Smart meter warning

riverside_campus

in brief, my smart meters stopped sending readings to British Gas Apx April 21  I discovered this by luck in Sept 21.  B.G. Used estimates in this period but have no system to alert customers. They exchanged meters on 19th Nov. And already they are not working. In the meantime my bills appear to be well overcharged and I still cannot resolve this with British Gas

Neil_Jones

A smart meter does not entirely remove the requirement for you to read them on occasion.  There never has been a system to "alart" customers to tell them their meter is not sending, as the meter is not the responsibility of the customer, its the supplier.  They usually notice at some point there are no readings coming through and send somebody out to check.  I you have an old-school meter that stops spinning, they don't know that, you have to tell them.  They only notice when they see a string of meter readings that are all the same.

matelodave

 riverside_campus said:

in brief, my smart meters stopped sending readings to British Gas Apx April 21  I discovered this by luck in Sept 21.  B.G. Used estimates in this period but have no system to alert customers. They exchanged meters on 19th Nov. And already they are not working. In the meantime my bills appear to be well overcharged and I still cannot resolve this with British Gas

You don't need a warning, as it shows up on your bills or statements. The first indication that something is wrong is when the readings on the bill are flagged as E (Estimated) rather than A (Actual) or C (Customer)

Had you done like sensible people do and regularly checked your bills and on-line statements to ensure that the meter readings were being used, that they were accurate and that your direct debit or whatever is on target to cover the cost of your energy then you would have discovered it much earlier and not by "luck"

Having a smart meter doesn't absolve you of all responsibility to check.

[Deleted User]

riverside_campus said:

in brief, my smart meters stopped sending readings to British Gas Apx April 21  I discovered this by luck in Sept 21.  B.G. Used estimates in this period but have no system to alert customers. They exchanged meters on 19th Nov. And already they are not working. In the meantime my bills appear to be well overcharged and I still cannot resolve this with British Gas

A SMETS2 meter can send c.250 notifications to suppliers and DNOs ranging from Extreme OverVoltage (265volts)  to the gas meter battery needs replacing. Clearly, it can send nothing if the comms hub becomes disconnected from the network. I confess that I have absolutely no idea whether any supplier has internal systems to alert them when there is a loss of meter connectivity, or what their procedures are to deal with it. Logically, the first thing that should happen is a request to the DCC to initiate a remote re-boot of the comms hub.

lohr500

I have been with EDF since the start of the year and had a smart meter installed in May to replace our conventional 5 wire E7 meter.

Initially the new smart meter was reporting the 30 minute data correctly and the information could be seen on both my EDF website and via the Bright App.

In July, we switched to the EDF GoElectric98 tariff. From that point on, the EDF website data stopped working, as did the IHD.
At the time of switching, the meter did receive the correct GoElectric98 tariff and time of use data and is still recording the correct details today.

In early December I noticed that the Bright App had stopped reporting the usage from 27th November.

After leaving it for a few days, I happened to be talking to a friend who lives a coupe of miles away. He is with Scottish Power. His usage also stopped being reported on the 27th November. Rightly or wrongly I concluded that this was more than a coincidence and that there must be a problem somewhere in the data collection process for the area. Possibly an outage in the Arqiva radio network.

To cut a long story short, I contacted EDF last week to ask what was going on, and they confirmed that the last data they could see was from the 27th November. They advised me to wait until 27th December and then escalate if the data was still unavailable. 

If EDF have do have internal systems to alert them to a loss of connectivity, then they didn't let on when I contacted them.

Interestingly, I received my latest bill from EDF and it was based around ACTUAL last meter reading data of 27th November. You would have thought that their system should trigger an alert if there was zero consumption from a certain point onwards.