Economy 7 meter issue - RTS vs Smart, massive mis-read

foggyjames

Evening all! First time poster...hopefully you can provide some advice! Please excuse the long post...

Back in July, I had my RTS meter replaced with a smart meter. There have been a few issues, with the key points highlighted in bold:

1) It appears that the meter failed to connect for above two months. During that time, estimated readings were used by my provider.
2) The meter (at least as far as I can tell) won't display a day/night rate breakdown - only a total - so I was unable to keep track myself.
3) Eventually, the meter fitting company made contact to say that they would need to come out to look at it, and an appointment was set (which is still in the future at the time of writing). When a previous smart meter at another property didn't connect at first start-up, the engineer said it would never try again, so this, combined with the appointment to fix the issue, meant I stopped checking to see if it had started communicating.
4) In spite of this, after a couple of months the meter magically made contact with my utility company, and started sending daily readings. The first of these put the entirety of the previous 2+ months usage on the Day rate.
5) The new meter is recording a dramatically different day/night ratio to the old meter - averaging 26% day rate on the old meter to 68% on the new.

This has manifested itself in the form of a very large bill covering the previous usage. I had selected a tariff with a very low night rate and a relatively high day rate, reflecting my previous readings, but both points 4 and 5 above have given be quite a headache on this front.

I have now changed providers for someone with a more conventional day/night rate split on their tariff, and will be coming off Economy 7 ASAP (for various reasons, it's about to stop working for my consumption habits)...but...what do you anticipate happening with this horrendous bill?

My assumption is that the dumping of 100% of units onto the day rate will be easily resolved - that it demonstrably not right. However, what % split is applied could be interesting.

The massive shift in the readings from the meter is more nuanced, though. I chose my tariff in good faith based on two years' readings. It took above two months for the readings to become visible to my supplier, and about another month before I realised. I have acted as quickly as I could once I was aware of the issue and digested the implications, but there is still a 3+ month period where I was unaware that a massive bill was being run up owing to a change in the behaviour of my meter.

I appreciate that there is a good chance that the new meter is correct, and the old one was wrong. It could be, for example, that the rates have been read back-to-front for years (and I have experience of this many years ago, when a digital (non-RTS) E7 meter had its internal clock set ~12 hours out), but the readings were inherited as they were from the previous occupants supplier.

What are my chances of a resolution which is favourable to me, or at least a compromise (on either or both of the issues mentioned above)?

Many thanks!

James

WiserMiser

Welcome to the forum.

Turn on all your high power appliances (kettle, tumble dryer, oven, iron, hairdryer, toaster, fan heater etc) and see which register increments.  Is that the one billed at Day Rate?

If not, they are transposed.

What do you use for room heating? Do you have an immersion heater?

QrizB

Good morning and welcome.

foggyjames said:
2) The meter (at least as far as I can tell) won't display a day/night rate breakdown - only a total - so I was unable to keep track myself.

What nmake and model is the meter! As far as I'm aware, all UK smart meters allow a manual reading of the registers, but it can take an arcane combination of button presses.

foggyjames said:

 I chose my tariff in good faith based on two years' readings. It took above two months for the readings to become visible to my supplier, and about another month before I realised.

Which supplier were you with?

foggyjames said:

I have now changed providers for someone with a more conventional day/night rate split on their tariff, 

What supplier are you with now?

foggyjames said:

, and will be coming off Economy 7 ASAP (for various reasons, it's about to stop working for my consumption habits)

This bit confuses me and it would be helpful if you could expand on these "various reasons".

E7 is typically better for customers with large off-peak energy requirements, which usually means storage heaters or similar stored heat.

Does your property have storage heaters? If it does, why do you expect E7 to be less suitable as we're going into winter?

If you don't have storage heaters, what were you previously doing to have almost three-quarters of your electricity use on night rate, and how has that now changed?

foggyjames

Hi Both,

Many thanks for your replies, and for the welcome!

Perfectly happy to get into the back-story (but was aware that it was likely to make for an even more lengthy first post...), but the main point was about how reasonable my previous supplier is likely to be regarding this metering/billing issue (half of which is clearly a metering problem, half of which is perhaps slightly more up for debate), and how I might stand with the ombudsman should it come down to it. My thought here is that I have ended up with a huge bill through little-to-no fault of my own, simply down to a meter change, and that the benefit of the doubt here ought to rest with the consumer. All thoughts welcome!

Anyway, to your questions:

I am currently with UW, and am in the process of switching to Home Energy. Based on the new day/night split (and their less extreme day/night unit price offset), that ought to save me ~15% straight away, and about the same again when I ditch Economy 7.

The meter is a Landis&Gyr E470. I followed the instruction video for this type of meter on the UW website, but their instructions don't work for my meter. I have just now looked up a random YouTube guide for reading the second rate on this type of meter, and that does work! I have no idea if it would have worked for the first two months, when it would appear it was set up to only record a single rate. We have various things on at present, so I will take a second reading in a bit and check that it has advanced the correct rate. I suspect that it will be right, to be honest, but that doesn't get me too far with my dilemma!

Heating is a work in progress, and a long story...but the salient point is that for the next few weeks at least we will be heating our bedroom using a convection heater controlled by a (high current switching) wall thermostat. That is what has brought a sense of urgency to proceedings.

E7 was working for us because:
1) We had relatively few electrical devices previously, and those we had could largely be scheduled to operate at night (immersion heater for hot water, dishwasher, washing machine, etc). I often shower late enough to be in E7 night-rate hours, etc.
2) Our previous meter was reporting nearly 75% of consumption being on the night rate (which seemed plausible), and combined with a heavily night-rate biased tariff from UW, that was notably cheaper than other options at the time I signed up for it.

As for the change in habits, there are two factors:
1) We're about to have our first child, and hence will be wanting heating all day, and most likely to run the washing machine and dishwasher whenever we want.
2) There's a good chance that we'll be installing an ASHP relatively soon, so E7 isn't going to work well for that.

...plus based on what the new meter is reporting, ditching E7 will be cheaper for us anyway, even without these exacerbating factors.

I'm well aware that both the convection heaters and immersion heater are not ideal...and replacement of both is an in-hand work in progress, but we need to do damage limitation in the meantime.

It would also be helpful if anyone has any insight into how understanding UW are likely to be about the double metering issue which has landed us with this giant bill which we couldn't have reasonably predicted. My gut feeling is that they really can't argue about the first two months all going on the day rate (and the related non-connection of the meter), but how we address the massive shift in what the two meters were reporting might be a tougher one to argue. However, I would make the point to them that I have been reasonably on top of this...and many a more vulnerable (or even just average) customer would not, so I think I have a fairly strong case for them at least meeting me in the middle.

cheers

James