Crossed meter or not?

QrizB

Reed_Richards said:

I can't see exactly how the wires run from your meter to your Consumer Unit (fuse box); is it possible some of your supply goes elsewhere to some other part of the building?

OP has a pet electrician (see the first post) so hopefully this has already been checked.

Reed_Richards

Possibly, but there is a lot of seemingly redundant equipment in there to confuse matters and anything that happens between the meter and the consumer unit is difficult for an electrician to deal with because they cannot render it safe without the removing the mains fuse, which they are not legally supposed to do.      

baglessupright

Many thanks, everyone, for your extremely helpful responses. There's a lot here to unpick and I'm going to make a list of all your suggestions and go through them over the weekend and I'll let you know if I find anything significant. I have a better understanding of how the electrical system in my flat works now and feel a bit more hopeful about the upcoming meter test. I'm told that it'll be up to 10 days before I get an appt for that but I'll pop back and let you know how it goes. Thanks again for all your input.

baglessupright

Reed_Richards said:

Possibly, but there is a lot of seemingly redundant equipment in there to confuse matters and anything that happens between the meter and the consumer unit is difficult for an electrician to deal with because they cannot render it safe without the removing the mains fuse, which they are not legally supposed to do.     

The electrician asked me to get Eon on the phone while he was here and told them the same thing re all the redundant equipment. I was promised an engineer's appt to remove it and that's another appt that still hasn't been made!

baglessupright

Chris_b2z said:

Your meter is famous. It hit the headlines in Ireland about 7 years ago 

Wow! That's interesting. My first thought when all this started was that the meter was going wonky - especially after the display disappeared following the sandwich toaster incident but Eon were quick to dismiss that and said that the meter was good for another 5 years.

baglessupright

Reed_Richards said:

So I think that a meter that is briefly blank probably isn't any cause for concern, one that is blank for 30 seconds or more probably is. 

Although I can't know for sure when the display disappeared or reappeared, I'd say that 30 seconds or more was entirely possible - by the time I'd figured out what was going on with the sandwich toaster, checked out the circuit breaker and the blank display situation and found/returned with a pad and pen.

baglessupright

Reed_Richards said:

I can't see exactly how the wires run from your meter to your Consumer Unit (fuse box); is it possible some of your supply goes elsewhere to some other part of the building?  That would explain how the meter reading managed to increase whilst you had everything in the flat turned off. And that in turn could explain why your electricity usage shot up.  But if it were a true reading of energy being used somewhere else then testing the accuracy of your meter would not help.   

I can't rule that out.

The flats I live in were purpose-built in the 1960's by/for the local council as holiday apartments. At some point they were sold by the council and are all now owner-occupied.

The flats are all built around external staircases - 9 flats to a staircase with 3 flats on each floor.

There are emergency lights on the staircase and light-sensitive fittings on the landings. The consumer unit for the communal lights and the meter are locked in cupboards more or less outside my front door. . I did wonder for a while if my meter was crossed with the one for the communal lights because the daily meter reading was so consistent but it's varying a little bit now.

My brother (who isn't an electrician) when trying to be helpful said:

"there was a lot of cost-cutting and short-cutting involved in council builds so making one wire do for two apts wasn't unknown - especially as the rent (of the holiday let) would probably have included bills too".

I don't know how true this is but it stuck in my mind....

Mobtr

If you speak with EON again & you get a competent advisor, ask them to check Ecoes to see how many flats are registered. Should give an idea if there is one meter per flat. Not sure why they changed you £100, would have thought they would have fitted a check meter for free 

QrizB

Mobtr said:

Not sure why they changed you £100, would have thought they would have fitted a check meter for free 

There's always a charge for a check meter, and it's always refunded if the meter proves to be faulty.

molerat

Mobtr said:

If you speak with EON again & you get a competent advisor, ask them to check Ecoes to see how many flats are registered. Should give an idea if there is one meter per flat. Not sure why they changed you £100, would have thought they would have fitted a check meter for free 

Easy enough to do it yourself.

Checked for a building a relative moved in to.  There are 8 electric and 7 gas supplies registered for 6 flats, several shipperless.  RM have the flats A to F, council tax have them GFL, 1FR, TFL etc.  The energy supplies are a mixture of both, some having several supplies.  Their bill is sent to RM address although that address does not appear on the energy registers.  When querying with her electric supplier if they provided the gas they said the meter was unregistered, previous tenants have obviously been having free gas for years, looks like there are a few others with either no gas or electric supplier.