Smart Meters

General_Grant

bobarran wrote: »

I switched to a 1 year fixed tariff with EDF about 8 months ago. They kept trying to get me to have a smart meter. After the 3rd time of refusing, they now tell me it's in my terms and conditions that I have to have one. If i don't they say they will switch me to the higher standard rate. I checked the small print and sure enough it's there at the bottom of the terms and conditions.
As i still have 4 months to go on my fixed rate, i will be facing a £60 charge to switch to someone else.
Has anyone else been bullied in this way and is it now standard practice for all the big 6 providers.
Can I insist that the £60 early termination fee doesn't apply because it's them making the change.

It seems not to be them who are "making the change" but it is you not being willing to accept a condition in the contract to which you have actually agreed.

buglawton

SSE has a phone spamming drive on to get people to accept appointments for smart meters. I asked if that meant SMETS 2 and could I get that in writing before any appointment is arranged. That's not possible I was told. If I get another call I'll ask to be taken off the spam list.

Michaelw

I've had problems topping up my British Gas L&G E470 meter,the red HAN light flashes after a few days of topping up,a long tedious vend code has to entered via the in home display for the gas then the electricity top up then appears then HAN back to green then back to red LED again after a few days.

I was wondering if theres an interference problem or possibly the dreaded gas meter battery beginning to play problems.

buglawton

bobarran wrote: »

I switched to a 1 year fixed tariff with EDF about 8 months ago. They kept trying to get me to have a smart meter. After the 3rd time of refusing, they now tell me it's in my terms and conditions that I have to have one. If i don't they say they will switch me to the higher standard rate. I checked the small print and sure enough it's there at the bottom of the terms and conditions.
As i still have 4 months to go on my fixed rate, i will be facing a £60 charge to switch to someone else.
Has anyone else been bullied in this way and is it now standard practice for all the big 6 providers.
Can I insist that the £60 early termination fee doesn't apply because it's them making the change.

Its a case of being caught out by the small print. Thanks for this heads-up anyway as it's something those who don't want to be lumbered with a SMETS 1 meter should watch out for when they switch. I'll be watching out for EDF and probably taking them off my next switch list.

Ken68

Email this morning from Tonik
"
We’re really excited to tell you that we now have the ability to communicate with the smart meter that you already have installed! The clever people in our Development Team have been working hard to make this happen; it means we’ll start to collect daily reads from your smart meter, even though it was provided by another supplier."

It was originally fitted courtesy of Scottish Power as Smet 1 but Smet 2 Compatible.

zeupater

Ken68 wrote: »

Email this morning from Tonik
"
We’re really excited to tell you that we now have the ability to communicate with the smart meter that you already have installed! The clever people in our Development Team have been working hard to make this happen; it means we’ll start to collect daily reads from your smart meter, even though it was provided by another supplier."

It was originally fitted courtesy of Scottish Power as Smet 1 but Smet 2 Compatible.

Hi

It's far more likely that the DCC has built an interface (at great cost to us all!) to enable the communications to happen.

Any supplier which is able to support smart meter readings only needs to communicate with the DCC as it's the DCC that controls the data access & flow .... once the ability is established the supplier should be able to process data from any make or model meter that the DCC is able to support.

HTH
Z

buglawton

Ken68 wrote: »

Email this morning from Tonik
"
We’re really excited to tell you that we now have the ability to communicate with the smart meter that you already have installed! The clever people in our Development Team have been working hard to make this happen; it means we’ll start to collect daily reads from your smart meter, even though it was provided by another supplier."

It was originally fitted courtesy of Scottish Power as Smet 1 but Smet 2 Compatible.

Interesting. So some suppliers have developed a crafty way of connecting to legacy smart meters. Why just some? Is the industry really so fragmented? Someone should invent the idea of a technical design standard and open source blueprint so that ALL suppliers can connect to SMETS1.

Thomas_Edison

No supplier can currently communicate with all types of SMETS 1 meters the DCC haven't sorted this.

Though if suppliers have contacts with the same smart metering companies they'll be able to get the smart readings.

There are 3 separate companies so each supplier can generally only communicate with a 1/3 of all smets 1 meters

zeupater

Thomas_Edison wrote: »

No supplier can currently communicate with all types of SMETS 1 meters the DCC haven't sorted this.

Though if suppliers have contacts with the same smart metering companies they'll be able to get the smart readings.

There are 3 separate companies so each supplier can generally only communicate with a 1/3 of all smets 1 meters

Hi

Well I certainly didn't mention communications with all SMETS1 standard meters & I haven't seen any recent posts saying that either.

In early 2017 the government finally realised that the delay in rolling out SMETS2 meters would cause significantly larger problems to the DCC plan than anticipated, therefore the DCC received the go-ahead to allocate £considerable additional funding to an enrolment & adoption project to build communication interfaces which would emulate each of the specific manufacturer & supplier solutions that were already being used on approx 13million Smart-Meters that should have been installed as v2, but the combination of availability delay & the exuberance of the industry & DECC/BEIS/Ofgem to prematurely push meters out to consumers as a simplistic tick box exercise to make the project progress look good continues.

It's now over two years since the DCC were tasked with providing a solution & they seem to have been trialling the first batches of units on an interoperability proof of concept basis since early December last year (presumably with a smaller energy supplier), with a view to ramping up to the first significant batch of SMETS1 migration supposedly being targeted at the end of May this year.

This costly fiasco has been driven entirely by those racing to grasp a share of the additional revenue stream that charging consumers for the smart metering project provides & it's long been obvious that as v1 of the standard didn't provide the required functionality that if the project wasn't slowed/delayed until SMETS2 compliant units achieved free supply volumes then additional rectification costs and reduced unit functionality would apply - no matter though as it can simply be passed on to the consumer, along with a generous industry margin attached!

Surely I'm not the only one that sees the conflict of interest that exists in what has been happening here ... somebody has really stitched this project up so well that it's silhouette certainly looks like a rather bloated cash cow!!

The plug should have been pulled years ago ... :wall:

HTH
Z

Zarch

Does anyone know whether EDF are installing SMETS2 meters as a new install?