Energy Tariffs

[Oldgreybeard]

Smart meters do not use the mobile phone signal, they use the local WAN (Wide Area Network) for security reasons. It is possible for them to use MESH (if its fitted to the particular meter), MESH is useful if you are in an area of poor WAN coverage and I believe you can effectively piggy back off of other neighbours meters (TBC)

Long running battle with Octopus who told us repeatedly for six months we could not get a signal as in poor WAN coverage area. OFGEM completely useless in being able to help, poor WAN coverage is not a concern of theirs.

In the end, Octopus agreed to fit a smart meter as I argued it would still need reading if it failed to operate as a smart meter (it will operate as a dumb meter)

Engineer came out, and give him his due he spent about two hours getting it to link, which it did with the aid of an additional antenna in the meter box. All was well for a couple of months and then the signal dropped. Out they came again and after a bit of faffing its worked fine since.

They are obliged to fit a smart meter if you request one, the fact that the infrastructure in your area may not support it is the problem that needs addressing. Don't let them fob you off with their postcode search, get them to come out and physically check the signal at your property. You may find like we did that it will connect!

The WAN is just a wide area network that uses the mobile phone system though, at least here in the South where we cannot use the LRR connectivity. If there is no mobile phone signal then there is no way for the meter to connect. We went through this in a lot of detail back when we had a smart meter fitted, about three years ago now. Despite the best endeavours of SSE they just couldn't get the meter to connect.

The Zigbee mesh backup connectivity system is very short range. It works OK when houses are close together, but here, where my nearest neighbour is a fair distance away, the mesh system cannot connect either. My nearest neighbour cannot get a phone signal either, so even if the mesh system could connect it still wouldn't be able to connect back to DCC.

I've looked into whether there is a likelihood that we will get a mobile phone signal here, really because it would give us better broadband. Sadly the one company that investigated installing a mast about a mile up the valley cancelled the project on the basis that the cost was too high for the small number of customers the mast would provide a service for. The parish council have a working group looking at getting better connectivity here, but if that happens it seems likely to be fibre, rather than a link to the mobile phone network.

[Thebeeman]

Down here in the S.West Airband seems to be the answer to all prayers for at least 2 months when it starts going T's up.

[Andy]

Smart meters do not use the mobile phone signal, they use the local WAN (Wide Area Network) for security reasons. It is possible for them to use MESH (if its fitted to the particular meter), MESH is useful if you are in an area of poor WAN coverage and I believe you can effectively piggy back off of other neighbours meters (TBC)

That is incorrect. They do use the mobile phone signal in most of England. However they have termed it WAN . This also includes the mesh component. I remember reading somewhere that the mesh range is really not great. In Scotland they use the arquiva network which is supposedly better for long range in to the hills. There is no mesh in scotland. It hasn't help me!

https://www.smartme.co.uk/smets-2.html#gsc.tab=0

[Oldgreybeard]

The SSE chap said at the time he was fiddling around with our smart meter than the mesh network only really worked with houses in urban areas, that were very close to their neighbours. Here my nearest neighbour is around 60m away, but they don't have a smart meter (same reason as us) so there is a chicken and egg problem with the mesh concept. The SSE chap reckoned that at 60m it was not likely that a mesh connection would work reliably, either.

In theory, the mesh should allow meters with no signal to connect to other meters, piggybacking data from meter to meter until it reaches a meter that can get a mobile phone signal. In practice there will be very few smart meters in no signal areas, so there won't be the meters around to create a working mesh. We're good examples of this, I had a smart meter fitted, then it had to be taken out after about 6 months because it couldn't get a signal. That means that our house isn't now available as a node for mesh connectivity. This is probably a pretty common scenario in poor signal areas.

[Galahad]

(Almost) everything you need to know about SMETS2 meters and how they work - https://www.smartme.co.uk/smets-2.html

[Thebeeman]

(Almost) everything you need to know about SMETS2 meters and how they work - https://www.smartme.co.uk/smets-2.html

Thanks for the link.

