smart meters

[ProDave]

12 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

 

I did have to call them several years back to check that 1 was day rate and 2 was night rate as the website did not use those numbers.  I have just tried to log into my account as my bill is due, and guess what, they hare having trouble and I have to try again later.

 

A while back we had a rental flat with E7 heating.

 

When we came to sell it and the last tenant moved out, and we sent the final readings the bill came back wrong.  I soon worked out the tenenat had been transposing the day and night readings.  It took months to sort out.  we even had a meter reader visit twice. He took down the readings and gave us a copy of the day and night readings he gave, but as soon as they got entered,  the "system" swapped them over as they were "wrong"

 

It took a lot of complaining and aparently they had to trace 2 previous tenants as the bills had been wrong for some time.

 

I guess if automated readings can prevent that error?  but then if there IS an error I suspect it will be almost impossible to correct as "it can't be wrong"

 

[lizzie]

I changed to bulb some months ago. I pay a dd of 96 a month (set by them) they now tell me I owe them nearly 300 as the 96 is not enough. They want to put me up to 150 a month. I send them meter readings every month. That seems a lot of money for one not very large house built to good u values and airtightness.

 

I was paying approx that at the old draughty rental....that was with B gas. 

 

Are bulb now an expensive supplier?

[Ferdinand]

9 minutes ago, lizzie said:

I changed to bulb some months ago. I pay a dd of 96 a month (set by them) they now tell me I owe them nearly 300 as the 96 is not enough. They want to put me up to 150 a month. I send them meter readings every month. That seems a lot of money for one not very large house built to good u values and airtightness.

 

I was paying approx that at the old draughty rental....that was with B gas. 

 

Are bulb now an expensive supplier?

 

That looks partly like a summer/winter imbalance, and that they are trying to claw back on the basis of 6 months of difference. it looks like a bit of a jump.

 

You may have done all of this next but.

 

I would cross check your actual usage against what they are charging, and decide how long you want to take for it to come back into line. In my experience these payments are negotiable with evidence. You could try for 125 or 130.

 

My payment with a different supplier has just hoicked from 87 to 117, but I owe them £250 after a heavy winter so I cannot really complain, and I only changed last year.

 

I am in the MSE Energy Club to monitor for cheaper tariffs, but I tend to go for large suppliers and fixed 2-3 year tariffs.

 

Others will know more about Bulb.

 

Ferdinand

Edited May 21, 2019 by Ferdinand

[dpmiller]

NIE or their subbie do all the readings over here regardless of vendor and they insist on an occasional physical visit even tho we can enter readings online.

I'll tell you tomorrow (hopefully) what kind of meter they're putting into new installs...

[ProDave]

This is where you do need to keep an eye on your bills and why I hate this rolling credit / debit thing.

 

At the beginning of the winter I noticed our monthly bill was exceeding the monthly payment so I instigated an increase to the monthly payment to prevent a large debit building up, because I did not want the supplier suddenly deciding to increase it to a silly rate to claw back the debit over a short period.  As it happened I seem to have guessed the amount about right as now mid summer I am slightly in credit.  I might even reduce my payment a bit now until the winter.

 

Whatever supplier you are with you should get as monthly bill so you can see how much you are using for esch month of the year and decide yourself if the pasyment matches the billing,

[newhome]

11 minutes ago, lizzie said:

 That seems a lot of money for one not very large house built to good u values and airtightness.

 

I was paying approx that at the old draughty rental....that was with B gas. 

 

Are bulb now an expensive supplier?

 

I don’t think Bulb are ordinarily expensive TBH but check your tariff. You will probably have things in the new house that you didn’t have in the rental, MVHR for example, not sure how much those things will add. You really need to check your own usage every month. I enter all of mine into a spreadsheet religiously as Scottish Power ‘deleted’ all of my readings and bill history and then couldn’t restore it so it was lost forever. Keep my own spreadsheet now! 

[Ferdinand]

2 minutes ago, ProDave said:

mid summer

 

??? 

 

Warm spring in Escocia?

[SteamyTea]

5 minutes ago, ProDave said:

This is where you do need to keep an eye on your bills and why I hate this rolling credit / debit thing.

What I do, 3 monthly billing, even though it costs more, which is annoying, I was on a direct debit, but after EDF tried to take £2500 out of my account, then a day later £2000 and then a day after that £1000, leaving me with bank charges of £90, which neither EDF or my bank would refund easily, I changed to back to cash/cheque method.

As most of you know, I have my own energy monitor and keep a keen eye on my usage, yesterday was 6 kWh.

It is useful having a display as it quickly picked up when my fridge when permanently on and was burning though an extra 3 kWh/day (the inside was not frozen so suspect gas had come out).

I am sure there are some people that have had problems with billing when a smart meter is installed, but I suspect there are less of them compared to the older system.

I also suspect that it is not the smart meter that is the problem, probably an admin problem.

[Jeremy Harris]

25 minutes ago, lizzie said:

Are bulb now an expensive supplier?

 

Don't seem to be for us.  The initial monthly DD was estimated to be £48.52 and I had a statement this morning telling me that our account is currently £103.35 in credit and that we used £43.53 in the last month, and that includes running my car.

[Jeremy Harris]

27 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

What I do, 3 monthly billing, even though it costs more, which is annoying, I was on a direct debit, but after EDF tried to take £2500 out of my account, then a day later £2000 and then a day after that £1000, leaving me with bank charges of £90, which neither EDF or my bank would refund easily, I changed to back to cash/cheque method.

As most of you know, I have my own energy monitor and keep a keen eye on my usage, yesterday was 6 kWh.

