Have just been offered a smart meter - should I accept?

System

House_Martin wrote: »

Hengus is always trying his to downgrade smart meter s and this is just another set of useless figures he s trawled up.

Yet again my friend, you go off at a tangent and accuse me of making things up. All the detail is in the link here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/smart-meter-roll-out-gb-cost-benefit-analysis

If you choose just to accept the mantra of BG or your Manager then that is up to you. I leave it to others, who like a more informed debate, to read the information that has been released to support the Smart Meter rollout programme. FWiW, I believe that the costs of the programme have been under-stated and the benefits exaggerated.

EachPenny

lstar337 wrote: »

I can think of quite a few worse things to have in your home.

• An angry bull
• A serial killer
• Polonium-210

Japanese Knotweed would be my worst houseguest - at least the others are relatively easy to remove.


And I'd see the angry bull as just an opportunity for a lifetime supply of steak and burgers

System

Hengus wrote: »

Yet again my friend, you go off at a tangent and accuse me of making things up. All the detail is in the link here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/smart-meter-roll-out-gb-cost-benefit-analysis

If you choose just to accept the mantra of BG or your Manager then that is up to you. I leave it to others, who like a more informed debate, to read the information that has been released to support the Smart Meter rollout programme. FWiW, I believe that the costs of the programme have been under-stated and the benefits exaggerated.

You do not read my posts properly Hengus or you would have seen that it was from the head of BG s RPU who said it on BBC TV a few years ago, ( Inside Story I think it was called ) where the BBC followed a few BG Revenue Protection men in their job catching fiddlers.. The top boss made that statement of £60 a year loss to us all with energy theft Why would you not believe the UK experts in energy theft. Why would some government assessment have any credence over the UK experts ?
Surely you know by now how stupid they are with the way they have run the smart meter rollout. Why do you accept those figures you trot out over the men who s job it is to stop energy theft.
Maybe the government have the silly notion that BG are the only suppliers catching them and no one is actually thieving from Eon, EDF, Scot Power, Npower, SSE and the legions of little guys because they don t actually report that many at all.They may just be calculating the actual reports from BG data figures instead of using BG s figures and applying them to all the other suppliers who do not spend money stopping energy theft. You don t make the figures up, you spend enough time trawling the internet to find anti smart meter stuff. You would nt be doing the trawling unless you were hoping to dig up dirt on smart meters.
I have had a chat with the Northern head of BG RPU and he told me he could find tenfold more fiddlers for BG given a bigger budget..Depends how much he is allowed to spend on RPU employees. They are out there and would be stopped if he had a bigger budget . Npowers budget by the way is £7.50 a year, he told me that Npower were the worst of the lot at stopping their customers stealing energy. Your figures are stupid guesswork by the government who are trying to hide the true extent of energy theft. You get privileged insider info from me Hengus.I promise you I m not making this stuff up. Its unbelievable I know but sadly its true.. Npower want their customers to pay for 100% of all the energy nicked because they are not going to waste their profits on RPU , they cost millions to run.. The main thing is that every time a supplier finds electricity being stolen, they have to repay it to the National Grid if they can t get it from the thief..They can t get it back so its cheaper to let them have it. Thats the rules !

EachPenny

House_Martin wrote: »

That data you have dragged up is crapola and pure guesswork...
Personally I would only believe what the head of British Gas revenue protection has stated on the BBC that it is costing each consumer £60 a year extra to cover the theft of gas and electric. They are the experts in the UK...

Can you explain to us how the Head of British Gas revenue protection arrived at the figure of £60, because I have a feeling the accuracy of the figure is no different than that you describe as "crapola and pure guesswork".

For starters, how exactly can anyone know how much energy is being stolen? A cornershop owner knows how much they lose to shoplifting because they can compare what they have purchased from a wholesaler and what goes through the till. Both the inputs and outputs are known.

With the electricity grid there are (legitimate) unmetered supplies and transmission losses to take into account. We know how much energy is pumped into the system by power stations, and what is measured by metered supplies, but the difference between these figures is not all energy theft - theft will make up only a small part of the difference between input and output. I'd also guess there is a fair bit of leakage in the gas transmission system.

Nobody can know precisely how much energy is stolen - any figure is a guess based on estimates of one kind or another.

I'd love to see how the £60 figure is accounted for - any bets it also includes the cost of running the RPU's?

House_Martin wrote: »

The top boss made that statement of £60 a year loss to us all with energy theft Why would you not believe the UK experts in energy theft. Why would some government assessment have any credence over the UK experts ?
...Why do you accept those figures you trot out over the men who s job it is to stop energy theft...

I have had a chat with the Northern head of BG RPU and he told me he could find tenfold more fiddlers for BG given a bigger budget..Depends how much he is allowed to spend on RPU employees.

