Smart Meters - Octopus/Greg Jackson states "They're so bad"

Hermann

Greg Jackson, Ceo of Octopus, has made comments regarding the difficulties and poor state of the smart meter system.

From.... https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-13022929/My-smart-meter-isnt-working-think-Octopus-energy-bill-hundreds-pounds-high.html

We've had a million such sessions looking at those darned things. They're so bad,'

Smart meters can be really cheeky - they send about 200 different messages and all need to be in order to get the data.

BellaBlondykeTheThird

Yes with our bad smart meter we paid 11p kWh for electricity yesterday and 14p kWh today. That was all thanks to a Greg's special smart meter tariff.

Ooooh they are so bad they are good ❤️

The_Green_Hornet

Greg Jackson was criticising the in-home displays (IHDs) not the actual smart meters.

Spoonie_Turtle

ThisIsMoney is a Daily Mail outfit, just so people know if they didn't already.  Adjust your expectations of journalistic rigour accordingly.

Their 'source' for the quote requires clicking through to another one of their dodgy articles, which itself takes a quote from Greg somewhat out of context.  They don't link to it, only a screenshot:

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/01/26/13/80500559-13009891-image-a-2_1706274710301.jpg


Edit: and to be fair, credit where it's due - even in their summary of the article they say "Boss Greg Jackson tweeted last week his frustration over some of the devices".  

ArbitraryRandom

Wasn't there the exact same thread on this story a week or two ago (i.e. when he actually made the tweet)? 

IIRC, the "so bad" quote was about in-house displays (not smart meters), and the OP has conveniently left out the bit where he said they've gotten much better since the initial rollout... 

Netexporter

Edit: and to be fair, credit where it's due - even in their summary of the article they say "Boss Greg Jackson tweeted last week his frustration over some of the devices".  

The Heil have to publish a truthful account of their misleading stories, to stay on the right side of the press regulator. It is usually the second or third paragraph from the end of the article, by which time most of the readership have dozed off.

Hermann

As far as I can tell the tweets are genuine so assuming they are then the CEO of Octopus has clearly stated he is frustrated by the smart meter system, and describes the spec as a decade out of date. 

He is clearly referring to the smart meter system and it's reporting back to suppliers and not just IHDs

The news article referred to the value of a customers bills so that too would have nothing to do with IHDs.

If there are issues with the system such that a CEO comments publicly on them then I suspect the best response is not to bury your head in the sand and ignore them.

Although some progress has been made the situation is still such that a public comment was made expressing the frustration. 

dunstonh

Hermann said:

As far as I can tell the tweets are genuine so assuming they are then the CEO of Octopus has clearly stated he is frustrated by the smart meter system, and describes the spec as a decade out of date. 

He is clearly referring to the smart meter system and it's reporting back to suppliers and not just IHDs

The news article referred to the value of a customers bills so that too would have nothing to do with IHDs.

If there are issues with the system such that a CEO comments publicly on them then I suspect the best response is not to bury your head in the sand and ignore them.

Although some progress has been made the situation is still such that a public comment was made expressing the frustration. 

It looks like Heiko Luder is referring to IHDs as the smart meters themselves do not have any higher failure rates than other types of meter.    Whereas IHDs can be range from poor to complete rubbish.  If you want a good one, then you have to buy it.

Greg Jackson's response is not about failures but the specs.   Tech savvy companies will often be frustrated by regulated requirements.

If there are issues with the system such that a CEO comments publicly on them then I suspect the best response is not to bury your head in the sand and ignore them.

The best response is to not take comments out of context and turn them into a different meaning to suit your agenda.

Netexporter

The Octopus Home Mini could get round the comms problem, as it uses the customer's own wi-fi. It is just that the regulations don't allow it, at the moment, I presume for reasons of data security.

Spoonie_Turtle

Hermann said:

As far as I can tell the tweets are genuine so assuming they are then the CEO of Octopus has clearly stated he is frustrated by the smart meter system, and describes the spec as a decade out of date. 

He is clearly referring to the smart meter system and it's reporting back to suppliers and not just IHDs

The news article referred to the value of a customers bills so that too would have nothing to do with IHDs.

If there are issues with the system such that a CEO comments publicly on them then I suspect the best response is not to bury your head in the sand and ignore them.

Although some progress has been made the situation is still such that a public comment was made expressing the frustration. 

Correct, but it has to be looked at in proper context.

For the articlex They mention somebody's bills vs what they were quoted.  Well those are two unrelated things, and the quote is completely irrelevant to smart meters.

***In none of this am I victim-blaming, the advertising of IHDs really does make it sound like they are reliable for everything and there is a dearth of education about managing utility bills in this country.  Yes a lot of info can be found online but not everyone is internet savvy to a) know where to find such info and b) discern what's reliable and what's not.***


With that in mind, let's have a little information literacy lesson, shall we?

"A pensioner living in a two-bedroom property is paying hundreds of pounds a month more for energy than she believes she should be." - okay, so what is she basing her belief on?  What evidence is there that she's right?  What has she worked out her bills should be, other than an initial quote which is meaningless?

"Lynn* joined Octopus Energy last November after having issues with her previous supplier who had told her there was a problem with the smart meter.

