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?
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.
I 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.
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!
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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!
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
----------
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.
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
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.
Noel | I have no official status; I'm just a volunteer who comes here to help other customers. My gear: Aclara SGM 1416-B Electricity-only E7 meter; Chameleon IHD3-PPMID-AAA | It may look as if I know what I’m talking about, but don’t let that fool you. |