...Npower want their customers to pay for 100% of all the energy nicked because they are not going to waste their profits on RPU , they cost millions to run.

The men (and hopefully some women too) who are directly involved with stopping energy theft may not be getting an accurate overview of energy theft across the UK to be able to come up with a more reliable figure than the data Hengus has put forward. You may see lots of examples, and have your suspicions about people not wanting to open their door to you, but that in itself doesn't allow you to make an accurate prediction of the cost per customer of energy theft. Even the 'top boss' will not necessarily have access to all the data needed to make a precise calculation of the cost - everyone is making guesses.

It is almost universal that managers say how much more they could do with a bigger budget. You say RPU's cost millions to run (which I think might contribute to the £60 figure), but what is the value of the energy stolen? You could spend a billion on an RPU and still not eliminate energy theft. And if the total cost of energy being stolen is less than a billion then you are wasting money running an RPU of that size. I'm not condoning energy theft, but spending more money trying to stop something than you lose by letting it happen makes no sense. It is a bit like the corner shop guy hiring a security guard at £100/day to stop two Mars bars a week being stolen.

System

The 'key point' here is that even if energy theft is in the order of £Bns/year, the Government Department responsible for smart metering - no doubt having taken expert industry advice - is only assuming that £219M a year will be saved from reducing energy theft. This equates to less than £2 a year for dual fuel customers.

Given that the Government is keen to show the savings that will accrue from a £12Bn investment, then I am sure that the £219M/year figure would have been more had the 'experts' concluded that smart meters will eradicate energy theft. They have concluded that ways will be found to bypass these meters by those who are minded to do so.

System

Energy theft will be reduced by a very large amount.Not "eradicated " using smart meters. My work record over the last ten years with BG proves it..( not one smart electric meter found fiddled or messed with. How the hell can I explain how the big boss comes up with the figure of £60 a person .. I will just take his word for it, he knows more than anyone else in the UK about energy theft.. He said it on TV so must have some belief with this figure
An even bigger loss of revenue, than theft , is the bad debt of people like the professional renter who flit from property to property paying virtually zero gas/electric and only a couple of months of rent.Typically they will be able to avoid force fitting of prepayment meters up to around £2k s worth of electric in debt and the same with gas meters..BG will get to work earlier than £2k and pay out for a warrant of entry and a locksmith but the others won t go this early. With a smart credit meter when a debt reaches , say £300-£400, the supplier could warn them the meter will be switched to prepayment meter mode automatically if money is nt paid in and their losses will be dramatically cut. Pro renters will only move in to properties with credit meters in place. I have seen a foreign woman who just moved two doors down leaving thousands owing to Scot Power to start again with EDF ! I read for both companies at the same time so I could monitor just exactly what her MO was.
A senior RPU man who has worked for BG RPU for over 30 years , reckons that the losses to bad debts is much higher than the losses to energy theft..smart meters will put a massive dent in that very easy way that the scumbags are fleecing the paying public who pay their bills
That is another little snippet of straight facts for you two anti smart meter chappies to run down! Hengus will probably quote a lot of acronyms and other useless stuff hes trawled up from Stopsmartmeters.org UK or Chris Horn the blogger on smart meters who he sees as a font of all knowledge

System

Look Hengus, you have to stop quoting government figures.They are ridiculous.only 750 people in the whole of the UK were actually prosecuted for energy theft in 2015 (top of the list was 250 in Liverpool lol ).You could look at that figure and conclude that energy theft was tiny.. But if you look at the truth behind the figure and see that nearly all the suppliers actively do not prosecute anyone, or even try and stop energy theft whatsoever a different view on energy theft can be concluded.
..I even found two fiddlers in a very classy street in Doncaster who were with Utility Warehouse and SSE earlier this year. One cheeky thief had simply turned his gas meter around in an outside box facing the front of the house ! That is how brazen they have become nowadays.Utility Warehouse simply rebilled him..and now hes doing it again ! No one gets the visit to the Magistrates like they used to do.. Its the modern way of doing things..so theft simply increases year on year.
750 went to court in one year in the whole of the UK..There are over 750 stealing energy in the Doncaster area alone.

System

House_Martin wrote: »

Look Hengus, you have to stop quoting government figures.They are ridiculous.only 750 people in the whole of the UK were actually prosecuted for energy theft in 2015 (top of the list was 250 in Liverpool lol ).You could look at that figure and conclude that energy theft was tiny.. But if you look at the truth behind the figure and see that nearly all the suppliers actively do not prosecute anyone, or even try and stop energy theft whatsoever a different view on energy theft can be concluded.
..I even found two fiddlers in a very classy street in Doncaster who were with Utility Warehouse and SSE earlier this year. One cheeky thief had simply turned his gas meter around in an outside box facing the front of the house ! That is how brazen they have become nowadays.Utility Warehouse simply rebilled him..and now hes doing it again ! No one gets the visit to the Magistrates like they used to do.. Its the modern way of doing things..so theft simply increases year on year.
750 went to court in one year in the whole of the UK..There are over 750 stealing energy in the Doncaster area alone.

