eon smart meter

tav159

like many others totally fed up with eon bombarding me with email/text /post, just had a telephone call from them telling me i must have a smart meter of loose my night time rate and current charge rate, this is blackmail i told the caller ,anyone else experienced this behaviour fro eon ?

Ayr_Rage

Certain tariffs do mean you require a smart meter so you'll just have to bite the bullet.

If your night rate is switched by radio, then that system is being discontinued next June, so you'll pay full rate all day and night without a meter upgrade.

It's not blackmail, it's a fact of life.

Rodders53

Why the tin foil hat?  Smart meter means you get accurate monthly billing from EoN (and other suppliers) rather than their estimates and no need to manually check meter reads and submit them.

You should have taken their £50 credit offer for having a smart meter around a year ago (like I did).

Non-smart meter rates will be clearly advertised --- or rather the requirement to have a smart meter fitted for some tariffs will be pretty obvious.

What EoN tariff are you on?

IF convinced the Agent that called you was attempting "blackmail" then a formal complaint with EoN is your first step...

Scot_39

tav159 said:

like many others totally fed up with eon bombarding me with email/text /post, just had a telephone call from them telling me i must have a smart meter of loose my night time rate and current charge rate, this is blackmail i told the caller ,anyone else experienced this behaviour fro eon ?

It is entirely upto EOn what tariffs they offer you on what is after all their meter kit - subject to some regulatory protection.

So the obvious question is how old is your meter - and is it rts or old secondary mechanical clock based for rate switching.

If EOn reasonably believe either is likely to be faulty - or simply out of certification period or go faulty e.g. after rts signal switchoff - resulting in a failure to switch properly if at all.
Even if rts does switch - it may drift and so not stay within 2 hours of nominal timing  - when   they are AFAIK legally obliged to intervene then yes it is possibly correct. 

It strikes me they are protecting both you and them.
You don't want off peak heating charged at day peak rate  - or not charged at all.

And they clearly don't want risk of you getting off peak at wrong time when it's costing them normal rates.

EOn are likely not blackmailing anyone - and your interpretation maybe biased by your desire not to go smart.

But feel free to complain - even if legal - the wording may be considered sufficiently poor.  And they will have recorded the call.

Their was certainly at one stage a conflict between legal mandating of smart metering and Ofgem guidance some suppliers wording.  But Ofgem are pushing even harder and end of life meter situation has certainly changed.

In the end, they have a commercial basis they agree to supply you on.

I wasn't happy when they replaced my heatwise rts with e10 as more expensive off peak - with options of e10 or single rate - that was in both cases modern digital not smart.

If unhappy change supplier.

Some of neighbours moved and onto e7 - most others didn't do e10 for new customers even then - I only found 1 other and they were more expensive than EOn.  At least 1 had to upgrade heating as wasn't lasting to evening.

One tried to refuse and challenged - and was aftrr nearly a year - and Ombudsman backed EOn so assume legally - upgraded to single rate digital with no restricted switching - he then switched supplier then back to e7.

Gerry1

Ayr_Rage said:

If your night rate is switched by radio, then that system is being discontinued next June, so you'll pay full rate all day and night without a meter upgrade.

Extremely unlikely, that's just desperate scaremongering by the industry. With such slow progress, it's quite possible, even probable, that Radio 4 LW will still be going strong well into 2026 and beyond; its closure has been postponed umpteen times already.  The June date is merely athe latest target, the drop dead date is the end of 2025, but that may well change.

Even if the LW signal did disappear, all that would happen is that your RTS would behave like a wristwatch that wasn't checked against the Greenwich Time Signal every day.  It might drift a few minutes per year.  AFAIK domestic E7 times don't vary from night to night so you wouldn't even be aware that anything had changed.

Ildhund

Gerry1 said:
... it's quite possible, even probable, that Radio 4 LW will still be going strong well into 2026 and beyond; 

Ofgem and other stakeholders don't think so. 30 June 2025 looks like a deadline set in stone.

Gerry1 said:
Even if the LW signal did disappear, all that would happen is that your RTS would behave like ...

