Tomato tariff - Pensioner or 9-5 lifestyle

Brand

Ildhund said:

... . All they need to do this are the half-hourly usage data, which they do know how to retrieve from the meter. ....
You say you have storage heaters. If these are switched on and off by the meter, they will be charging at the Economy 10 offpeak times. If these don't match the cheap times of your Tomato plan, you have some thinking and possibly some rewiring to do.

Thanks very much Ildund

That is reassuring if you think they are storing time of day usage, so then can hopefully apply the money rate per KWh correctly in billing.

As for the storage heater timing, I ticked the box, to say that I had them, but it made no difference to the pernsioner rates offered on the graph.

I used the Contact Us Customer Care form to ask if I could leave them switched on all the time, but would warm up only on the 15p rate, or do I have to switch them on and off myself to fit the 15p time periods, and of course I got no reply.

I fear I will have to have to remember to do the switching on and off, don't you?

Ildhund

Brand said:
I fear I will have to have to remember to do the switching on and off, don't you?

That depends. The 'normal' E10 configuration for a SMETS2 5-wire meter would have the tariff timings set to three offpeak periods a day, one at night, one in the afternoon and the third late at night. The meter peak/offpeak registers record according to that schedule. Quite separately, there is a load control switch in the meter that powers stuff like storage and water heaters on and off to match the tariff schedule. You say that the meter is recording peak/offpeak usage according to the E10 schedule. If the load control switch is set to match the tariff schedule, then there will be periods when your heaters are charging at peak rate, and possibly offpeak periods when there is no power to the heaters to take advantage of. There would be no point turning the heaters on if the circuit they're connected on isn't live at the time.

I wrote 'normal', because there seem to have been almost as many cases of the E10 configuration being anything but normal. The only simple way to be sure is careful observation of the meter and the heaters. If you posted a photo of the meter clear enough for its display and markings to be legible, and another showing the entire meter backboard so the cables to and from it can be seen, we might be able to give more detailed instructions. It would also help to know where you're located - the first part of the postcode is usually close enough.

Brand

Thanks again for such a full explanation.

The Ovo Capped E10 low rate is 000-0500, 1300-1600 and 2000-2200, so the only coincidence with Tomato Fixed Pensioner Lifestyle tariff is 2000-2100, so I'll check whether the storage heater loads up when I switch a storage heater on for that one hour to see if it works.

I attach snaps and my postcode stem is PO12 2

I was wrong on the contact form, as there are two: one for Enquiries/CustomerCare and another, a pink one within the customer portal which does indeed have a box for customer numer.

On the contact form, however, I see Tomato has headlined that they no longer accept customers, so all this might end up academic.   .https://www.tomato.energy/contact

Reed_Richards

Tomato have stopped taking on new customers.  Either you got in just in time or just before the fall.

Brand

It would be very mean  if the staff on Tuesday were sent up the road to Reading on a team-building day manwhile the bosses were clearing out the office. 

https://www.instagram.com/tomato.energy/p/DGyKNF8COWj/?img_index=1

Ildhund

Brand said:
I attach snaps 

Thanks. I have exactly the same type of meter. It's good you managed to find the Active TOU Number in its impenetrable menu structure. We can also see the load control switch icons in the bottom right-hand corner of the display. You should find that in an E10 offpeak period, the Active TOU Number changes to 2 and the lower icon changes to something else. On mine and many others I've seen photos of, it changes to LC1LC2 - yours may be different. This means that the two time switches inside the meter are both closed, energizing the switched circuit powering your storage heaters and probably the main immersion heater as well. 

The timings (actually a complete calendar) for the load control switches can be changed remotely, but it's not a completely straightforward process, and I really doubt that Tomato techs have the skills needed to do it if they struggle to access meter readings. I saw recently a case where BG techs had tried to do this manoeuvre on a meter which was soon transferred to OVO because the exercise hadn't worked. OVO's people couldn't do it either, and they eventually discovered that BG had messed irretrievably with the meter's firmware. The meter had to be replaced.

If you want to stick with Tomato and their attractive prices, I think you'll have to find a way of rewiring the heaters to be always live, then install one or more time switches to turn them on and off at the right times.  

Brand

Thanks again very much for taking time to explain and to suggest how to use the 15p rate on storage heaters.

I attach pics from 2.45 am this morning, which of course is during the E10 low rate period 000-0500

Before the smart meter, the SSE (now Ovo) set-up was a 3-rate meter with rate 3 for storage heaters and an Economy 7 timer for the immersion heater.which I needed adjustment by 1 hour to cope with  BST and billed at rate 2.

Back in the 1990s a SSE engineer kindly set up an automatic afternoon 2-hour boost for any  storage heaterswitched on at the time. This was very useful to keep a room warm into the evening.

(The E10 cheap afternoon period 1300-1600 seemed to develop that idea. and overall the E10 could suit some people very well.  Tomato Pensioner though fits much better with my typical day, though.