Smart meter woes

valmiki

I'm with People's Energy, and after being chased a few times I caved in and decided to have smart meters installed last week. The installer from Magnum Utilities did a decent job, all neat and tidy and left me a Chameleon IHD3 (In House Display). The first couple of days it worked great, showing gas and electricity usage, and then stopped only showing "Connection Lost" (I hadn't moved it,  and it's only about 5 feet from both meters). After some tinkering (read "switching on and off a few times") it sparked back to life but is now showing just the gas. I had a look at the actual meter itself (which also has a display) and cycling through different screens, I can see it is still working there but is not syncing up with the IHD. I contacted Peoples Energy a couple of times but I guess they're not really clued up on them - suggested booking a visit which would take months -  and I'm sure they've got plenty on their hands at the moment as it is! Just wondering if anyone has had any experience of the above and how they resolved it, or if any kind install engineer could drop me some instructions on how to re-sync the meter to the IHD!

matelodave

I think you could trawl this site and see many questions like yours mostly with inconclusive or negative answers - what is really important is not the IHD but what info if any is being sent back and used by your supplier.

May I suggest that you still read the meters themselves at least once a month and CHECK your online account/statements/bills to ensure that your readings are being used and if not send in your own readings. Lots of people are still getting estimated bills even though they've got smart meters and apparently fully functional IHD's. keep a careful eye on it and if I were you I'd be regularly downloading and saving PDF copies - just in case.

I've been with three failed energy companies and having my own info to hand has made it a lot easier to sort it all out especially when or if the on-line account gets closed.

wild666

Couldn't you just email them the meter readings a few days before the monthly direct debit is taken that way they won't estimate any bills, even if the meter isn't sending the readings to the supplier.

matelodave

wild666 said:

Couldn't you just email them the meter readings a few days before the monthly direct debit is taken that way they won't estimate any bills, even if the meter isn't sending the readings to the supplier.

Of course you can but you still need to check that they are using your meter readings and not estimates random guesses for your bills. It depends how the supplier handles the data. If the meter is sending info and the supplier is actually using it then that's what should happen but in my experience it doesn't always, so it's up to you to check if you want to avoid possible problems in the future

valmiki

I'm pretty sure the meters are capable of sending the correct readings to the server in the sky, just not connecting up to the in house display. 

One thing I did notice though was that the new meters all started at 0, and that the old gas imperial meter was replaced with a m3 one. About 3 days after the meters were put in, I submitted readings (from the new meters) online to People's Energy. When I then tried to sort out the problems earlier with them, they said that the only readings they had on their system was the ones that I had given them, so so much for that!

Thankfully I take meter readings every day, and I won't be stopping any time soon by the looks of things.