This statement by consumer champion Martin Lewis has been widely reported today:
"The rollout of the smart meters has been a disgrace in this country. Twenty percent of them don't work ...”. I saw it at second or third hand from this article, but I haven’t been able to find the source if it wasn’t in an attributable interview the Express had with him.
Does anyone know what the basis for this assertion is and where it was first made? Is it true?
Best answer by Jeffus
View originalI have no idea, we have had a smart meter for years, through Scottish Power, Eastern Electricity and now OVO. No problem with any of them. Anything new upsets people especially golden oldies like me as an over 80 year old . They have nothing better to do except complain about inevitable change. We have solar power, heat source pump, two electric cars, the smart meter not only shows us what we are using but the fact we might have left something on!
Do not read newspapers that never give good news only bad, otherwise there is nothing to interest readers.
This is not true.I have my smart meter for over 9 years & has never failed it is accurate.I have checked this out already.I have taken a meter reading from my smart meters has(5022) & when I checked against a meter reading which was automatically sent to ovo system has(5000).This is shows how accurate the smart meter is.
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I bet it’s the old thing where SMETS1 meters sometimes became “dumb” after folk changed suppliers. But that didn’t prevent them being used and read in the same way as traditional analogue or digital jobbies.
A 20% “failure” rate sounds ridiculous, that would surely be a ludicrously unworkable level!
Could be true but who actually knows? My gas smart meter has never worked. The engineer who fitted it stated from the outset that it wouldn't work (too far from the electricity meter) but was contracted to fit it anyway.
I'm pretty sure that many others that live in upstairs flats have the same problem. (Electric hub in the flat but gas meter outside at ground level). Energy companies are still knowingly fitting useless meters to my type of property to meet government targets or risk fines. Neither parties care! The energy firms make target and the government can falsely brag about their climate saving actions.
Will we ever get some honesty from these people? With an election in the offing I think not!
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EDIT: The government has revised up these official figures as it turns out some Suppliers gave them inaccurate figures. The revised current figures are in a later post in this thread
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The government Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) has a lower figure in its last report. See below.
This is an often quoted figure, although recently the government has been using a 2.7m figure sometimes from DNEZ.
It is difficult to know how accurate these figures are, for example, we do see examples on the forum where it appears ovo think a smart meter is working but it isn't in some way.
I do see short-term issues with my meter connection, whether they are picked up in the stats i don't know. It doesn't mean my bills are wrong on a regular basis, just I have to be careful what I am looking at sometimes.
It may be Martin Lewis has been mis quoted without knowing exactly what he was referring to with the figures. I haven’t heard or seen where Martin said this.
So the majority of smart meters/connections/accounts are working, perhaps around 90% plus or minus a bit at any one time, but clearly we see some painful examples with issues on the forum. It won't be the same people with issues all the time. Some are short term, some are more serious than others.
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That has largely been fixed. Dual-Band Comms Hubs and AltHAN have basically eliminated almost all range issues between the Comms Hub, Gas Meter and IHD.
I very much doubt the 20% is accurate - it’s probably FAR less than that at this point. 5% sounds more realistic tbh.
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It’s possible that figures from a Which survey were those the comments were based on
That said, it was a survey rather than a wider data gathering exercise
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It’s possible that figures from a Which survey were those the comments were based on
That said, it was a survey rather than a wider data gathering exercise
It is interesting as this will be feeding through to customers contacting their supplier to resolve an issue.
I assume OVO have some stats on the number of smart meter customers who have contacted them in the last 12 months with a "problem" along with stats around meter readings.
Clearly, there are many different ideas of what working and not working mean. Is your fridge not working if the light doesn’t come on when you open the door? Is your car not working if its ashtray’s full? It’s a meter’s job to measure; to my mind, if it’s measuring, it’s working. The Government report Jeff quoted uses the term to mean working as intended, which is a much more helpful criterion. We see very few cases of meters that aren’t measuring, like an electronic gas meter with a flat battery.
