Been offered a smart meter , on economy 7

Rosie1001

Edf are pushing to change my old horseman rts meter 

Been offered a smart meter , smets 2 they said , day and night rate 

but at the moment , at the moment I have day and night , plus a heat so 3 different reading 

I have old storage heaters , they work really well and suit my lifestyle bricks in a box type ) 

i also get a boost in the afternoon , which I need , and I presume this new meter will not give that 

any help please 

MultiFuelBurner

Do you mean you are on economy 10?

Rosie1001

No I get 5 hours at night , 2 hours afternoon boost 

Rosie1001

It’s a old legacy tarrif , used to be called super tariff by northern electric 

ecraig

Are they going to remove the tariff when you move to the new meter?
That is the question to ask your energy company.

Rosie1001

I’ve asked …it will go on economy 7 they said 

my concern is , can this meter work my NSH ‘s properly 

QrizB

Rosie1001 said:

I have old storage heaters , they work really well and suit my lifestyle bricks in a box type ) 
i also get a boost in the afternoon , which I need , and I presume this new meter will not give that

If you need the afternoon boost regularly, it sounds as though your storage heaters are too small to work effectively on E7.

You won't get an afternoon boost on "normal" E7, and (unless you can find a creative electrician) you won't even be able to boost them on full-price afternoon electricity. You'll end up needing a separate convector heater for the evenings.

You will eventually be forced to have a smart meter and might end up on E7, but until then keep your current meters and tariff, and you might want to start saving to replace your storage heaters when that happens.

Swipe

Rosie1001 said:

I’ve asked …it will go on economy 7 they said 

my concern is , can this meter work my NSH ‘s properly 

No need to be concerned as long as you grill the installer before they start. Ask them if they are installing a 5 terminal meter and, if not, will it use an external contactor? And, most importantly, make sure they explicitly confirm that your storage heaters will work only on the off peak rate once the meter is installed.

Rosie1001

Quote …”If you need the afternoon boost regularly, it sounds as though your storage heaters are too small to work effectively on E7.”

I get 5 hours thru the night and 2 in the afternoon 

heaters are perfect size for the rooms 

QrizB

Rosie1001 said:

heaters are perfect size for the rooms 

... But too small (store insufficient heat) to work effectively on E7.

QrizB

An example might help here.

Imagine that you want to heat a room that has a constant heat loss of 500 watts (half a kilowatt). That's 12 kWh a day. You might think that you need a 12kWh storage heater, but on E7 you only need to bridge the seventeen hours from the end of one E7 period to the start of the next, which means you only need to store 8.5kWh. (You also need to "leak" 500 watts for those seven hours, but that doesn't require any extra bricks.)

But what if you've got two separate cheap-rate periods? Say, midnight to 5am and 2pm to 4pm? Well, 5am to 2pm is nine hours, and 4pm to midnight is eight hours. Now you only need to bridge nine hours, which means storing 4.5kWh. Sure the heater will be cold by 2pm but you can then heat it up again, ready for the evening gap.

So, as smaller (lower capacity) storage heaters are cheaper, someone designing a system to work with an afternoon boost will specify smaller (lower capacity, cheaper) storage heaters.

Which is fine so long as you can keep the split tariff. However, these tariffs are mostly now obsolete and it looks like they will be withdrawn by the few suppliers that support them as part of the smart meter rollout. Smart meters enable all sorts of other tariff options and, in principle, suppliers could continue to offer tariffs like "Super Tariff" but in practice they haven't yet chosen to do so.

Which means that, sometime in the next two years or so, you should expect to be moved to a smart meter and to lose your Super Tariff. When this happens you'll have at least three options:

1. Keep your current storage heaters but use a top-up heater (convector, oilfilled, etc.) in the evenings when you run out of stored heat.
2. Replace your storage heaters with larger (higher-capacity) ones that will last all day.
3. Be cold.

Which one to pick really depends on how long you expect to live in your current house. Replacing the heaters could cost several thousand pounds, which you could instead choose to spend on extra peak-rate electricity in the evenings. But once you've replaced your heaters you'll be set forever, while keeping the old ones will result in extra heating costs indefinitely.