Prepay Economy Timer

System

This discussion was created from comments split from: Economy 7 timer switch advice.

iamthatiam

I have a prepayment meter with key.  I recently moved in and can't get my head around the storage heater thing at all.  They seem to come on at all hours of the day or night, unless I switch them off completely, so I've taken to setting the alarm for 1am and getting up to switch them on.  I'm 72 and usually fast asleep by then.  I thought storage heaters only charged up during off peak hours.  This definitely isn't the case with mine, and they're not the fancy kind.  Just bog-standard Creda models. Am I wrong about this?

iamthatiam

Actually, here is a pic of my delightfully minimalist meter collection.  Can anyone tell me which does what, and what to check to see if there's a timer somewhere for the off-peak to come on?  Cheers.

[Deleted User]

Hi,

you may be on an E10 set up, giving an afternoon boost.

An Economy 10 meter offers ten hours of off-peak electricity at a lower rate, seven days a week. Economy 10 meters are also suited to members who have storage heating at their property or use a large amount of electricity during off-peak hours. The Economy 10 rate usually takes effect for three hours in the afternoon, two hours in the evening and five hours overnight.

Here's an idea of TIMES, though they won't be spot on.

MSE_Stephen

Hi @iamthatiam

We have created a new thread for your question

QrizB

iamthatiam said:

Actually, here is a pic of my delightfully minimalist meter collection.  Can anyone tell me which does what, and what to check to see if there's a timer somewhere for the off-peak to come on?

You've got a five-port electricity meter. If you look at the bottom of the meter you can see five wires, brown-blue-blue-brown in a row plus an extra brown one that's slightly further forward. That extra brown one is the fifth port, and that's the one that makes your storage heaters get hot.

The meter contains the timer plus an internal switch. The internal switch controls when the fifth port is live. It should only be switched on when you have cheap off-peak electricity.

Following the cables, the wire from fifth port goes through the big switch and connects to the left-hand consumer unit. This one should contain the MCBs for your storage heaters.