The Which? figures are just as misleading as so many others; some of the respondents had more than one problem (add up the numbers shown and you get 127%), but if we assume that the 40% who said their IHD wasn’t working had no other problem, the 23% suddenly drops to 14%.
That is still too high, but I think those of us who frequent these forums will know that most of these ‘problems’ are either only short-lived, fixable or workroundable. A gas meter that’s busily measuring gas but is too far from the electricity meter for its readings to be propagated further is still working, but its smartness is handicapped. This can be fixed in many cases, and of course it’s always possible to work around the lack of communication simply by taking and submitting readings manually.
But to say that a meter is not working because it’s not transmitting data over the HAN or the WAN is IMO just wrong.
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Unfortunately several organisations use surveys and present their findings as valid data whereas they are a group of opinions from a selection of chosen contacts - that’s one reason why I don’t find surveys generally useful.
I’ve found some respond with what they think was required, rather than offering any factual information. That’s not to say that some smart meter connections (internal and external) are in need of strengthening although in many cases, better guidance has a greater effect
If it’s not communicating then it isn’t a “smart” meter it’s just a meter.
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Actually, Smart isn’t just about Comms. It’s also about a LOT more than that, for example:
And a bunch more.
I had it installed a few years ago and it worked fine after a few weeks or so. The Octopus dashboards are fantastic...
Still every time I would get someone knocking and taking a reading it would mess up the bills, really shocking values. This never hit our bank account but still caused some concern.
Eventually they fixed it. Something to do with the old reading point not having been completed disabled. We now have a policy that we only let anyone in that we are pre-warned about. Stopped it for sure. Apparently even if the gas meter readings are also sent, manual readings are needed...
In other words, smart meter setup is not as squeaky clean as it should be.
But we love the pricing that changes every 30 minutes and getting paid to charge our EV, so only look forward. 😁
I bet it’s the old thing where SMETS1 meters sometimes became “dumb” after folk changed suppliers. But that didn’t prevent them being used and read in the same way as traditional analogue or digital jobbies.
A 20% “failure” rate sounds ridiculous, that would surely be a ludicrously unworkable level!
I agree with waltyboy here, I wonder if it’s to do with the SMETS1 issue where they weren’t compatible with all suppliers? I’ve worked for OVO for a long time and would be very surprised if this were the case. I wonder what the source is? If it is the Which survey the problems are ‘self reported’. I know that sometimes there can be confusion when it comes to smart meters- with estimated readings for example, when a customer is on monthly meter reading schedule and this causes them to believe that the smart meter isn’t in communications.
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The latest government "official" figures are here as of end 2023. Quarterly updates.
This is collated from data supplied by energy suppliers so will include data that ovo have supplied rather than subjective customer data in the which survey and other surveys. Historical figures have recently be revised up as some suppliers had given the government inaccurate figures.
30,823,000 smart meters in smart mode
3,981,000 smart meters in traditional mode
34,805,000 Total
So 11.4% of smart meters in traditional mode at the end of 2023 according to supplier data for a number of reasons that are described in the report that are important for context. It is a snapshot in time.
This includes some non domestic and advanced meters.
There is a spreadsheet for those really interested in the detailed breakdown over time and splitting out domestic and non domestic etc.
I wonder if OVO would be willing to share their slice of the data in the official figures out of curiosity. It would be interesting how the figures vary across suppliers. Some Suppliers may well have more smart meters "working in traditional mode". We know ovo have been fined for the speed of their rollout of smart meters so there are likely to be differences in the splits for this reason.
This official data will never line up with the which data
1. The which data asks a sample of customers if they have had problems over the last 12 months.
2. The official data is a snapshot of meters that the supplier cannot contact at a specific time.
The percentages in the which data will always be higher as the time period is 12 months.
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And today’s article summarising the figures in the online Guardian supports the kind of figures suggested by
Final two paragraphs imply some 11% below par…but even so, that seems only to refer to the smart meters being no worse than traditional meters requiring quarterly estimates or submission of readings by consumers.
