in their room on boost all day for example. Fortunately they always paid their share of the falsely exaggerated bill so when we all went our separate ways I got a hefty refund which I divvied up amongst the other occupants and myself. About £40 each ISTR which in the early 70's was a reasonable sum.

G.Harman

[Harry Bloomfield]

Brian Gaff explained :

No, they are read remotely, the user sets it for a monthly or daily read, with an option of data being recorded every 30 minutes. Daily and

30 minutes data is reported back at around midnight, then appears on the suppliers website.

Entitled maybe in the future. It is maybe an 'in development' scheme.

Just a thought, you obviously manage Usenet successfully and to browse I suppose. Could you not log into your suppliers web site and read the data there, maybe using a text to speech app?

No meter old or SM will give precisely the same consumption figures, but averaged out they do pretty well.

Do as I do, block them/ use an alternative search engine which ensures privacy.

[Harry Bloomfield]

Andy Burns brought next idea :

OVO's system was that they set a calculated on consumption figure. You could then pay more via the slider, but not less.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

That's interesting. Did wonder where the 'zero' month was.

[Harry Bloomfield]

Andy Burns explained on 21/03/2017 :

The IHD's are generally useless. The only useful thing they do is show instantaneous usage, as a number and a speedo dial. They don't properly indicate what you still owe, only what the total cost is, they have no idea what you might have paid each month against the bill. They don't provide a current meter reading, something I would have thought was a primary thing to include.

Its interesting to watch the instantaneous consumption for a day or two, then you soon get bored and unplug it.

[Andy Burns]

Makes sense that it's the first quarter after Winter's out of the way I suppose, unless they split customers into twelve groups and I just happen to be April? Anyway I'll be with Scottish Power in a few days, and not likely they'll be able to read the smartmeters remotely.

[Andy Burns]

I've never expected mine to show that, just a per minute/hour/day/week/month/year figure, unrelated to actual payments, and I'm fine with that.

I keep it in the corner of the study, makes a useful red/amber/green check before going to bed, though I wish I could nudge the amber->green boundary up by 50 or 75W.

[Harry Bloomfield]

Unfortunately, the boundaries of the colour change are none adjustable, as is the speedo range - making it useless for the gas with a boiler. It just goes to pining the needle on full scale, lighting the red LED when ever the boiler fires up.

The electric equivalents are much more usefully ranged.

[Brian Gaff]

Well that may be part of it, but as they say, no smoke without fire. I feel that considering how long the smart meter has been in gestation it should have been perfect and un c*ck upable by the user. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

It was on a program on RNIB Connect radio's tech talk where a spokesperson was giving a talk some weeks back and did say that these were available you just had to ask for them. the presenters suggested at that time that it seemed ludicrous to make special ones, they should have all had it and you can turn it on or off as required. apparently all sorts of similar devices are available in other parts of the world and the chips and software for it have been around for ages.

As I say ineptitude. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

That is a c*ck eyed way of working though. This has been suggested, if its as useless as their online billing system then I fear the worst. The tendency is to use pretty pictures of virtual remote units based on java where all displays are in fact pictures not text at all. Brian