As you do not trust the Government, foreign energy suppliers et al, you might have more confidence in the latest figures from Ofgem on energy theft:

Quote It is estimated that energy worth £440m is stolen from the network every year by criminals tampering with energy meters and supplies to artificially reduce their recorded usage, offences that add £20 to the average household bill. Unquote (Source: Ofgem Sep 2016)

Aagh, but Ofgem is of course another quasi Governmental body so....... perhaps we should rely on the British Gas Revenue Protection Unit:

Quote: The industry estimates that a whopping £400 million worth of gas and electricity is stolen every year in the UK, a loss that adds around £20 to every honest customer’s bill. It’s an industry-wide issue and British Gas detects 65% of all energy theft cases – more than 10,000 cases a year. BG RPU (May 2016) UnQuote (Source: BG's website)

It follows that the Government Smart Meter Cost Benefit Analysis might well have been prudent when it set a reduction in energy theft figure of £219M/year.

One can conclude from this that stopping energy theft is only a minor (but welcome) benefit of the UK Smart Meter programme. You might wish to reconsider your £60 per household per year figure. What it doesn't explain is why if energy theft is costing me £20 per year, and it is cut by 50%, then getting a smart meter is only going to save me £11 per year provided I reduce my energy consumption. Oh, I forgot, there is no legislation in place to make suppliers pass on any savings that they make from their customers with smart meters.

As an aside, if you are interested, there is a report on the Utility Week website that suppliers are now looking to collaborate on the deployment off smart meters because Quote the costs associated with the UK smart meter rollout pose a serious threat to energy suppliers, especially large incumbents who are responsible for the bulk of installations. Unquote (Source Utility week and EY)

EachPenny

House_Martin wrote: »

I will just take his word for it, he knows more than anyone else in the UK about energy theft.
...
A senior RPU man who has worked for BG RPU for over 30 years , reckons that the losses to bad debts is much higher than the losses to energy theft..smart meters will put a massive dent in that...

That is another little snippet of straight facts for you two anti smart meter chappies to run down!

House Martin, there is a big difference between facts and something a mate told you in the BG tea room.

How can you claim your chappie knows more than anyone else in the UK about energy theft? Do you personally know all the other people in the UK who know about energy theft to be able to compare their relative knowledge? Of course you don't, and since there is no published league table of UK energy theft experts it is impossible for you to make that claim. However much you like him and admire the information you get from him.

An example of not seeing the 'bigger picture' is the notion that smart meters will solve the problem of bad debts. Has it occured to you that if the meter becomes more secure and measures are taken to prevent credit meters being used to run up large unpaid debts then there will be an increase in direct energy theft? An outcome which will place more people (including meter readers) at greater risk of danger and also result in damage to suppliers equipment which someone will have to pay to repair.

System

A mate ! the Northern head of BG RPU ! no chance of that .It was a private meeting he had with me to do with why most meter readers do not log any theft of gas or electric to BG RPU..He was trying to find the answers why only very few meter readers ever find fiddled meters whereas I and two or three of my colleagues (out of around 30 in my area ) were finding them every week. I don`t rub shoulders with RPU people very often except by emails when I have suspicious refusals or actual theft of energy. We certainly don t have a tea room !
Hengus you mention OFGEM to be trusted as a source of knowledge about energy theft.. OFGEM is the reason why there is so much of it going off. They are absolutely toothless.They know that only BG do anything and they refuse to really get stuck into the big foreign big suppliers to stop overlooking energy theft. OFGEM will hide their uselessness to cover how bad they are. They have made many threats to the other suppliers to do the same as BG over the years but they just get ignored..Where are the massive fines thrown at them for ignoring energy theft. That is what is needed. They are quick enough to levy million pound fines at the suppliers when they transgress consumer rights.
And for the last time , BG are the UK experts in energy theft, because no one else is working on how to stop it. Their figures are more trustworthy than OFGEMS. They have a large RPU and training facility which none of the others have, and a very dedicated team who do a great job. You maybe saw that TV prog a few years back Hengus, the senior head of BG RPU made that £60 a year statement..its not my figure I ve plucked out the hat
Someone can steal £2k from a supplier and not even receive an admonishment or a threat of a prosecution.They just rebill the estimated theft. If that same person had stolen £2k worth of heating oil from someones garden storage tank and was caught they would be facing a prison sentence..Because its piped gas and electricity they do not even get a slapped wrist.