”Smart Energy GB, a government-backed non-profit set up to help with the smart meter transition, said there are now almost 35m smart meters in Great Britain “and the vast majority are operating as intended”.
It added that there had been an overall improvement in the proportion of smart meters operating in smart mode since 2022, increasing from 87.3% at the end of 2022 to 88.6% at the end of 2023.”
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And today’s article summarising the figures in the online Guardian supports the kind of figures suggested by
Final two paragraphs imply some 11% below par…but even so, that seems only to refer to the smart meters being no worse than traditional meters requiring quarterly estimates or submission of readings by consumers.
”Smart Energy GB, a government-backed non-profit set up to help with the smart meter transition, said there are now almost 35m smart meters in Great Britain “and the vast majority are operating as intended”.
It added that there had been an overall improvement in the proportion of smart meters operating in smart mode since 2022, increasing from 87.3% at the end of 2022 to 88.6% at the end of 2023.”
An additional challenge is whether some of the functionality in smart meters can realistically be utilised any time in the near future.
There are load control features that currently are not being used by the likes of OVO and Octopus. So OVO Anytime relies on the Internet for switching as does Intelligent Octopus Go.
It will be interesting to see how the market evolves and whether the stats can get to a point that suppliers look to utilise more of the smart meter features. Else we as customers have spend an awful lot of money on the smart meter rollout when a cheaper cut down solution could have been deployed. The latest estimate is £13.5 billion at 2011 prices... so an eye watering amount in real terms.
From the impenetrable figures in the tables Jeff referred to, we can see that dumb meters account for 11% of all supposedly smart ones, We don’t know whether they’re ‘working’ or not, but assuming they are, that leaves 9 of Lewis’s 20% unaccounted for. Some of those 11% will be SMETS1 devices that couldn’t be connected to DCC, which would become dumb on a change of supplier as Emmanuelle points out. Any customer in this situation will have been made aware of the possibility.
I’m still wondering about the large number of non-working IHDs - is it likely that 10% (40% of the 23% of Which? respondents who said so) of them aren’t working properly? I’m sure that there is a significant number of customers who simply give up on their IHD when it won’t tell them what they want to know and stuff it in a drawer somewhere. That isn’t evidence of a non-working smart meter.
As Balfour stated, “There are three kinds of falsehoods: lies, damned lies and statistics.”
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From the impenetrable figures in the tables Jeff referred to, we can see that dumb meters account for 11% of all supposedly smart ones, We don’t know whether they’re ‘working’ or not, but assuming they are, that leaves 9 of Lewis’s 20% unaccounted for. Some of those 11% will be SMETS1 devices that couldn’t be connected to DCC, which would become dumb on a change of supplier as Emmanuelle points out. Any customer in this situation will have been made aware of the possibility.
I’m still wondering about the large number of non-working IHDs - is it likely that 10% (40% of the 23% of Which? respondents who said so) of them aren’t working properly? I’m sure that there is a significant number of customers who simply give up on their IHD when it won’t tell them what they want to know and stuff it in a drawer somewhere. That isn’t evidence of a non-working smart meter.
As Balfour stated, “There are three kinds of falsehoods: lies, damned lies and statistics.”
It is not a like for like comparison
This official data will never line up with the which data
1. The which data asks a sample of customers if they have had problems over the last 12 months.
2. The official data is a snapshot of meters that the supplier cannot contact at a specific time.
The percentages in the which data will always be higher as the time period is 12 months.
My meters would definitely be in the 23% if I had filled in the which survey but very unlikely I would have been in the snapshot official data from the suppliers seeing if they could see my meter.
Of course it’s important to put statistics in context, and that’s just what the statement that prompted my question is lacking. As I pointed out earlier, it’s a meter’s job to measure, so if it’s measuring it’s working. We still don’t know just how many smart meters aren’t in fact measuring, but I suspect it’s a tiny proportion of the 35 million. I would hope that most customers with a smart meter would soon notice if it stopped working, and we do very occasionally see examples in these forums. But to claim that a smart meter isn’t working because it’s lost the connection to the supplier is downright misleading.
