New smart meter

EssexHebridean

PaulDesmond said:

You've got a reasonable excuse, and you have had two previous smart meter engineers try to fit one and fail.

I'd probably still let the third one visit, just to stop my supplier bugging me for another year!

Where did this information come from? My grate great great  gandad probably. I just want to be in control of my meter treadings and send them at the end of the month not receive them when they randomly get the readings and supply statments. 

They don't "randomly" get readings at all - use is recorded on a half-hourly basis and that data is then generally pulled and transmitted through to the supplier at the close of each day. Billing is generally going to be monthly - and will almost certainly be on the same day each month - an improvement on a scenario where the supplier's billing might vary depending on the provision (or not) of a reading from the bill payer. 

As above though, not only is there no reason at all why you can't continue to take your own readings and keep a record of those, it would be a very good idea for you to continue to do so! 

p00hsticks

PaulDesmond said:

I just want to be in control of my meter treadings and send them at the end of the month not receive them when they randomly get the readings and supply statments. 

There's nothing to stop you still providing monthly meter readings. In fact they might provide you with a little in home display that will tell you the readings without having to open the meter boxes. And if you're really lucky like us, you may find that the smart meter doesn't actually manage to communicate the readings to the supplier at all....

powerful_Rogue

p00hsticks said:

PaulDesmond said:

I just want to be in control of my meter treadings and send them at the end of the month not receive them when they randomly get the readings and supply statments. 

There's nothing to stop you still providing monthly meter readings. In fact they might provide you with a little in home display that will tell you the readings without having to open the meter boxes. And if you're really lucky like us, you may find that the smart meter doesn't actually manage to communicate the readings to the supplier at all....

Curious as to why that is lucky?

QrizB

EssexHebridean said:

It should be mentioned that erratic readings or meters counting up without any gas flowing can also be an issue with traditional meters. We've seen cases of that here in the past. 

@MeteredOut joined this forum for that very reason; their dumb gas meter was advancing when the gas was isolated upstream of it.

They have a long thread recording their experience in getting it dealt with:

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6452074/gas-meter-still-increasing-whilst-gas-isolated-siemens-landis-gyr-e6s

EssexHebridean

That was exactly the thread I was thinking of  - and I’ve run out of fingers since to count the number of people who when that has been mentioned have jumped to the (wrong) conclusion that it was a smart meter! 

WiserMiser

EssexHebridean said:

moneysaver said:

mr_stripey said:

short answer - no


What is the reason you don't want to have a smart meter?

When the internal battery runs out on a gas meter it can be a lot of hassle. It took me a year to sort out because the meter was giving false readings including increasing digits with everything turned off, even the gas supply. I am still not sure I got it sorted correctly as I was billed as an estimate based on the previous 5yrs usage.

Moneysaver

It should be mentioned that erratic readings or meters counting up without any gas flowing can also be an issue with traditional meters. We've seen cases of that here in the past. 

Physically impossible for a mechanical (bellows) meter.

WiserMiser

EssexHebridean said:

That was exactly the thread I was thinking of  - and I’ve run out of fingers since to count the number of people who when that has been mentioned have jumped to the (wrong) conclusion that it was a smart meter! 

You've completely missed the point.  It's misbehaved because it's a poorly-designed, battery-operated electronic meter.  (It may also have a ZigBee unit but that's incidental.)

My mobile phone and portable DAB+ radios know precisely how much battery capacity is left.  They don't call wrong numbers or display gibberish, they switch off and show a Low Battery warning.  No reason why battery gas meters can't do the same.

Suppliers need to implement a preventative maintenance schedule to replace gas meter batteries at sufficiently frequent intervals.  This modus operandi would provide a suitable incentive.  If the gas meter is ZigBee linked to a comms hub it should also phone home before it stops metering.

Qyburn

PaulDesmond said:

I have heard from Martin Lewis that you can regquest the smart feature of a smart meter to be turned off. Has he got this wrong?

I'm pretty sure this was always a myth, "dumb" smart meters were fully communicating with DCC and the supplier, the only thing "dumb" was the supplier not collecting half hourly data. Even that will no longer be the case now the industry is moving to hh settlement. 

EssexHebridean

WiserMiser said:

EssexHebridean said:

That was exactly the thread I was thinking of  - and I’ve run out of fingers since to count the number of people who when that has been mentioned have jumped to the (wrong) conclusion that it was a smart meter! 

You've completely missed the point.  It's misbehaved because it's a poorly-designed, battery-operated electronic meter.  (It may also have a ZigBee unit but that's incidental.)

My mobile phone and portable DAB+ radios know precisely how much battery capacity is left.  They don't call wrong numbers or display gibberish, they switch off and show a Low Battery warning.  No reason why battery gas meters can't do the same.

Suppliers need to implement a preventative maintenance schedule to replace gas meter batteries at sufficiently frequent intervals.  This modus operandi would provide a suitable incentive.  If the gas meter is ZigBee linked to a comms hub it should also phone home before it stops metering.

Two issues here - firstly, plenty of aging mobiles DO give erroneous battery info - either claiming a high percentage then suddenly dropping to nothing and becoming unusable, or dropping rapidly to 1% then being functional on that apparent level for long periods are two issues I and others have encountered. Second - some electronic meters DO give a low battery warning - they all might, I'm not certain whether that is the case, but some certainly do. 

I've not missed the point either - we've repeatedly seen folk jumping to the wrong conclusion that MeteredOut's meter was smart because that was the rhetoric they'd been told must be correct - they'd believed the misinformation that smart meters repeatedly play up in this way - which isn't true. 

p00hsticks

powerful_Rogue said:

p00hsticks said:

PaulDesmond said:

I just want to be in control of my meter treadings and send them at the end of the month not receive them when they randomly get the readings and supply statments. 

There's nothing to stop you still providing monthly meter readings. In fact they might provide you with a little in home display that will tell you the readings without having to open the meter boxes. And if you're really lucky like us, you may find that the smart meter doesn't actually manage to communicate the readings to the supplier at all....

Curious as to why that is lucky?

I was being sarcastic really (I'd much prefer to have our smart meter being smart as it would mean I wouldn't have to provide readings every month and we could probably get some better tariffs, but I've long given up trying to get our supplier to get it working properly). But it sounds as if one like ours would keep both the OP and the OP's suppplier happy.