Shortage of non smart meters

Dee72

Ah, I think I now understand how you did this, Talldave

Rather strangely, it seems that Ovo will do as you say, as an extraordinary action for those during their first contract period (either switching to them, or as you did picking them up as the incumbent supplier at a property you moved to)

But they will not continue this past the end of that initial contract period unless you agree to a meter change.

Looks like the fee to change the meter has now been increased to £106 as well :eek:
(still free for a smart meter)


This came from a later post (24 April 2019) by the same 'Nancy' @ Ovo elsewhere on their site.

Talldave

Dee72 wrote: »

Did you perhaps have smart meter at that property that Ovo were able to communicate with?

Otherwise I don't understand how you were able to do that. :huh:
They told me they were NOT able do that. And they presumably have told the OP something similar.

I also found this on the Ovo forum - see the first/best answergiven by 'Nancy' who appears to be from Ovo.

forum.ovoenergy[dot]com/understanding-economy-7-74/can-i-switch-to-ovo-and-go-from-economy-7-to-a-single-rate-meter-and-tariff-1163

No, the meter is very much "eyeballs only" technology, although when built it was allegedly a business smart meter but not in the sense we know today.


Maybe Ovo give different answers to customers in different supply areas? Although there would be no rational reason for doing that because I assume the back office system into which they have to enter two readings will be common across the whole organisation.


Maybe they stopped doing it after July 2018 for new customers as part of the smart meter push.

Dee72 wrote: »

You must have missed my earlier post where I explained we now have a smart meter. It was installed free by Ovo as we did not want to pay the £57.75 they would have otherwise charged us to change the meter to obtain their single rate tariff we wanted.

Now we have a smart meter, Ovo say we can choose either a single rate or E7 tariff from them
(they say they can change the set-up remotely)

I did, sorry - that what comes of peering at a tablet!


Indeed, the smart meter can presumably do whatever they want it to do. And if it's SMETS2, you can move elsewhere and hopefully retain all its functionality.


Ironically, I didn't have an issue with Ovo, but I was switching to Pure Planet to get their cheaper gas price, and you can only be electric only or dual fuel with them, so I had to switch electricity as well.

Dee72

Talldave wrote: »

...
Maybe Ovo give different answers to customers in different supply areas? ...

I doubt it.

There is no indication given on that forum of what supply region the OP /question poser was in.
(and there is no indication in Nancy's later post that their policy is supply region related)

It would be somewhat remarkable if myself, Dhooper, and Elaine128 over on the Ovo forum all live in the same supply region.

See above as to the probable reason you got a single rate despite having an E7 meter - you only stayed a few months, so presumably were still within the contract period of the tariff you originally chose.

Talldave

Dee72 wrote: »

I doubt it.

There is no indication given on that forum of what supply region the OP /question poser was in.
(and there is no indication in Nancy's later post that their policy is supply region related)

It would be somewhat remarkable if myself, Dhooper, and Elaine128 over on the Ovo forum all live in the same supply region.

See above as to the probable reason you got a single rate despite having an E7 meter - you only stayed a few months, so presumably were still within the contract period of the tariff you originally chose.

Could be the case - the tariff was Simpler Energy.

AndyCF

I did actually look into this about 4 maybe 6 months ago for one of the neighbours with her Smart meter.

It seemed it was possible to move suppliers *and* have a traditional meter fitted however in her case it was a prepay one. The cost was if I remember correctly between 140 and 170 to do this "swap" , the supplier change was needed unfortunately as the current one was not terribly interested in this. As its not for me I can't go naming names.

I can't remember which new supplier it was that did list it was possible, I'd found the info via Google however. Not many are willing to do this it seems though. Google will provide the answer again I'm sure, I do remember it did take a bit of finding though!

Conclusion seems to be here it can be done if you are willing to do some hoop jumping and pay through the nose for it too. But it is not impossible.

Pagett

AndyCF wrote: »

I did actually look into this about 4 maybe 6 months ago for one of the neighbours with her Smart meter.

It seemed it was possible to move suppliers *and* have a traditional meter fitted however in her case it was a prepay one. The cost was if I remember correctly between 140 and 170 to do this "swap" , the supplier change was needed unfortunately as the current one was not terribly interested in this. As its not for me I can't go naming names.

I can't remember which new supplier it was that did list it was possible, I'd found the info via Google however. Not many are willing to do this it seems though. Google will provide the answer again I'm sure, I do remember it did take a bit of finding though!

Conclusion seems to be here it can be done if you are willing to do some hoop jumping and pay through the nose for it too. But it is not impossible.