It is useful having a display as it quickly picked up when my fridge when permanently on and was burning though an extra 3 kWh/day (the inside was not frozen so suspect gas had come out).

I am sure there are some people that have had problems with billing when a smart meter is installed, but I suspect there are less of them compared to the older system.

I also suspect that it is not the smart meter that is the problem, probably an admin problem.

 

Energy monitoring is definitely one of the most useful things we've had for the past few years.  There's no substitute for being able to see just how much you're using at any time as a way of making us think about when to turn things on or off.  We shifted a lot of our consumption to the E7 off-peak period in January/February this year, and that's had a significant impact on our bill.

 

The curious thing for us is that we're not seeing a major drop in the bill now that we're not using any heating at all.  It seems that hot water, car charging and other loads dominate our bill.  In particular, we've had a few days in the past month where we've had the air cooling running in the evening, after the PV system has pretty much stopped generating, and that seems to cost more to run than the heating did during the winter, mainly because we can't easily shift it to the off-peak period.  Need to get a battery system installed to be able to reduce the peak rate usage, I think.

[SteamyTea]

2 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

The initial monthly DD was estimated to be £48.52 and I had a statement this morning telling me that our account is currently £103.35 in credit and that we used £43.53 in the last month

I think this is part of the problem, most people talk about the money they spend, really it should be about the energy used.  Shame we don't sell energy my the MJ, would be a lot better than units, kWh, litre, bottle, kg, and all the other terms used.

Using the MJ would also sort out the classic confusion between kWh, kW/h kW, killer wot, killa what our.

Tariffs change and that is often not taken into account.  When my tarrif changed at the beginning of April, I looked at my usage and compared it what EDF thought I had used before and after the increase.  It was within a couple of kWh for each reading, bloody amazing, they must have a good algorithm to sort it, especially as my previous year was all to cock as my E7 immersion heater had gone pop and I was using more day electricity.

[Ed Davies]

1 hour ago, SteamyTea said:

I have an old digital meter, it flicks between t (total kWh), 1 (day kWh) and 2 (night kWh). 

 

Slightly surprised it doesn't cycle through 888888 to make it obvious if any of the LCD segments have failed. I thought most did.

[ProDave]

I keep a weekly reading of our energy usage.  I actually have 5 meter readings to take (don't ask) but it tells me exactly how much we use, how much heating and hot water use, how much we generate and how much we export.

 

Total usage is well down from the winter.  Heating use is a small fraction of our bill.  Other "stuff" uses more than the heating.  Now no heating is on you can see the "stuff" usage drop as as the solar PV generation goes up.

 

MVHR and the treatment plant both use about 2KWh each per day.,

 

ASHP uses almost 1KWh per week for "heating"  even when the heating is off. that is just to power it's electronics to keep it ready to turn on. That's a constant load of about 5 watts.

[ProDave]

41 minutes ago, Ferdinand said:

 

??? 

 

Warm spring in Escocia?

In just 4 weeks it will be midsumers day and the nights will start to draw in.

 

[Ferdinand]

49 minutes ago, ProDave said:

In just 4 weeks it will be midsumers day and the nights will start to draw in.

 

 

According to my diary, 21st June is the first day of summer.

 

Crossed wires in custom and practice, methinks.

[joe90]

1 hour ago, Ferdinand said:

According to my diary, 21st June is the first day of summer.

 

21st June is the middle of summer, the longest day surely.

[SteamyTea]

4 minutes ago, joe90 said:

21st June is the middle of summer, the longest day surely.

No, I have a book somewhere that explains the seasons and how it is all worked out.

Would be so much easier if we just took the coldest time as mid winter (which would be February) and then divided the year into quarters from there.  Could make the tax year start then too, so you only have to pay your taxes on the coldest day of the year.

[SteamyTea]

2 hours ago, Ed Davies said:

Slightly surprised it doesn't cycle through 888888 to make it obvious if any of the LCD segments have failed. I thought most did.

Then we would get some huge bills.

I did say it was an old digital meter.  I seem to remember when it was changed, the guy said they had to be replaced every 20 years.  Still got a few years till 31-08-2026.

[lizzie]

I'm going to start monitoring my usage as suggested.  I guess usage up to recently may be skewed by the MVHR and UFH not functioning properly.

[Jeremy Harris]

Just read a post on another forum where a "smart" meter customer had their electricity supply remotely switched off for nine and a half hours by their supplier.  The sequence of events was that the customer called the supplier to report that the meter in-house display was showing the wrong tariff, a different tariff to the one he had signed up to.  The supplier said they would correct the display over the air.  All seemed OK, until a few hours later when the power went off.  The supplier called out the DNO, when the power outage was reported, and the DNO reported back that the supply to the meter was OK and that the meter had turned off the supply to the house. 

 

It turned out that someone at the supplier had sent the meter the wrong programming data when trying to reset the in-house display to show the correct tariff.  What they did was change the meter so that it was programmed as a Pay As You Go credit meter, without telling the customer this is what they had done.  When the period of grace allowed without credit ran out the meter disconnected the supply.  Getting the supply back on took many 'phone calls and a long delay.  No compensation was offered.

 

Everything I've read about remote disconnection has stressed that the suppliers would not use this feature (it's built in to all "smart" meters).  This case seems to prove that a supplier can disconnect a supply remotely without any checks, just by someone with a bit of finger trouble.  That doesn't fill me with confidence.

 

 

[Temp]

Apparently 20% of smart meters being installed are still SMEETS I meters and a third of people with the latest SMEETS II meters are reporting problems when switching supplier. What a bog up.

 

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-7403561/A-fifth-households-having-generation-smart-meters-fitted.html