[nowty]

Martin Lewis has made a statement after mtg with the CEOs of the big energy supplier companies and has clarified what it means to those on fixed rates and its as I suspected it would be back on page 1, https://camelot-forum.co.uk/phpBB3/view ... 295#p17353

IMPORTANT NEWS FOR THOSE ON ENERGY FIXES
All fixes that are more expensive than the new price guarantee rate will see an automatic reduction in Oct (but they will at most only reduce to the level of the new guarantee)
So for now DO NOTHING...
In the energy summit I had today BG, Shell, Eon, EDF, Ovo (SSE), Octopus CEOs agreed to my ask that the few (maybe 1%) whose fixes still cost over the price guarantee after that, CAN move onto the guarantee with no exit penalties, til at least 15 Nov (some beyond)
Yet firms DONT have full info from govt yet, so don't waste time calling them now (and 99% of fixers needn't do anything anyway).

[Beau]

Had a smart meter installed today.

The first thing I asked is 'does you have reception in there? 'Oh yes it's fine'

Come the end 'it just needs an aerial' nope that didn't work either so I now have a dumb meter that does exactly what the old one did but has cost our supplier a chunk of money.

Even if it had worked there was no separate user-friendly display to help keep track of energy use. Literally a complete waste of time

[nowty]

Had a smart meter installed today.

The first thing I asked is 'does you have reception in there? 'Oh yes it's fine'

Come the end 'it just needs an aerial' nope that didn't work either so I now have a dumb meter that does exactly what the old one did but has cost our supplier a chunk of money.

Even if it had worked there was no separate user-friendly display to help keep track of energy use. Literally a complete waste of time

And as my parents found out, their old dumb meter was easy to read but when their SMETS1 smart meter ended up with Scottish Power after their supplier went bust, they could not read it when they were asked for an opening reading. So I drove 250 miles to read it for them and even I had to video the display and play it back because the display changed to quickly for me to write down the numbers.

Luckily, they then moved to Octopus who could read their SMETS1 meter.

[Oldgreybeard]

Had a smart meter installed today.

The first thing I asked is 'does you have reception in there? 'Oh yes it's fine'

Come the end 'it just needs an aerial' nope that didn't work either so I now have a dumb meter that does exactly what the old one did but has cost our supplier a chunk of money.

Even if it had worked there was no separate user-friendly display to help keep track of energy use. Literally a complete waste of time

And as my parents found out, their old dumb meter was easy to read but when their SMETS1 smart meter ended up with Scottish Power after their supplier went bust, they could not read it when they were asked for an opening reading. So I drove 250 miles to read it for them and even I had to video the display and play it back because the display changed to quickly for me to write down the numbers.

Luckily, they then moved to Octopus who could read their SMETS1 meter.

This mirrors our experience. We were on Economy 7, and bowed to pressure from SSE to have a smart meter, with assurances that it would be no different to our existing E7 meter, but would save me having to send in readings. Great, I thought, especially as we had just bought an EV, and it looked as if the EV plus a smart meter offered some advantages in terms of available tariffs.

Sadly the smart meter not only never managed to connect and work, but it also meant we lost the E7 capability altogether. The meter has no way of knowing, or displaying, the peak and off-peak usage, it relies on being connected to do that. This means that if it cannot connect for any reason you get billed for peak rate usage all the time. To say I was not impressed is an understatement.

After about 6 months of faffing around SSE admitted defeat, but I had a hell of a struggle to get them to agree to take the thing out and replace it with a normal E7 meter. Thankfully I managed it in the end, but would urge caution for anyone that relies on E7 to consider very carefully before deciding to get their meter swapped. I was lucky, in that our smart meter fiasco started in March, so we didn't really lose out a lot by not being able to use the E7 tariff before the meter was replaced, but things could have been very different had the new smart meter been fitted in the Autumn, resulting in most of our heating and hot water being charged at the peak rate for the winter.