Faulty smart electricity meter

Droodle1

A brief update:- I finally bit the bullet and paid £120 to have the meter tested. They installed a second check-meter in series with mine. After three weeks (including a week or two away with the power switched off at the consumer unit) the check-meter had registered 7kWh whereas mine had increased by 12kWh. They have accepted that it's a 'firmware fault', i.e. my meter is faulty, and refunded my test fee. I'm currently waiting for a date for the engineers to replace it. Hopefully the new one will behave itself. Thanks for all your comments and suggestions. I've certainly learnt a lot about smart meters!

Swipe

Droodle1 said:

A brief update:- I finally bit the bullet and paid £120 to have the meter tested. They installed a second check-meter in series with mine. After three weeks (including a week or two away with the power switched off at the consumer unit) the check-meter had registered 7kWh whereas mine had increased by 12kWh. They have accepted that it's a 'firmware fault', i.e. my meter is faulty, and refunded my test fee. I'm currently waiting for a date for the engineers to replace it. Hopefully the new one will behave itself. Thanks for all your comments and suggestions. I've certainly learnt a lot about smart meters!

Are they going to recalculate your bills too?

QrizB

Droodle1 said:

A brief update:- I finally bit the bullet and paid £120 to have the meter tested. They installed a second check-meter in series with mine. After three weeks (including a week or two away with the power switched off at the consumer unit) the check-meter had registered 7kWh whereas mine had increased by 12kWh. They have accepted that it's a 'firmware fault', i.e. my meter is faulty, and refunded my test fee. I'm currently waiting for a date for the engineers to replace it. Hopefully the new one will behave itself. Thanks for all your comments and suggestions. I've certainly learnt a lot about smart meters!

That's good news, thank you for letting us know!

BikingBud

Droodle1 said:

A brief update:- I finally bit the bullet and paid £120 to have the meter tested. They installed a second check-meter in series with mine. After three weeks (including a week or two away with the power switched off at the consumer unit) the check-meter had registered 7kWh whereas mine had increased by 12kWh. They have accepted that it's a 'firmware fault', i.e. my meter is faulty, and refunded my test fee. I'm currently waiting for a date for the engineers to replace it. Hopefully the new one will behave itself. Thanks for all your comments and suggestions. I've certainly learnt a lot about smart meters!

Very interesting. Makes you wonder about the in-service accuracy generally. If all meters were creeping by 5kWh we would not really notice as it would mostly be lost in the noise.

Droodle1

Yes, they'll be refunding some of my bill payments, although I'm not sure how they can calculate what's 'real' usage and what isn't. It's not like it was over-running by a fixed percentage, it just kept running whenever the real usage was very low. 
Still, I'm delighted that I was shown to be right, despite being told that it was 'extremely' unlikely since the meters are very rarely faulty! The engineer said there are about 13,000 meters like mine in use and, like you say, very few people would be in a position to notice the discrepancies, so it does make you wonder..

milgo

Going forward I can see lots of people doing the "mains switch off" test now just to check if their meter continues to clock up units.