Unable to keep paying over £500 a month, she was quoted £100 a month by Octopus but racked up a bill of £550 after the first month." - if this was actually a bill and not Direct Debit amount, of course bills in winter are going to be higher than an average spread across the year.

"When Lynn, whose name has been changed at her request, first disputed the bill she was told the readings on her in-home device (IHD), which shows customers their energy usage, did not match up with her smart meter." - readings, or ££ shown?  Most people mix the two up.  If it was the actual readings, why?  Does she have different registers on her electricity meter that she's being billed against?  The IHD only shows a cumulative total.

"'They said they don't agree with the findings on the device and said it wasn't working properly,' she told This is Money." - secondhand source, from someone whose understanding of their energy usage and bills has not been establised as reliable.  (With all respect to 'Lynn' - I didn't know any of this until joining this forum.)

"An in-home device (IHD), which shows customers their usage in real time, is not required for a smart meter to function, but it did mean Lynn was left unaware of how much her bills were." - Does she not check her bills when they came through every month?  (If she's with Octopus she has internet access, so she should be able to check her usage in her account but to be fair maybe she's not internet savvy, not everyone is.)  Or maybe she simply doesn't know how usage correlates with cost, which again is common.*

"Octopus keep saying that my usage is correct. They say they'll tell their tech team, they know I'm in this position but there's still nothing they can do." - usage in ££ or in kWh?  Ambiguous reporting.  If usage in kWh and the bills are correct then clearly the meter is reporting fine and should be shown on her bills.

"They're never nasty or rude but every time I've spoken to them, they've said the same thing. If they're having technical issues then if I put on another heater, I can't see how much it's going to cost me.'" - it would help if someone educated her how to calculate the maximum extra cost, based on the Wattage of the heater and the different bars.  The IHD would be useful, of course, but since the problem isn't going to be solved soon then clearly something else is required.

"A spokesman for Octopus Energy said the original quote was based on a significantly lower estimated usage, likely based on the size of Lynn's property, rather than her actual use." - oh and there it is.

"'Her actual usage from her meter shows she should have a monthly bill of roughly £330 for her account to be in a healthy place throughout the year.'" - oh so her meter is actually working fine AND sending usage to Octopus.  


Onto your claim of it being a wider issue than the IHD:
26 paragraphs. 
Paras 1-3 intro, without any evidence that bills are actually too high.
Paras 4-12 about Lynn's problem, every single one explicitly mentioning or directly about the non-malfunctioning IHD.
Paras 13-16 about Greg Jackson's comments, 13 and 14 explicitly about IHDs, 15 and 16 unclear because the context is not given.
Paras 17-26 about Octopus' response and actions in Lynn' specific case, which appears to have all come about because of a problem with the IHD rather than meter itself.  Paras 21 and 23 explain the discrepancy between the £100 quote and the higher bills.  Ah!  *And para 25 mentions her app, so although it's transmitting data to Octopus she can't see it?  Okay, fair - but why wasn't it mentioned in the rest of the article?.  (One might wonder whether the smart meter settings are monthly rather than daily or half-hourly, but we can't really speculate.)  So a potential communications problem, but the thrust of the article has indeed been about IHDs.

ArbitraryRandom

Hermann said:

As far as I can tell the tweets are genuine so assuming they are then the CEO of Octopus has clearly stated he is frustrated by the smart meter system, and describes the spec as a decade out of date. 

He is clearly referring to the smart meter system and it's reporting back to suppliers and not just IHDs

If you look at the original article on the thread from a while back (or indeed checked twitter) you'd see that it's not ONE tweet - he frequently responds to customers on the platform.

The majority of complaints he responds to (including the one where he specifically used the phrase 'they're so bad' and the other phases you quoted in the thread title/first post) are relating to the IHD (and he has every right to be frustrated as the suppliers are the ones taking the flack for the toy not working properly when they have no control over the manufacturing/ software/ updates).  



And I'm not saying this to be a pedant - but because they're a completely different thing from the actual smart meter, much more likely to cause issues for the user, and the source of a lot of the complaints/ bad feeling about smart meters because they've been packaged/advertised and treated as the same thing by the industry, government and media. Personally I think the automatic issuing of them should be scrapped and customers should be encouraged to use one of the smart phone apps available - those unable to use an app (on the priority register maybe) should be able to request one, at which point they'll be capacity to give proper tech support/replacements as needed. 


As for actual smart meters - as Dunstonh has said - the specs ARE a decade out of date... but that still more in date than the specs of the 25/30/40 year old machines they're replacing Because the regulators are slow to update the requirements with new technology.

Partially because that's going to introduce more problems (we have progressively fixed the problems with the current units),

Partially because the national rollout started a decade ago (so the units installed a decade ago are now a decade old!) and

Partially because it's installing new meters is expensive (there's a lot of them) so if the current ones are working acceptably (with a more than 90% of them working as intended and vast majority of the ones with problems still actually functioning as traditional meters)

While I understand that's a less than ideal situation for a company with a significant market share that has to provide front line customer service and who likes to push the edge of new innovation in the industry... in the grand scale of things I find it hard to be outraged at the situation.