Yes it does appear that some people spend so much of their life jumping through hoops (about 30 yrs in the odd case, allegedly) that they do lose sight of their goal, and end up paying throiugh the nose for it.

I don't know if Talldave (Bark01?) remembers, but I like to think it was me that persuaded him about 6 weeks ago to switch to an E7 tariff after 30 years of avoiding it, despite always haviung an E7 meter over all those years, to save him about £65 a year if I remember correctly.

And now to see some more history that he spent over 6 months with Ovo on their single rate Simpler tariff? (again despite having an E7 meter) :eek:

I can only go on todays prices (as I have no real way of knowing what they were last year), but if only he had simply asked Ovo to put him on the cheapest tariff for him.

Today's Better E7 tariff (based on Talldaves usage and supply region) would actually have a break even point of as little as 18% low rate.
Iirc, Talldave admitted to using as much as 21% low rate (still remarkably low since 7/24 is about 29%)

That would have cost him about £10 a year more for his efforts, and that is without taking into consideration an additional £30 a year saving available with the Better tariff for providing meter readings online; the discount is not available with the Simpler tariff.

Even taking into account Talldave only remained with Ovo for about 6-7months (not that he probably realised he would leave at such time when he was jumping through all those hoops at the beginning), and so would only have got half of that discount, and even allowing for a £30 exit fee, the oncost would have only been about £5

That all pales into insignificance with the approx £200 a year saving he is now enjoying being on E7, compared to what the Ovo Simpler single rate tariff would cost (for his usage and supply region).

These answers, my friends, are not (as Bob Dylan may have claimed) blowing in the wind - they are all available from a quick consultation with any comparison site.

Talldave

Pagett, I'm not sure what the point of your long post is (and I really do only have one account), but I spent the first three months in this property battling the letting agents and the landlord to fix the heating system so that we could actually heat the place sufficiently for humans.

At that point in time I was contemplating legal action to get something done, so saving a few quid on my electricity slid down the priority list. (And Ovo's bills proudly proclaimed we were on their cheapest tariff).

Also, despite renting the place in July we didn't fully move in until mid August.

I started my switching attempt in October, when I realised we were on for colossal gas consumption, but it was the electricity switch that delayed things for several weeks because the meter was listed as commercial in one parameter of the national database. I had to wait a couple of weeks for Ovo to solve this before I could switch. This meant more time paying through the nose for higher priced gas and electricity. Even when I switched, the idiots on the industry quango that screws up your readings did just that and forced me to pay for more units with Ovo than I had used. (My guess is that the previous tenants were using 2-3x the electricity and incompetent quango can't comprehend a sudden drop in consumption, thus changing my meter readings to some imaginary numbers.)

I did move to E7 last month as a 15% break even point is comfortably below our 21% night time use. But the savings there are dwarfed by the £450+ I saved moving gas supplier again.

Ironically, a significant chunk of the electricity consumption goes on running the heating and the graph of electricity usage tracks the gas consumption almost identically.

I'm not sure what any of this has to do with the OP, but you seem to take great interest in my energy purchasing choices. It's pointless comparing what I pay now with Ovo, as I was always going to move from them once I sorted the gas out and, as it happens I had to switch in order to get the gas deal.

Pagett

Talldave wrote: »

Pagett, I'm not sure what the point of your long post is....

I would like to think my post was very clear.

e.g. In part it relates to your post#5 above
Almost 10 years ago when you first joined this site, Cardew (amongst others) tried to educate you.
https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/1906109/npower-waste-of-time&page=2#33

Hopefully, the penny has now eventually dropped?

Talldave

Pagett wrote: »

I would like to think my post was very clear.

e.g. In part it relates to your post#5 above
Almost 10 years ago when you first joined this site, Cardew (amongst others) tried to educate you.
https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/1906109/npower-waste-of-time&page=2#33

Hopefully, the penny has now eventually dropped?

Which penny? Some companies can handle E7 meters on non-E7 tariffs and some can't. We all know that. But npower could and Ovo could, which is all I've posted about in the threads associated with those suppliers.

I don't get what you feel your purpose in life is? The process appears be:

Someone queries E7 meters with non-E7 tariff with supplier X.
Because I've used supplier X in just that way, I post to say they did it for me.
You post to point out that not all suppliers can do it despite me not saying that they could and the whole thread is about supplier X anyway.
When I point that out you start ploughing through 10 years of my posts in order to cross reference where the conversation has previously been had in respect of other suppliers - in this case npower.

I fail to comprehend how this helps the Ovo customers I was trying to be of use to? Can you explain?