Octopus smart meter issues - best way to resolve?

rubble2

We had a SMETS1 electric meter and a dumb gas meter changed by Octopus on 3rd February this year.

Prior to the change we got consistent readings from the electric meter on the Octopus app and Octopus themselves were lifting electric consumtion readings reliably.
Since the change, we have had no electric readings on the app or the IHD (Octopus have confirmed that they also cannot get electric readings). We get gas consumption readings on the IHD (most of the time) but again no meter readings on the Octopus app.

I contacted Octopus toward the end of February to report the issues and was told that they were aware of the problems and were currently working on it.

Beginning of the second week of March I contacted Octopus again, was again told that they knew of the problems and the agent I spoke to said he had 'done something' that would rectify the problem - give it 48 hours and if it didn't work they would organise an engineer visit.

Gave it a full week and no improvement (also no engineer) and I rang back. this time the Octopus system seem to recognise my phone number before I had a chance to speak to anyone and I was told they would send an email with a link to their 'Smart meter clinic' (an online questionairre) which I duly completed and sent back.

Fast forward to today and still no change, just wondering where I go from here? everytime I get in touch I get a different story and a promise of action which never results in any improvement.

I was honestly better off with the original meter as at least then the electric consumption could be monitored.

Could anyone advise if and how I can escalate this to get two working smart meters please?

Thanks

InvertedVee

I'm experiencing problems after Octopus replaced my gas and electricity smart meters ten days ago. To be fair, they say that it can take up to 14 days for the process to be complete, so I'm being patient.

I reported a billing issue this morning by phone. I had been charged over £200 for a negative export of over 1300kWh at 15p/kWh. This arose because they had not updated the export account to reflect the meter change. They cancelled the bill and appear to have corrected the meter serial number on the account dashboard, so I'm hopeful that we're making progress.

I've found Octopus' agents to be friendly and helpful but their systems are not perfect and I'm disappointed that I had to find this error myself. I imagine many people would not take so much care to verify the serial numbers of the meters on their bills and might not have noticed the error for some time.

I haven't had to escalate any issue yet but have needed to be persistent.

In your position, I'd send an email asking them to treat the failure to rectify the problems in the promised timescale as a formal complaint.

rubble2

Probably coincidence but having posted this yesterday I just got an email from Octopus :-

'I had a look at your meters and it looks like the issue is on our end. When your meters were installed, the old meters were not completely deactivated on our system, which caused a little bit of a confusion here and is the reason why you cannot see your usage.

I have requested now for the old devices to be removed on our end. Please allow a couple of days for everything to be working correctly.'

I will report back in s a few days time, I am not holding my breath as everytime I contact Octopus I am told that the solution is a couple of days away. Let's see.

InvertedVee

rubble2 said:

Probably coincidence but having posted this yesterday I just got an email from Octopus :-

'I had a look at your meters and it looks like the issue is on our end. When your meters were installed, the old meters were not completely deactivated on our system, which caused a little bit of a confusion here and is the reason why you cannot see your usage.

I have requested now for the old devices to be removed on our end. Please allow a couple of days for everything to be working correctly.'

I will report back in s a few days time, I am not holding my breath as everytime I contact Octopus I am told that the solution is a couple of days away. Let's see.

Similar situation to me. But hopefully they'll be quicker than you predict.

I can now see my data on the Octopus website and they sent a statement today correcting the £206 billing error that was caused by them using the old meter serial number for export.

Bill73

InvertedVee said:
Similar situation to me. But hopefully they'll be quicker than you predict.

I can now see my data on the Octopus website and they sent a statement today correcting the £206 billing error that was caused by them using the old meter serial number for export.

Interested to learn what is your generation source for export and your experience with Octopus in this regard. You don't mention whether solar / wind / hydro. I am considering moving from my current Licensee to Octopus and struggling to determine the appropriate export tariff for wind.

[Deleted User]

Bill73 said:

InvertedVee said:
Similar situation to me. But hopefully they'll be quicker than you predict.

I can now see my data on the Octopus website and they sent a statement today correcting the £206 billing error that was caused by them using the old meter serial number for export.

Interested to learn what is your generation source for export and your experience with Octopus in this regard. You don't mention whether solar / wind / hydro. I am considering moving from my current Licensee to Octopus and struggling to determine the appropriate export tariff for wind.

FWIW, my generation source is PV solar and I am on Octopus’ Flux tariff which pays variable export rates (based on three periods) of up to 40p/kWh. I am not aware of any specific wind generation tariffs but you could contact smart.help@octopus.energy and ask for advice.

Edit:

This might help:

https://octopus.energy/help-and-faqs/articles/seg-tariff/