Which suppliers support smart meter switching TO Economy 7?

70sbudgie

I joined Octopus a few years ago with an E7 meter but single use tariff to get access to Octopus Go. Octopus installed a smart meter for me and after a couple years I switched to E7. I am currently moving back to a smart tariff (Flux).

I don't have an automatic switched circuit for E7 and don't know why this house had an E7 meter when we moved in, but Octopus didn't make a fuss about switching me to a tariff that uses multiple registers. 

The only thing that I would suggest is that you double check as soon as the switch is confirmed that both registers are working correctly as my meter didn't seem to have been programmed correctly for E7. It took me a while to realise and some time to sort out. (It isn't the reason I'm switching to a smart tariff again)

TheElectricCow

For the benefit of any future readers or anyone who happened to have been following along on this one, I now finally have an update from Octopus confirming that they do support this kind of switch.

After just 40 days, 10 outgoing emails, a formal complaint, an email to 'the CEO's team', 3 different customer service agents, and 2 broken promises, Octopus have now changed my tariff from Single rate to Economy 7 via a remote switch to the smart meter. They made the change today without any fuss and applied it from April 28th. As soon as the confirmation came through this morning I checked the meter and the second register had indeed become active with an accurate reading for my night use since the 28th.

I chose to contact them entirely through email, for my own reasons, which I suspect is largely the reason this took so long. For the first 39 days I was only able to get 2 replies out of Octopus, and both lacked any information about my actual request. This morning a helpful manager got in touch to let me know he'd picked up the issue, put me on E7, and from there everything appears to be sorted.

Seems like the actual process itself is quite quick, provided you can get through to the right person. For anyone else wanting to do this, I'd say giving it a go over the phone looks like the quickest way to go (and I've seen others recommend twitter for a fast response too). Email route is slow but does eventually get the job done.

markin

Did you get storage heater installed then? If not you probably best on single rate over summer.

TheElectricCow

markin said:

Did you get storage heater installed then? If not you probably best on single rate over summer.

Never went for storage heaters in the end as the cost benefit wasn’t there for me when looking at the figures to get HHRs installed. Do have an immersion tank though which is the single biggest energy consumer I’ve got, and that can be set to come on at any time.

I did download my smart data from Octopus to run the numbers prior to making the switch, and on my current usage (with the only load shifting being the very minimal hot water heating) I’ll be paying pretty much the same on either tariff. When increasing water heating or taking appliance use into account running the dishwasher etc. overnight that tips things in E7’s favour, even during the summer for me.

Won’t be great when it’s hot enough for air con, but some lose estimates suggest I still won’t be losing out compared to single rate.