New Smart Meter are dangerous - Budget Exceeded

ariarnia

The_Green_Hornet said:

Maybe the budget feature shouldn't be set by default.

ours isnt/wasnt (we certainly haven't bothered changing anything and its not on now so i don't think it ever was). but maybe differnt suppliers do things differently or maybe the engineer set it up on install/asked us/the op if they wanted it turning on and they they forgot they said yes or we said no. who knows. 

born_again

justAnotherBadger said:

Morning,

I am very concerned about new Smart Meters, on Friday morning at 9.16 my new Smart Meter was flashing at me that my weekly budget had been exceeded, that is only 4 and a bit days.

This was my first full week of using the meter, I have not played with any of the settings, this is a default meter that has come straight from the energy company.

I've tried to live within the budget as an experiment, I've gone with the heating the body principle, hot water bottles have been in regular use. Even doing this I can not get anywhere near the default recommend daily budget. The house is cold and I am cold.

This is my worry, I know the default budget supplied by the smart meter is rubbish. If I was able to keep to it my energy bill would be just over £1000 a year, a pipe dream!

I would like @MSE_Martin or any member of the team @MSE_Andrewto contact the energy companies and get meaningful default budgets set on smart meters, the current default is dangerous. People are going to die this winter if they try to stick to the default budget, it is dangerous. To be honest it feels negligent and criminal.

Nobody should wake up and see their smart meter flashing budget exceeded, I was shocked and worries until I checked my maths again.  All I want from this post is to raise awareness to the issue.

Nothing wrong with Smart meters, they do their job & send meter readings to your supplier
But IHD is best consigned to a kitchen draw. Where people can not scare themselves to death when you turn something on & it shoots into the red zone.

These device remind me of Sat Nav & people that blindly follow the routes provided when it is clear something is wrong 🤷‍♀️

dunstonh

PennyForThem_2 said:

My IHD initially showed me spending about £50 per day.  It was worrying initially but after googling and getting 'sorry we have a s/w problem'  I turned it off and consigned it to a draw.  It is pretty useless, tbh.  Occasionally used it to read the meters but it has even ceased to do that - mainly because it is never on to receive s/w updates.

They are not useless.   They are an important tool to help you see your use.  Providing you have them set to display kWh rather than money cost.   

k_man

I think my (and most people's) thought process in this situation (new IHD warning of over budget) would be:

Oh no!
<Immediately followed by>
Hang on, what budget? How does the IHD know my budget (I don't know my budget)?
Obviously it needs setting up

matelodave

k_man said:

I think my (and most people's) thought process in this situation (new IHD warning of over budget) would be:

Oh no!
<Immediately followed by>
Hang on, what budget? How does the IHD know my budget (I don't know my budget)?
Obviously it needs setting up

However there are some who just cant or dont think and go into the headless chicken mode and panic. Possibly need instructions on how to breathe and walk at the same time.

Common sense isn't as common as you'd hope and TBH is probably a lot less common than it used to be. On top of that it seems that there are fewer people around who can concentrate on anything that takes longer than 30 seconds or has more than a dozen written words, so explaining stuff or even giving an instruction manual is a total waste of time - probably best giving the instructions by TikTok, FaceAche or WhatsApp.

jennifernil

I would just be glad if our (very recently fitted) smart gas meter would supply data to our IHD.

It does supply readings to our provider.

The IHD only shows the electricity information.  Both meters are in outside boxes right next to each other.

EssexHebridean

born_again said:

justAnotherBadger said:

Morning,

I am very concerned about new Smart Meters, on Friday morning at 9.16 my new Smart Meter was flashing at me that my weekly budget had been exceeded, that is only 4 and a bit days.

This was my first full week of using the meter, I have not played with any of the settings, this is a default meter that has come straight from the energy company.

I've tried to live within the budget as an experiment, I've gone with the heating the body principle, hot water bottles have been in regular use. Even doing this I can not get anywhere near the default recommend daily budget. The house is cold and I am cold.

This is my worry, I know the default budget supplied by the smart meter is rubbish. If I was able to keep to it my energy bill would be just over £1000 a year, a pipe dream!

I would like @MSE_Martin or any member of the team @MSE_Andrewto contact the energy companies and get meaningful default budgets set on smart meters, the current default is dangerous. People are going to die this winter if they try to stick to the default budget, it is dangerous. To be honest it feels negligent and criminal.

Nobody should wake up and see their smart meter flashing budget exceeded, I was shocked and worries until I checked my maths again.  All I want from this post is to raise awareness to the issue.

Nothing wrong with Smart meters, they do their job & send meter readings to your supplier
But IHD is best consigned to a kitchen draw. Where people can not scare themselves to death when you turn something on & it shoots into the red zone.

These device remind me of Sat Nav & people that blindly follow the routes provided when it is clear something is wrong 🤷‍♀️

It is the very fact that it shoots up into the red zone that makes the smart meter itself a decent tool for helping a lot of people cut their use, and so their costs. without that, there would be no prompt for people to think "Hang on - that's using a lot of juice!"

ariarnia

jennifernil said:

I would just be glad if our (very recently fitted) smart gas meter would supply data to our IHD.

It does supply readings to our provider.

The IHD only shows the electricity information.  Both meters are in outside boxes right next to each other.

@jen@jennifernil

if your meters both send readings to your supplier then you might find an app like the bright app useful. it isnt instant (it updates first thing in the morning i think) but it shows your use in graphs (inc 30 mins) and there planing soon you can add your tarrif details so it will also tell you cost. 

Magnitio

justAnotherBadger said:

matelodave said:

Should the budget be set in kwh or in £££'s because if you set the budget in kwh and the cost increase then then budget gets blown out of the water if it's been set in £££'s

My six year old IDH has a target rather than a budget and it's set in kwh so it tells me whether I'm above or below target and tells me how much it's going to cost (the tariff is actually properly set). Dunno how newer IHDs are set

However, like virtually everyone, my consumption in the winter it vastly higher than it is in the summer (8-10kwh a day in the summer and 30-60kwh/day in the winter). Therefore, the budget or target function is pointless unless I tweak it virtually every month (or week or day) depending on the weather, or if we are going to be doing the washing or even going on holiday.

Target is certainly better wording than budget, target doesn't have the same connotation as budget.

These are sold as smart meters to help save energy, they should actually be smart and useful straight out of the box. 

It didn't come with a manual or instructions so I can't RTFM. 

Did it come in a box? The one I have was in a box with a URL printed on it for the manual (or is that FM?) It also has a built in tutorial that tells you how to use it. I think that's quite considerate of the supplier.

Jyana

I don't use my IHD, apart from firing it up on the first couple of days I had it to see what it did. I found it a bit redundant and prefer to use apps like Bright instead. But when I did first get it, the first thing I did was look on British Gas' website to see what info they had on it, because that seemed like the most obvious thing to do when handed a bit of kit from someone, go look at what they have to say about it.

I've just looked at a few other energy sites and they all have the same info on their site's too, for all the different kinds of IHD they give out to their customers, including manuals to download and specs you can program in. It's not like they have hidden this information away where it's difficult to find.