One big problem with RTS systems is that there are so many variations on the theme since it was introduced decades ago. Some may be set to fail safe - i.e. the circuits it controls will simply be switched off if there's no signal. Some may be set to continue with the last configuration before the signal was turned off. Others may do something else, so all anyone can say about how a particular RTS system would behave on that date is 'nobody knows'. That's why a taskforce has been set up to see that as many RTS customers as possible have new meters installed and working before the deadline. 

matelodave

I'm guess that a lot of people would be mightily cheesed off if their RTS system does something strange or unexpected on switch-off day and the energy company then made them wait several months to get it sorted out, especially when they've had the opportunity to get it all set up and working beforehand.

Switch-off day is a bit late to find that its all gone wrong and I can't really see the energy companies bending over backwards to help the intransigent ones if it does.. I cant say that I'd have a lot of sympathy.

I'm not sure that @Gerry is correct about the meter having an internal clock. Earlier system which had an external time clock would still operate, as I guess would those meters that do have a clock and were not RTS enabled.

There's no need for an internal clock in an RTS meter as it gets switched by the RTS signal. AFAIK some meters did had the RTS functionality built in whereas others had a separate receiver/actuator which switched the meter and associated off-peak circuits. 

Ildhund

matelodave said:

I'm guess that a lot of people would be mightily cheesed off if their RTS system does something strange or unexpected on switch-off day and the energy company then made them wait several months to get it sorted out, especially when they've had the opportunity to get it all set up and working beforehand ... Switch-off day is a bit late to find that its all gone wrong ...

They meaning customer or they meaning supplier? Members of the taskforce aforementioned will try to catch anyone likely to be surprised; if customers don't react, I'm afraid I tend to share your lack of sympathy: "You can lead a horticulture ...".
  
An exception to this might be the most vulnerable customers who have never bothered about how their electricity arrives so long as it does, which is presumably why the taskforce has agreed to "Ensure support for known vulnerable customers, particularly those who are over 75 years old and households with children under 5 years old, including prioritising action for them where needed." 

Swipe

I'm sure someone once posted a youtube RTS tear down video here and it showed it having an internal clock built in.

Gerry1

matelodave said:

I'm not sure that @Gerry is correct about the meter having an internal clock.
There's no need for an internal clock in an RTS meter as it gets switched by the RTS signal.

As I've posted several times, the system would have been fatally flawed if the RTS system had relied on the schoolboy howler of using instantaneous CHEAP RATE NOW and PEAK RATE NOW commands.

• It would be unreliable.  Although the diurnal signal strength variation on LW is less than on MW, the daytime signal at 0830 can be weaker than the night-time signal at 2330.  At the margin it would be quite possible for the daytime PEAK RATE NOW command to fail to be decoded.

• Local shielding can also weaken the signal, e.g. new steel framed tower blocks; London needed a fill-in transmitter on 720kHz MW.  Even the rise and fall of a nearby gas holder could have made all the difference !

• Fraud would have been widespread.  Students and techies would soon have discovered that screening the RTS unit when it was showing cheap rate would then have given lower bills forever !

Gerry1

Ildhund said:

Ofgem and other stakeholders don't think so. 30 June 2025 looks like a deadline set in stone.

Sounds like panic has set in !

Ofgem see a need to 'Make available sufficient trained installer resource to meet the increased pace of RTS meter upgrades'.

At 1 October 24 there were 807,439 RTS installations; just three suppliers account for 395,964 of them.  SmartMe.co.uk admits that at current rates, it will take 7 years to replace all the RTS systems out there.

The numbers are dropping over time as all the easy installs and willing customers have been exhausted, and technically difficult installations such as tower blocks and large houses are left.

How are they going to rustle up sufficient additional staff (who are either out of work or can abandon their current job immediately without giving notice) to squash 7 years work into 188 days? Who is going to train them and how long will it take?

In any case, 30 June 2025 is only a target. The hard deadline is December 2025. Yet another problem is that there are roughly 33,000 postcodes that do not have a WAN. This work is in an exploratory phase and there is still uncertainty regarding what the technology solution is for these scenarios...