Possible acquisition of OVO Energy by EON

When there is a change like this does the company taking over another honour the fixed tariffs that we have? I can't remember what happened when we were moved from SSE. 

Might be time to look at Octopus, they seem to have good customer service ratings.

Based on past experience with mergers/takeovers, the two systems usually run side-by-side for some time before they manage to work out how to integrate them.
E.On have two tariffs for EVs: Next Drive and Next Smart.
Next Drive doesn’t require either a compatible car or charger. This is basic charging at an off-peak rate (6 hours from midnight to 6am) with day rate hiked-up.
Next Smart is increasingly requiring a compatible car, which can be a problem. I think there is also a very small list of compatible chargers that they supply.
Hopefully (if this happens at all) E.On will integrate OVO’s ability to use compatible chargers into the system, and (fingers crossed) continue with the charge anytime model.
Sadly, as my old maths teacher used to say: “If things don’t change, they’ll stay as they are”. 😥

As an Octopus customer I feel that I've been looked after mostly but simple issues can take a while to be resolved. As an example my smart meter (the one Octopus recently installed) stopped giving half hour readings which is absolutely essential for the Agile tarrif where each HH has a different price. I reported the issue. This went on for several weeks without any response then I had a questionnaire to complete and then a couple more weeks went by. I had to phone their customer services at which point they said they were going to send an engineer to investigate. Two days before they were due to arrive the meter just started working again. Presumably by a remote reset. I cancelled the engineer and it has been fine ever since.

About five years ago I had exactly the same thing happen with OVO and they sent the questionnaire almost immediately followed by a meter reset within days which fixed the issue.

The other thing is Octopus billing is haphazard to say the least. OVO never failed to deliver a bill on time in 10 years.

Peter 

Thank you for this assessment, Peter. On other forums where I am or have been active, many people praise Octopus - when that praise is accompanied by code which rewards the code giver for every person they sign up, I treat such praise with scepticism. On the issue of billing, I have seen people struggling to understand bills that appear to be, frequently, showing charge backs and rebilling etc. I have also seen people confused about receiving bills on different dates each month. 

In contrast, OVO bills are easy to understand and cover an exact calendar month. (My SSE bills, which should have covered 3 months, covered anything from 66 to 99 days!) I have had a few problems with my smart meters since they were installed, but they have, usually been resolved quickly. However, I think that this is because I notice the problems as soon as they happen. I have seen many people who have had estimated bills for months on end, due to either smart meter failure or customer failure to send readings. 

The OVO complaints process does seem to work well. The quality of their responses is, consistently, good. Again, this could be because I NEVER phone OVO and just use the messenger facility on their Facebook page or email. 

While OVO may not be perfect for everyone, I am happy with most things. This is, possibly, the main reason for my reluctance to change.

Just a reminder: please be aware that everything I say in this thread relates to my own personal views. Please do not consider any of this to be from OVO or anything official - it is literally just a random guy on the internet mashing a keyboard in his bedroom at 11:30pm on a Bank Holiday.

This is a bit of a sensitive topic for me, so I’m afraid I’m not particularly comfortable nor keen going into much discussion over it. So for this reason, I’m choosing to hold back from the discussion of whether OVO and E.On Next will or won’t merge. What I am comfortable saying, is that I have no information about it as I’ve only seen the same speculation that everyone else has. But that’s basically all I’ve got in that regard. And I’m not keen to comment on speculative stuff.

I’m also in a weird position, a bit of a black swan in some ways when it comes to being an OVO customer that means I can’t be as open about this as I’d like. It’s a long, boring complicated story so I don’t really feel like going into it, but I would personally prefer that things stay as they are now. As it stands, the current setup just… Works… And I wouldn’t be keen to see all the work and effort lost by moving to another system. OVO literally custom built the current billing platform because the original one ended up being… Let’s just say no longer fit for purpose… And that’s why OVO ripped it out and had Kaluza build one from scratch. If the OVO Forum history is anything to go by, some folks initially hated the new one but it’s since been accepted by the community as superior over the old one. I seem to recall some folks also prefer it over other suppliers…

And yeah… Part of my preference is because SSE did kinda screw up my account and data back in the day - someone at OVO spent an awful lot of time a few years ago doing a seriously deep dive to reconstruct half my account, rebuilding the data and fixing some serious data corruption caused by SSE. That’s partially why I’m loyal and choose to stick around - I know a lot of other suppliers wouldn’t have bothered with the heavy lifting it took to fix all that stuff.

I know, nobody is perfect, but I would also like to stay with OVO.

As a complete aside from the subject but to just fill in a bit of detail, on the recent occasion when the HH meter readings were restored all the missing data from my electricity meter was retrieved so that I got an accurate calculation at the next bill. If I understand correctly I think the meter can hold up to a year's worth of data which can eventually be retrieved. The gas meter was different. Only a few days of missing data was retrieved but it didn't matter as I was on a fixed rate for that so it only needed a recent reading to get that right.

Peter

​@Peter E FYI: SMETS2 lays down what the meter has to store. For example, 

Thank you ​@Firedog for filling the hole that I created. Much obliged.