Electric company refusing to replace broken electric meter.

Tallerdave

[Deleted User] said:

In February, there were nearly 21M smart meters connected to the DCC. A total of 359,870,041 messages passed through the hub. I am not sure that I would rely on any supplier to react to a gas battery alert. 

Fortunately, .....

If the Remaining Battery Capacity(4.5.4.16) falls below ten percent of the nominal Battery capacity GSME shall be capable of:

i. generating an entry to that effect in the Event Log(4.5.4.8); and

ii. sending an Alert to that effect via its HAN Interface.

A good reason to keep the IHD plugged in.

It would be interesting to know how the industry plans to deal with 1 or 2 million flat batteries a year.

My guess - there is no plan.

Tallerdave

[Deleted User] said:

In February, there were nearly 21M smart meters connected to the DCC. A total of 359,870,041 messages passed through the hub. I am not sure that I would rely on any supplier to react to a gas battery alert. 

Fortunately, .....

If the Remaining Battery Capacity(4.5.4.16) falls below ten percent of the nominal Battery capacity GSME shall be capable of:

i. generating an entry to that effect in the Event Log(4.5.4.8); and

ii. sending an Alert to that effect via its HAN Interface.

A good reason to keep the IHD plugged in.

It would be interesting to know how the industry plans to deal with 1 or 2 million flat batteries a year.

My guess - there is no plan.

phillw

Gerry1 said:
and they still have to make regular safety checks regardless of the meter type.

I believe that the frequency of visual safety checks has been reduced for smart meters.

It was mostly a con to force you to allow them to get a reading once a year anyway, but the smart meters supposedly can report certain faults themselves too. The man turning up for ten seconds to read your meter once a year did very little of a safety check, I doubt he would even notice if it had been bypassed.

phillw

victor2 said:

If ever the power companies want to reduce loads, they'll just cut the power to certain areas as it suits them, smart meters or not.

It's slightly more complicated than that. If the companies feeding into the grid are unable to cope with demand, then the grid fails no matter what meter you have. However, the companies that supply energy to end users have absolutely no way of cutting energy to an area.

The company that bills you has to have bought enough energy from the companies feeding the grid to satisfy the demand. This is essentially a stock market, with companies buying future supply of energy at a fixed price they can then sell on at a profit. If your supplier hasn't bought enough for their own current demand then they have to buy it on the open market.

Essentially your provider is having to pay estimated bills as nobody knows which customer is using the energy at a particular time. Smart meters make this process a lot more accurate and will hopefully lead to cheaper prices.

What people are worried about is if they have calculated that the fixed price you have locked in is lower than the price they would need to pay on the open market, then there would be a benefit to shutting your usage off. I don't have a smart meter and have never been offered one, I don't know how I feel about the risk about a company that is facing bankruptcy deciding to shut off every ones meters. They aren't supposed to do it, but unless the individuals are criminally liable then they might just do it anyway.

[Deleted User]

phillw said:

victor2 said:

If ever the power companies want to reduce loads, they'll just cut the power to certain areas as it suits them, smart meters or not.

It's slightly more complicated than that. If the companies feeding into the grid are unable to cope with demand, then the grid fails no matter what meter you have. However, the companies that supply energy to end users have absolutely no way of cutting energy to an area.

The company that bills you has to have bought enough energy from the companies feeding the grid to satisfy the demand. This is essentially a stock market, with companies buying future supply of energy at a fixed price they can then sell on at a profit. If your supplier hasn't bought enough for their own current demand then they have to buy it on the open market.

Essentially your provider is having to pay estimated bills as nobody knows which customer is using the energy at a particular time. Smart meters make this process a lot more accurate and will hopefully lead to cheaper prices.

What people are worried about is if they have calculated that the fixed price you have locked in is lower than the price they would need to pay on the open market, then there would be a benefit to shutting your usage off. I don't have a smart meter and have never been offered one, I don't know how I feel about the risk about a company that is facing bankruptcy deciding to shut off every ones meters. They aren't supposed to do it, but unless the individuals are criminally liable then they might just do it anyway.

