Complex meter: Refused Economy 7?

HI ​@Nukecad thank you so much for your message. If anyone has any suggestions for this, I would be incredibly happy to hear them! My complaint is now being handled by someone in the Chief Exec’s office at Scottish Power, and even they aren’t engaging with the infrastructure issue and unsuitability of the tariff ‘solution.’ God I wish we were with Ovo. 

Hehehe, you’re welcome!

Just in case it helps, many of the Forum Volunteers hold the Plan Zero Hero or Carbon Catcher tags - you’ll see those next to our names and we’re always happy to help you out, just give us a shout and we’ll swing by and say hi.

Likewise, the Forum Moderators such as ​@Ben_OVO and any other OVO Staff are all tagged with _OVO on the end of their names and their ranks show what they do. We also have access to a few contacts for certain things. Luke’s superpowers are downgraded a bit if you’re not with OVO, but he is my Sekrit Weapon if I ever get stumped.

I can promise you this much. Looks like your posts here are 100% safe in terms of the House Rules. You’re being cool with us, so we’re totally happy to welcome you and grab you a sofa.

As for your case…? Bear with me - lemme dig into some resources I had buried somewhere. This may take a while so I apologise if I don’t reply for a couple of days. This stuff is my speciality but I need to get brained up again on the Scottish Power specific stuff so I’ll need to bury myself in the research for a bit.

Speak soon!

​@Blastoise186 thank you - that’s amazing, I really appreciate it. I’ve attached some pics of our meter set up for you in case that’s helpful. One thing to add - we have a system override for the hot water heating, (it’s heated by RTS overnight, but we can get hot water during the day anyway if we do a ‘boost’) and our storage heaters aren’t timed - we can operate them at any time and get heat. (Though the temperature of that may be controlled by RTS - i.e. there’s a certain maximum output controlled through RTS). 

I like having one heat tariff and one standard tariff 24/7, and actually don’t want to swap to White Meter 1 at all, as we don’t have the facility to use off peak electricity due to the way our storage heaters function. I’d like to keep the Comfort Plus Control tariff - just minus whatever the RTS does for this system. Do you know what would happen if we did nothing at all? Or is it feasible for SP to fit a meter that will allow us to continue with this tariff as is, once the RTS bit is taken out of the equation?

Thanks again!

Urrff… That’s a messy setup…

All I can say right now is that there won’t be a Comfort Plus Control style option to migrate to. It’s not just RTS that’s going away, it’s just about every RTS Tariff too… And there’s no meters that can do CPC without RTS assistance...

​@Blastoise186 eeek - this is exactly what I’ve been trying to get SP to understand, that our flat is basically wired for CFC and that alone. Sending a smart meter fitter isn’t going to do anything at all. It’s got to the point that I’m actually quite frightened that no one will listen to me and I’m doing everything I can to avoid a nightmare situation on 30 June where things just stop working - and SP are treating me as a massive inconvenience. I’ve even suggested they send someone out from SP Energy Networks to look at the system to advise them on what will work!

As mentioned - all our heating is on a control circuit and all our standard electricity is on another circuit. I don’t even know which one of them the smart meter would be fitted to (both)? We can’t use white meter 1 off peak as there’s no timers on the storage heaters. Changing to white meter 1 would, I imagine, mean completely rewiring aspects of the system which I just can’t see them doing. 

I’m probably panicking too much and I’ll leave you to your digging for now but just want to say again how much I appreciate this! There’s 47 people with this same system in my development, 47 individual customers they are failing by not engaging meaningfully with us. 

No worries. And please don’t worry - I got this. It just needs time for me to crunch because I have to try and think of the best solution I can come up with.

Please, feel free to relax on our sofa and grab a drink for now - you’ve not only shown yourself as being totally respectful, but you’ve even come up with a unique puzzle for us, which we absolutely love. I can promise you that the Forum Moderators are totally cool with what you’re asking for too - they love watching us solve these challenges just as much as we love tackling them. It’s our goal to get you the best possible outcome and we’ll go pretty deep in our research if that’s what it takes. All on the house, of course.

I will try to get you something of an answer by Monday. My tools in the BlastoiseLabs infrastructure are watching this thread and working overtime as well to guide my answer but I’m making progress on it myself - it just takes a lot of research!

