"A system error in smart meters has led to customers being quoted thousands of pounds for a day's usage of gas and electricity. Confused customers posted the strange readings from their SSE smart meters on social media, with one display showing almost £20,000 for a single day."
Tim
It took me about a year to sort out an overcharge of more than £4,000 from a smart meter that had been fitted into a factory that I leased out. I suspect the previous tenant must have been overcharged as well, but didn't notice it as the factory wasn't sitting empty.
Tim+ expressed precisely :
The meters don't calculate the cost, the in home display does that, using consumption and costs fed to it from the meter(s).
My two, as near as I can tell, have been spot on since they were fitted last June (then on OVO)- that despite not functioning as SM's since I switched to First Utility. FU have emailed to say they will be re-enabling both SM's as SM's, with remote reading in 28days.
and even that calculated number isn't the one used by the company when billing you
they start again from the raw figures
tim
Ah thats an integer rounding error sorry, I just knew those cheap old Z80 chips had a drawback when i saw they were ex Sinclair. Brian
I have been told that when they alert me to fit mine, I have to ring up and be sure they fit the accessible one, the one with the voice. would you not have thought that cost wise it would have been just as cheap to fit them all with this function and you could turn it off. Seems a wasteful way of going on. However apparently the units for single fuel and economy 7 are still not ready apparently. I find the whole way this has been done to be grossly inefficient and unduly complicated for what, on the surface seems like something many pieces of domestic gear have been able to do for years now. they say its the security aspect, but then again, if they are reading the meter directly o now how can this be a problem? All I hope is that it will have a little ringer that tells you when it was actually read for billing so one can actually make the readings agree when the bill arrives. Brian
It happens that tim... formulated :
Understood. The IHD in fact is fairly useless except as a rough guide. They do seem fairly accurate though, as a means of assessing instantaneous demand. The one glaringly obvious bit of data absent from our IHD is the actual meter reading value. Were I designing them, that would be top of my list to include..
Brian Gaff submitted this idea :
I agree, the whole thing has been very amateur. Even the fact that each supplier seems to have been able to implement a separate system, incompatible with the rest.
The customer decides when/how often they are read - monthly, daily or every 30 minutes, but I think that irrespective, the data is sent daily at around midnight. The monthly, daily, 30 minutes only sets out how the data is tabulated on their website. The IHD, via the meter I guess, is update on the standing charges and costs per unit, but doesn't seem to get updated on what you as the customer, pay into your account.
I had mine set for 30 minutes - which would show when the boiler fired up to heat the tank of HW. You could also see when the oven went on and TV's, lights turned on from the consumption graphs.
Our bill indicated by the IHD just kept on incrementing from the day it was installed and is still incrementing - how useless is that? I actually paid them a fixed amount towards the bill, each month, but had to check with the site whether I was ahead or behind.
So really, the IHD is handy to see your instantaneous consumption only. It gives a figure for your standing charges and unit charges. The suppliers website provides the only reliable information about your actual consumption and how much you owe them/they owe you.
The suppliers seem to be suggesting that all readings of the SM's are collected by an independent third party, if that is true then differences in SM's shouldn't really matter - the third party ought to be able to ensure there is continuity of data reading, when you switch suppliers.
Brian Gaff was thinking very hard :
One thing to be aware of, is that the trigger points for higher consumption levels are not user adjustable. Our IHD has tri-colour LED's to show when an instantaneous consumption level is exceeded. Every time the boiler fires up, the gas LED turns red, when not lit, it shows green. Likewise the 'speedo' style LCD display just gets pinned to the full scale when the boiler fires.
I suspect your voice version would only offer similar low/medium/high consumption voice output. Much more useful to you, will be the values shown on the suppliers web site.
I'm guessing it's the remote display that has the speech synthesizer, not the smart-meter.
In todays news, lab tests of a number of different types of meter have shown overreading by smart meters when led lighting or dimmer switches are used - 100s of percent in some cases!
SteveW
Link please.
Is that due to 'noise' and communication as the last excuse I heard years a go even before smart meters was because switched mode PSUs and computers w ere out of phase so recorded less usage so they had to increase the VA coun t .
Got a link?
I thought for domestic supplies, you were charged for watts, not volt.amps, so the power factor is not your concern?
No but it is in the Telegraph.
>
How about a link with some information in it?
That website says that a 'Rogowski Coil' is used to measure the current, and gives a link to a description of this
I would imagine that smart meters would have a completely different circuit arrangement, probably involving fast analogue to digital converters monitoring both current and voltage, and software to do the multiplication into true power. There could be many causes of error if current waveforms are encountered that have not been catered for in the design.
That seems the sort of clip-on sensor from devices like the Owl or CurrentCost. In an electronic meter (be it smart or dumb) I'd have thought a current shunt would be more likely, as it's already sitting between the incomer and the CU?
I'd imagine the frequency of sampling in order to send volts*amps to see the power drawn by "odd shaped" loads like SMPSUs and dimmers and integrate it properly to register energy is where the report found weaknesses.
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