More smart meter woes 20 November 2022 at 12:55AM in Energy 13 replies 1.1K views

70sbudgie

When I first spoke to Octopus about the strange bills that had appeared, they booked a meter reader to visit again on the 12th December. That seemed a long time to wait when it was booked, so I took the videos described above and sent them to Octopus. 

They phoned me a couple weeks ago to say that having seen the videos, they still want the meter reader to visit. 

Tuesday (the 13th) I got a phone call from the meter reading company asking to reschedule the visit that didn't happen on the 12th. I now have an appointment for the 20th.

I got home today to a "sorry we missed you" card from the meter reading company. But I suspect this may be unrelated as the tiny text said it was an inspection / check of my generation / export meter.

Today my Octopus account has had another crazy debit applied, this time gas. There is a small possibility that it isn't wrong, but I am unable to check as there is no bill to go with it. Is it normal for the bill to be posted to my account several days after the debit is applied?

My account is looking a bit of a state at the moment, because the bill that was being questioned by Octopus was posted so I could see what the system was doing wrt meter readings. My second question is, is my account at risk of being marked as defaulting if I have an outstanding query? Do I need to zero my balance and then take the money back out when the issue is resolved?

Edited for typos.

70sbudgie

For those that are interested, I finally have an update on my Octopus query. 

Last month I had to send Octopus more videos with a very specific series of button presses that they'd instructed me to follow.

But it seems to have shown that they have managed to activate R02, so I now have two import readings! Woo hoo.  But it seems that I will now have to convince Octopus that my registers aren't the wrong way round. The email I had today had some little gems in it: 

"monitoring the situation with the elec meter reading and can see that we are now getting the second reading from the smart meter. 

...

Day 6091.0

Night 11452.8

...night usage is high, ...confirm if you have storage heaters or use a lot of energy at night?

...confirm that the day reading is actually a day reading, ...

...if you will benefit from the single rate tariff where your day and night readings are charged at a flat rate..."

So, not completely resolved yet, but very significant progress. I am especially pleased with the approximately £1500 of credit that has been applied to my account today. . But it is in many small amounts and I don't have the accompanying bill yet, so I have no idea what all the credits apply to. Perhaps there's an export payment for Feb in there too?

70sbudgie

Octopus billing team are clearly still working on my account. What looks like an export value (with kWhrs attached) has now appeared and the values of the credits have changed - though there are too many for me to be completely sure. I am now up to 22 credits of differing values, whereas there were only 21 on Wednesday. The total value of the credits has increades too.

Still no bill or other communication to explain what's going on. Saturday afternoon does seem to be a preferred time for bills to appear. So fingers crossed that tomorrow will bring clarity.