Smart meters. SSE

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  • I have said this many times on here that anyone expecting their current supplier to be fitting a smart meter very soon is living in dreamland.
    BG has been fitting them for over 10 years now with a large fitting team and is nowhere near complete, not even half way.
    The fitting teams are incredibly slow.
    Because of the way the government have arranged it, it was always going to be super slow requiring each supplier, even such as Spark Energy, Bulb, Iresa etc to conduct their own installs visiting their customer base, who switch around a lot anyway scattered throughout the towns villages and hamlets.
    The rest of the EU did not follow this ridiculous expensive slow method but used the DNO s or equivalents to swoop down each street fitting as many as possible on the first sweep .
    As a long term meter reader I have friends who have switched to meter fitting who tell me they only fit very low daily numbers, sometimes one meter a day. They drive many miles between each appointment too. There is no incentives to work quickly to put themselves on the dole when the roll out is complete.
    Anyone expecting a smart meter from their current supplier can expect a wait of up to 10 years
  • EachPenny
    EachPenny Posts: 12,239
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    edited 5 September 2017 at 2:36PM
    Anyone expecting a smart meter from their current supplier can expect a wait of up to 10 years

    :j:j:j

    By which time they might finally have some genuine benefit to the consumer.
    "In the future, everyone will be rich for 15 minutes"
  • I have said this many times on here that anyone expecting their current supplier to be fitting a smart meter very soon is living in dreamland.
    BG has been fitting them for over 10 years now with a large fitting team and is nowhere near complete, not even half way.
    The fitting teams are incredibly slow.
    Because of the way the government have arranged it, it was always going to be super slow requiring each supplier, even such as Spark Energy, Bulb, Iresa etc to conduct their own installs visiting their customer base, who switch around a lot anyway scattered throughout the towns villages and hamlets.
    The rest of the EU did not follow this ridiculous expensive slow method but used the DNO s or equivalents to swoop down each street fitting as many as possible on the first sweep .
    As a long term meter reader I have friends who have switched to meter fitting who tell me they only fit very low daily numbers, sometimes one meter a day. They drive many miles between each appointment too. There is no incentives to work quickly to put themselves on the dole when the roll out is complete.
    Anyone expecting a smart meter from their current supplier can expect a wait of up to 10 years

    What a complete load of twoddle
    Honest? Probably......sort of.
  • This is all interesting reading. I have a smart meter from BG but as I intend to switch shortly it will become a dumb meter. I only joined BG last September and was contacted in October to see if I wanted a smart meter. Granted it was an 8 week lead time to actually having the install done but it's hardly a 10 year wait. If I'm honest the thing I would miss the most is the precise monitoring ability...but that's more because I'm a bit geeky anyway :)


    I am always good with readings so even before having the smart meter I would give readings as often as weekly to ensure I was up to speed with things. The monitor has been very useful and even helped me spot two issues:

    1. An issue with my Hive randomly turning on my heating for an hour at 3am most mornings - without seeing my hourly usage I would never have spotted it and as I reckon it was costing me about 50p a day, that would have equated to £15 a month had I not been aware of it.

    2. The motor on my hot water valve on the boiler broke and I managed to spot it straight away by noticing that I hadn't used any gas one day when I would have generally expected an hour's usage by that time. I was able to switch the motor out and manually boost my hot water without having to realise it wasn't working at shower time.
  • Undervalued
    Undervalued Posts: 8,839
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    edited 5 September 2017 at 12:59PM
    The fitting teams are incredibly slow.
    Because of the way the government have arranged it, it was always going to be super slow requiring each supplier, even such as Spark Energy, Bulb, Iresa etc to conduct their own installs visiting their customer base, who switch around a lot anyway scattered throughout the towns villages and hamlets.
    The rest of the EU did not follow this ridiculous expensive slow method but used the DNO s or equivalents to swoop down each street fitting as many as possible on the first sweep .

    Quite!

    I would love to see some reasoned justification for the current system incase we are missing the obvious but I really struggle to see what it could be!

    The letter I had said about two and a half hours for both G & E so that would be a maximum of three houses a day even assuming they are fairly close together.

    The natural gas conversion was done in the way you describe roughly fifty years ago. Is this really progress?

    I assume the aggressive marketing is mainly an attempt to get more appointments per day in a small area or is that crediting the process with too much intelligence?
  • EachPenny
    EachPenny Posts: 12,239
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    I assume the aggressive marketing is mainly an attempt to get more appointments per day in a small area or is that crediting the process with too much intelligence?

    I think it is debatable whether the current process can be credited with any intelligence.