I wonder how many of the 35 million smart meters installed over the past decade or so were replacing ones that would have had to be replaced anyway because of their age.
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Of course it’s important to put statistics in context, and that’s just what the statement that prompted my question is lacking. As I pointed out earlier, it’s a meter’s job to measure, so if it’s measuring it’s working. We still don’t know just how many smart meters aren’t in fact measuring, but I suspect it’s a tiny proportion of the 35 million. I would hope that most customers with a smart meter would soon notice if it stopped working, and we do very occasionally see examples in these forums. But to claim that a smart meter isn’t working because it’s lost the connection to the supplier is downright misleading.
I wonder how many of the 35 million smart meters installed over the past decade or so were replacing ones that would have had to be replaced anyway because of their age.
Interesting
The majority of ovo customers rarely log onto their ovo accounts we are told. Many never log in.
I suspect hence most customers would be unaware if their bills were estimated for transitory times during the year because of this. They don't look at their bills in that much detail. Of course some people look in detail.
I go through periods of not looking at my ovo bills. I haven't checked for many months for personal reasons having other priorities. I haven’t paid much attention for over a year now.I have no idea if they are being estimated.
The semantics are interesting. For me if my bill has estimated readings, then somewhere in the end to end smart meter ecosystem including ovo billing etc there is an issue. That utilmately is all I care about and I suspect is all the majority of people care about. I just want to be able to tell ovo there is an issue if spot it and for it to be investigated by them as I am their customer. I also hope there are some automated procedures in ovo and others to spot issues and investigate and fix without me even knowing, this could be better I am sure.
I honestly don't care if the issue is with ovo or connectivity or some database or the meter or the comms hub. I just simply want ovo to facilitate getting it fixed either themselves or via 3rd parties.
I quite like the government stats in that it keeps it simple. Can the supplier see the smart meter to get a reading. It is simple for the public to understand I think. Anything else risk complicated wording I fear.
Of course some of us are more curious about stats and the details etc, including me.... along with enjoying helping people it is why I contribute to the forum, although much less recently.
Ultimately I am not sure if currently the ecosystem is ready for load control, time and type of use on a mass scale. It isn't bad, but feels a bit flaky for the average person. I spent most of my working life working in financial services, it certainly feels the energy ecosystem is a bit flaky compared to that. I fear ovo would get swamped with queries.
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Yes indeed, “The majority of ovo customers rarely log onto their ovo accounts we are told. Many never log in.” and not just this energy supplier; yesterday’s Martin Lewis newsletter contains the following snippet from one (pleasantly surprised) consumer:
"After giving EDF meter readings, it was confirmed this morning that I am £3,831.91 IN CREDIT! Which is being repaid to me.” And which is a jolly Good Thing.
+5
Yes indeed, “The majority of ovo customers rarely log onto their ovo accounts we are told. Many never log in.” and not just this energy supplier; yesterday’s Martin Lewis newsletter contains the following snippet from one (pleasantly surprised) consumer:
"After giving EDF meter readings, it was confirmed this morning that I am £3,831.91 IN CREDIT! Which is being repaid to me.” And which is a jolly Good Thing.
Whilst I always check my balances - energy, bank, - I realise that some might not bother and previously relied on meter readers to get updates on their bills.
I understood that a physical check on meter readings were required every 2 years but this seems to have gone by the wayside, maybe organisations reducing costs.
Having been through an issue with British Gas many years ago where they wrongly read my meter as imperial, I now double check at least once a month. That in itself would reduce the reported ‘problems’.
I now double check at least once a month.
I check my readings every day; it’s the first thing I do when I switch to my OVO page, before even visiting the forum🤓
I normally collect my Hh data before going to bed; n3rgy usually has them for me by 00:35, sometimes earlier.
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