In the past few years, there have been less than 20 electricity disconnections and none for gas. Suppliers are legally required to get a Court Order and provide the consumer with 7 days warning of a disconnection. This is what the present rules state:

Quote: Suppliers aren’t allowed to disconnect you between 1 October and 31 March if you’re: 

• a pensioner living alone
• a pensioner living with children under five

Suppliers have signed up to an agreement to make sure you won’t be disconnected at any time of year if you have:

• a disability
• long-term health problems
• severe financial problems
• young children living at home

Unquote

Yes, it is possible that suppliers and some domestic consumers may enter into a load limiting contract. The consumer will pay less for their electricity by limiting the demand from the Grid during peak periods. ( We are talking kWs here NOT kWhs). If the agreed kW limit is exceeded, then the supplier will send out texts; IHD messages etc before disconnecting the supply. Supply is reinstated after a phone call. This system is already working in some other countries. 

The possibility of suppliers just disconnecting meters at will is scaremongering: the risk to suppliers of getting it wrong is just too great. There is though a risk of a third-party disconnections which has been mitigated by the use of GCHQ level smart meter system security. For example, if someone hacked into my smart meter and actioned a disconnection, the instruction would be ignored as the message would not have the supplier and DCC security certificates attached to it.

tim_p

Tallerdave said:

It would be interesting to know how the industry plans to deal with 1 or 2 million flat batteries a year.

My guess - there is no plan.

Isn’t there a bunch of unemployed meter readers who could help....oh, wait..
What a ludicrous situation, still if we’re all £11 better off then it was worth it...

Ectophile

Tallerdave said:

[Deleted User] said:

In February, there were nearly 21M smart meters connected to the DCC. A total of 359,870,041 messages passed through the hub. I am not sure that I would rely on any supplier to react to a gas battery alert. 

Fortunately, .....

If the Remaining Battery Capacity(4.5.4.16) falls below ten percent of the nominal Battery capacity GSME shall be capable of:

i. generating an entry to that effect in the Event Log(4.5.4.8); and

ii. sending an Alert to that effect via its HAN Interface.

A good reason to keep the IHD plugged in.

It would be interesting to know how the industry plans to deal with 1 or 2 million flat batteries a year.

My guess - there is no plan.

Until recently, suppliers had an obligation to inspect all meters every 2 years.  That got scrapped.

But swapping one meter every 10 years seems a lot less onerous.  The electricity meters are fed off the mains anyway, so only have a backup battery.  Only gas meters should be getting flat batteries.

silverwhistle

phillw said:

It was mostly a con to force you to allow them to get a reading once a year anyway, but the smart meters supposedly can report certain faults themselves too. The man turning up for ten seconds to read your meter once a year did very little of a safety check, I doubt he would even notice if it had been bypassed.

40ish years ago when I knew a bit more about these things I can assure you that directly employed meter readers were much more on the ball.. As for getting an annual reading...  you can't imagine the number of complaints people used to make about estimated bills but still make it difficult for an actual meter read.. There may have been a connection! :-)

As for smart meters: I have one and a time of day tariff. With a little awareness it gets me a nice low average unit rate and my reaction to high half hourly prices, reducing my consumption, can only help to prevent a mass, undiscriminated blackout, so I really cannot understand the consistent scaremongering by certain posters here.

The rise in the proportion of renewable energy can only increase the need for technologies to address intermittencies, and getting people to reduce _peak_ consumption is just one of the methods. In Australia they are even talking about too much domestic solar at certain times of day in certain seasons. It's the opposite problem of the system being overloaded with too much power, but similar responses would seem appropriate: get individual users to use more power so that they don't export!  Ice-makers? Bitcoin mining?

lakesider52

In October 2019 I moved into a house with "dead" SMETS 1 meters. I immediately switched supplier to British Gas on a 1 year fix and asked for live SMETS 2 meters to be installed. They said I was added to the list but had still not installed the meters by the time my contract ended. I switched to So Energy (I use the MSE Energy club to switch every year) and made a similar request. Now I am on their "list" but am still waiting for them to install the meters and expect it will not happen by the time my contract ends. It appears that the energy companies can't be bothered to install new meters when they expect you to switch to another supplier.

MWT

lakesider52 said:

It appears that the energy companies can't be bothered to install new meters when they expect you to switch to another supplier.

It is not so much that they expect you to leave, but that their targets are driven by new installs not replacements, and the plan for SMETS1 is to adopt them into the DCC, not replace them...