British Gas smart meter in house display no longer working & B Gas not doing anything about it

Marvel1

Makes me wonder as my parents have a smart prepayment meter, only plug in the IHD to put the voucher code in.  What would happen if the IHD stops working after topping up and csnt redeem the code?

QrizB

Marvel1 said:

Makes me wonder as my parents have a smart prepayment meter, only plug in the IHD to put the voucher code in.  What would happen if the IHD stops working after topping up and csnt redeem the code?

With most suppliers, you can top up online via  your energy account.

Who supplies your parents?

Marvel1

QrizB said:

Marvel1 said:

Makes me wonder as my parents have a smart prepayment meter, only plug in the IHD to put the voucher code in.  What would happen if the IHD stops working after topping up and csnt redeem the code?

With most suppliers, you can top up online via  your energy account.

Who supplies your parents?

British Gas

clive_p

You are lucky you are not with EDF.  I had a smart meter installed in April, it worked perfectly for a month, it was a fault with the comms  module in the electricity meter.  After a couple of weeks they sent someone who fixed it, and it worked for about another month.  But then EDF refused to do another repair - they said that they are only required to fix it once.  I appealed to the Energy Ombudsman fairly confident that EDF would lose, as the contract between Ofgem and energy suppliers requires them to repair or replace when the unit is less than a year old and says nothing about only doing a single repair.  Mine smart meter was only a few months old.  But the Energy Ombudsman sided with EDF saying it would be "too expensive" for them to replace the unit, even though it was pretty clearly defective from the outset.  Moral: don't bother to appeal to the Energy Ombudsman, they are effectively funded by the energy companies and naturally very much on their side, not that of the consumer.  My smart meter is still only partly functioning, have no gas information at all, and the electricity display says at intervals "Supply disconnected", which is clearly rubbish.

jbuchanangb

@clive_p seems to have fallen for the "IHD is the smart meter" mistake. The In-Home Device (IHD) is not the smart meter. The smart meter is in a cupboard somewhere which actually measures the energy use. 

badmemory

jbuchanangb said:

@clive_p seems to have fallen for the "IHD is the smart meter" mistake. The In-Home Device (IHD) is not the smart meter. The smart meter is in a cupboard somewhere which actually measures the energy use. 

Of course this has absolutely nothing to do with the way that energy companies try to pressurise people into taking smart meters.  They should be forced into ensuring that the customer has a way of accessing the info without the useless IHD before they are allowed to leave the premises.  The basis of this whole smart meter thing was supposed to be that both parties would know exactly where they were & not just the energy company.

powerful_Rogue

badmemory said:

jbuchanangb said:

@clive_p seems to have fallen for the "IHD is the smart meter" mistake. The In-Home Device (IHD) is not the smart meter. The smart meter is in a cupboard somewhere which actually measures the energy use. 

Of course this has absolutely nothing to do with the way that energy companies try to pressurise people into taking smart meters.  They should be forced into ensuring that the customer has a way of accessing the info without the useless IHD before they are allowed to leave the premises.  The basis of this whole smart meter thing was supposed to be that both parties would know exactly where they were & not just the energy company.

They do, you can look at the meter readings.

badmemory

powerful_Rogue said:

Of course this has absolutely nothing to do with the way that energy companies try to pressurise people into taking smart meters.  They should be forced into ensuring that the customer has a way of accessing the info without the useless IHD before they are allowed to leave the premises.  The basis of this whole smart meter thing was supposed to be that both parties would know exactly where they were & not just the energy company.

They do, you can look at the meter readings.

True but as the smart meters I have seen are much harder to read that isn't always a viable possibility.

chrisw

badmemory said:

powerful_Rogue said:

Of course this has absolutely nothing to do with the way that energy companies try to pressurise people into taking smart meters.  They should be forced into ensuring that the customer has a way of accessing the info without the useless IHD before they are allowed to leave the premises.  The basis of this whole smart meter thing was supposed to be that both parties would know exactly where they were & not just the energy company.

They do, you can look at the meter readings.

True but as the smart meters I have seen are much harder to read that isn't always a viable possibility.

How are smart meters more difficult to read? Mine just gives a number eg 12345Kwh, whereas reading my old meters involved trying to figure out where the needles were on the little dials.

victor2

chrisw said:

badmemory said:

powerful_Rogue said:

Of course this has absolutely nothing to do with the way that energy companies try to pressurise people into taking smart meters.  They should be forced into ensuring that the customer has a way of accessing the info without the useless IHD before they are allowed to leave the premises.  The basis of this whole smart meter thing was supposed to be that both parties would know exactly where they were & not just the energy company.

They do, you can look at the meter readings.

True but as the smart meters I have seen are much harder to read that isn't always a viable possibility.

How are smart meters more difficult to read? Mine just gives a number eg 12345Kwh, whereas reading my old meters involved trying to figure out where the needles were on the little dials.

E7 electric smart meters can be a bit trickier to read and smart gas meters "sleep" when not being read, so a button press is necessary to read one.