    The marketing - which I'd say was more about misleading than being aggressive - is aimed at encouraging people to vounteer to have a smart meter, or to persuade the undecided that they really are the best thing since electricity was discovered.

    The suppliers have targets to meet and Ofgem are getting ever so slightly antsy with them that these targets are not being met. Rather than doing the logical thing and questioning whether the smart meter programme should continue in its current form (i.e. installing already obsolete equipment), Ofgem have - in their considerable wisdom - encouraged the suppliers to fit even greater numbers of obsolete (and largely unnecessary) smart meters.

    One way of doing this is to switch to 'deemed appointments' where the energy supplier is encouraged to use sneaky tricks to make consumers think that (a) having a smart meter is compulsory, (b) is just part of 'business as usual', and (c) putting consumers to inconvenience by making them cancel or reschedule the appointment.

    It is typical of the way this country is run that whilst the programme of electrification of our railways (with clearly defined benefits) has been scrapped due to budget overruns and some impracticabilities, the smart meter programme (with very vague benefits) is allowed to continue regardless of cost and whether they actually serve any useful purpose in ther current form.
    "In the future, everyone will be rich for 15 minutes"
  • House_Martin
    House_Martin Posts: 1,462 Forumite
    edited 5 September 2017 at 5:32PM
    Quite!

    I would love to see some reasoned justification for the current system incase we are missing the obvious but I really struggle to see what it could be!

    The letter I had said about two and a half hours for both G & E so that would be a maximum of three houses a day even assuming they are fairly close together.

    The natural gas conversion was done in the way you describe roughly fifty years ago. Is this really progress?

    I assume the aggressive marketing is mainly an attempt to get more appointments per day in a small area or is that crediting the process with too much intelligence?
    The DNO s ( in my area it was Y.E.B ) changed all the old card token prepayment meters to the not very modern ( and easier to fiddle ) key meters in a 2 or 3 years flat. All the awkward ones refusing entry were faced with the tokens being withdrawn on a certain date which flushed out all but the fiddlers and bypassers. All done quickly and efficiently.
    The decision to change the usual way, like all of the EU are doing, was because the government thought that the suppliers would be better at "selling " the meters to be acceptable.
    In the EU all the countries made it mandatory to accept the meters, apart from Germany and Sweden, so no one needed to talk anyone into accepting the meters that they deemed suitable.
    Here in the UK they gave, for the first time ever, Joey public the chance to have his say to accept the new technology.
    Of course we had to do it the hard and grossly expensive way.
    They will have to make them mandatory now anyway, too many are refusing them..50% ! All new meters fitted will be smart meters regardless. The suppliers will just promise not to link them to the servers.
    They will own the meters so its up to them which models are fitted.
  • AndyPK
    AndyPK Posts: 4,241
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    berries wrote: »
    time to get reading up on it

    https://www.sse.co.uk/smartmeters
  • EachPenny
    EachPenny Posts: 12,239
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    ...because the government thought that the suppliers would be better at "selling " the meters to be acceptable.

    And that, in a nutshell, is the problem. If smart meters are so great for the consumer then there would be no need to "sell" them - consumers would be falling over themselves to have one. If the government design the roll-out programme expecting the need to 'sell' the meters, then you know there is something wrong with them.

    When Apple launch their latest i-Device you don't see them taking out expensive and misleading adverts to convince the public to buy - they develop a working product that people can see a benefit of having, then it sells itself.

    The principal (perhaps only) benefit to consumers of having a smart meter is the ability to have energy pricing which varies with time of day. Yet many suppliers (as we've discussed and agreed HM) still haven't got the facility to offer smart meters to customers on existing ToU tariffs like Economy7.

    Switching to Economy7 is like going through the labours of Hercules, and customers with Economy10 are treated as if they have an infectious disease. The government's drive to make energy pricing simple flies in the face of the principal consumer beneft smart meters can offer.

    'Selling' a smart meter (aka ToU meter) without an attractive ToU tariff to go with it is like selling an iPhone with nowhere for a SIM to go. The only difference is Apple fans would still be willing to pay hundreds of pounds for the phone. :(
    "In the future, everyone will be rich for 15 minutes"
  • Robisere
    Robisere Posts: 3,237
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    More thought and better organisation should had been given to this wildly inappropiate, incompetently organised programme. The first and most glaringly obvious part of the process, should have been not actually beginning without ensuring that the meters were a standardised model. This has led to meters being fitted that do not work after a switch to another energy company, because many have a different meter, added to which many more are already obsolete.

    The words "Booze up" and "Brewery" come to mind. Like many planned programmes in this country over the last few decades, there is very little actual planning and no organisation.
    I think this job really needs
    a much bigger hammer.
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