Having had a smart meter for as long as I can remember, I’ve never needed a reminder. I’m interested to hear, though what the reminder email says nowadays.

It was usual to recommend that customers took a reading just before the end of the billing period. We discovered by bitter experience that this always led to estimated bills, because usage from the time of the reading to the end of the period was estimated. To avoid estimates, the reading should now be submitted in the morning of the first day of the next period. It will be logged as having been taken at the preceding midnight, at the precise time when billing periods end and begin. 

It has taken some time to get official guidance documents updated to reflect this, but I’ve also discovered that email notifications are often the last bits of text to be updated to incorporate changes like this. Hence my question.

Email meter read reminders normally land 5 days prior to the end of a billing period, so I guess any meter reading submitted over a 5 day window is better than none at all.

But for the people who do rely on a reminder, they could miss submitting a reading all together.

     I didn’t receive my reminder this month, so could be the dev’s have broke something🤭

or is this a planned change?
 

Tom…

                                                                        ***** 

        Not as clear cut as is could be, but better than nothing at all🤭                                              
 

Thanks. So it is still wrong: “Sending a meter reading in the next 5 days will make sure your bill is as accurate as possible” is just not true. It will be perfectly accurate if the reading is submitted one day later. It will be based on an estimate if the reading is submitted any earlier - I think. 

You are correct, submitting a meter read on the last day of my billing cycle resulted in a estimated reading being used to calculate my bill.

Thanks to your previous good advice, I now submit a meter reading the day after my billing cycle ends (albeit 1day) results in no more estimated readings being used.

                                                        *****

Do take note that the text from my previous post, had been copied from an email dated 5/7/24.

So the 5 day window was still being pushed as recently as the beginning of July.

Tom…

Thanks for yet another data point to nail this fast. I’ll suggest that our forum masters give the appropriate people a(nother) nudge. IIRC, it’s about 18 months since this change was discovered, so even longer since it took effect.