Full disclosure: I know nothing about these curious Scottish arrangements, so all I can add is the results of a bit of research and the odd suggestion.

This is what Scottish Power say about their ComfortPlus Control system:
  

There is no way that a single smart meter can replicate this sort of control, so what is best for the individual victim depends very largely on what heating equipment is installed. What a smart meter can do is:

1. Record usage on different registers at different times, e.g. peak and offpeak, so that usage can be billed at different rates depending on when it takes place;
2. Switch a dedicated circuit on and off so that it only provides power during offpeak periods.  

If heating is by low-power storage heaters (that take 14 hours to charge up fully), the normal two-rate plans like Economy 7 (E7) or Economy 10 (E10) will probably not be the best. If you have higher-powered storage heaters, like those designed for E7 that take 7 hours to charge up fully, then E7 or E10 could be a good bet. If the heaters aren’t capable of keeping the house warm through the evening, E10 with its daytime offpeak slots might be preferable. 

The concept of lower-cost 24-hour electrical supply for heating will very soon be history. Any necessary rewiring may take an hour or two of a competent electrician’s time; if that is the consumer unit above the meters in your photo, it should be fairly straightforward. I would suggest that you ask for a five-port meter, with the fifth feed being used for the switched circuit, which should charge the storage heaters and power the water tank’s main immersion heater. If there are two connections for each storage heater, the second should be connected to the constant feed along with lights, sockets and appliances. The same applies to the hot water tank.

It’s difficult to say more without knowing a lot more about the equipment in the house. You might consider getting your friendly neighbourhood electrician in to advise you on what needs to be done, especially if some of it could be done before the meter exchange takes place.   

Still analysing the situation! Man this is complex stuff!

All I can say right now is that it looks like White Meter 1 will potentially make you even more worse off than Economy 10 because you’d lose even more hours of cheaper heating. I think we need to explore whether E10 might be a better fit, to at least soften the blow a little.

I’m still digging this, so please bear with me. Apologies for not posting as much as I’d like, but I really want to get the best info I can and I felt giving you some food for thought might help in the meantime.

There’s also the question as to whether Comfort Plus White Meter with Weathercall might have been a better option for you all this time - I’ve heard that in some cases CPWM can be cheaper than CPC… But alas, both are going away anyway so we’ll never know.

Just so you know, my research is being AI Assisted via Gemini Advanced using the 2.0 Flash model. However, my posts on the Forum regarding this are being written by me personally.

Thank you both for the replies, sorry I’ve only just seen them now. ​@Blastoise186 thank you for how in depth you’re looking into this. My fear is we have skyrocketing bills if they move us to White Meter 1 - and I believe that this goes against their OFGEM requirements that they should take reasonable steps to ensure customers are no worse off. ​@Firedog thank you for what you’ve shared re: the electrical set up. We do have two connections for each storage heater - but we don’t know why as there’s no lower rate at night, it’s all only ever on the ‘control’ heat tariff 24/7. Yes that’s the fuse box above the meters.  I could certainly get an electrician to come by if that is going to be of use to us in the long run. However, I think that any electrical rewiring that has to be done that involves SP’s infrastructure has to be done by SP Energy Networks? A fuse blew in the heating circuit last year and we got an electrician out to fix it but he couldn’t and SP Energy Networks had to change it instead. But you will know this better than me! 

(Editing to add: pics of storage heater in living room attached below - one thing I didn’t mention (apologies!) is that we have small panel heaters in the bedrooms - again, no timers.)

Our meter is due to be installed on Tues 13 May. I have a call booked in with SP on Thursday morning to discuss this, though that’s with a customer service agent, not anyone who has the competency to actually address the complexity of the issue unfortunately. If either of you see this in time, do you have good questions for me to ask the agent about options I may have - both tariff and infrastructure wise? I’m not sure that economy 10 is possible to get now - they may have that for old customers, but not for ‘new’. I was looking and even the Standard Single Rate would be better than WM1 in my book. 

My big fear, having been completely locked into this one system and one tariff only offered by SP is that any meter change will do the same - i.e. we will continue to be locked into one tariff solely with SP as SP simply don’t see it as worth their while to do anything else. Am I totally wrong in thinking that might be the case that whatever they fit might limit us like that? I’m not exaggerating when I say that WM1 would increase our bills 50-100% - and CPC wasn’t even that cheap to begin with!