Complex meter: Refused Economy 7?

Thanks. The two feeds to the heaters are a good sign. The first is for charging up, the second for controlling and for the fan inside the heater to push warm air out when needed. The first will be on the switched circuit, only energized in offpeak periods. The second will be on the constant circuit, ready to react to the output setting.

You didn’t mention water heating. It’s quite common for a hot water tank to have two immersion heaters, the main one at the bottom and a secondary one near the top. The main heater is on the switched circuit, the secondary one on the constant circuit for emergencies when all the hot water’s been used up.

Panel heaters aren’t good news - they are about the most expensive form of heating available, short of burning £10 notes in the fireplace. However, on an Economy 10 plan, you would be able to run them before bedtime at the offpeak rate.  

You will have to do some serious sums to work out how best to proceed. My inclination would be that with storage heaters like yours and a water tank with immersion heaters, an Economy tariff is going to be the cheapest option, because it’s likely that most of your electricity consumption is being used for heating.   

hello ​@EdinburghFan, I can see that you are booked in for a new exchange, ill email the local TM now to ensure a suitable engineer arrives to change the meter. Tech have checked it and all looks good to go!!

Sorry for lateness of reply… ive changed roles within OVO so have had to have some time to adjust myself. 

​@CookieCooke I can see you’ve had support from other members on the forum, for OVO our customers are put through to a specific ‘squad’ to talk tariffs and best fits for out customers. As you can imagine with all the weird and wonderful tariffs that exist that sometimes this isn’t a straightforward conversation but there is a solution to most things. 

Sorry I cannot be more helpful, I dont know how SP operations are conducted or what conversations they have with Customers.

Hi ​@Firedog re: hot water we have a timed heating circuit that comes on circa 4am - 8.30am and we also have a ‘boost’ override function to heat if we run out of hot water. However, on CPC the rate is the same whenever we use them.  I’m not sure if it translates to there being two different tanks, as there’s just one large cylinder that looks like a single tank. Re: panel heaters - yes that wasn’t our choice, we inherited the set up and SP have never made it possible to change away from this tariff so we haven’t changed anything as a result.

Re: doing the sums yep I definitely intend to! That’s why I’m so keen to work this all out ahead of someone coming to replace the meter as I’m very worried that they will fit a specific meter designed for a specific tariff that I will then be locked into again. I am desperate to move away from SP so I’m hoping that what gets done when the meter is changed also makes that possible….. 

​@Lukepeniket_OVO  thanks for your response, wasn’t expecting you to be able to comment of course. It would be wonderful if SP had a ‘complex meters squad’ to take to, but no. None of their agents understand anything. Just glad it’s OK for me to ask q’s like this on an Ovo forum. 

AFAIK it’s unlikely they’d lock you in with a specific meter. And chances are if you switched away, your new supplier could potentially just swap it anyway if needs be.

Still researching though! Give me another few hours and hopefully I’ll have something more for you.

Just as a test though, try to generate a quote via https://switch.ovoenergy.com to see what happens. Don’t go through with the switch itself, just see if it’ll spit out any quotes as I’m curious.

And yeah, Luke is a legend, that much I can tell ya - it’s very rare he gets stumped. But we’re open to everyone so that’s one of the reasons we’re totally cool with having you on the sofa with us. OVO pays the bills and provides the Moderators, but the Forum Volunteers get to run the show day-to-day.

​@Blastoise186 unfortunately I get: 

Oops, there’s a problem…

Unfortunately, we can't give you a quote right now. We're currently unable to support your meter setup, but we're working on it and expect to offer quotes in 2025.

Gotcha, thanks. I had a feeling it’d say that. You may have better luck once the meter swap is done though.

Back to the drawing board...

​@Lukepeniket_OVO Thank you for sending the email! It all now rests on what the engineer will suggest / be able to do during the appointment and their skills. 

Good. The timing for the water heater is determined by the RTS; when you get your smart meter, it will be wired along with the night storage heaters to the switched (offpeak) circuit. This might need some adjustment to avoid heating water unnecessarily, but that can wait until you have a bit of experience with the new system. As I said, it’s likely that there’s one tank with two immersion heaters inside.

Smart meters are pretty flexible, but not every supplier is geared to apply tariff changes remotely. As I said, my inclination would be to try for Economy 10 as being more suitable for a northern climate.

As regards SP having to be involved when there was a problem with your heating circuit: it looks as if this circuit is connected to SP equipment (meter and/or RTS) direct, with no isolator in between SP’s stuff and yours. That means it could only be de-energized by disconnecting it inside one or other of the SP boxes, and that requires an SP engineer. It’s not clear from your photos where the main fuse for the property is; that is SPEN’s property and responsibility, only to be touched with their permission. The fact that there are two sorts of SP (the energy supplier and the network operator SPEN) doesn’t make things simpler ...

HI ​@Firedog ​@Blastoise186 -

I spoke to Scottish Power today and went over how my system works - the 2 electric circuits with 2 separate rates for heating and hot water, the set up of the storage and the panel heaters. I explained the significant increase in our bills if we were moved to White Meter 1 - the CPC heat rate is 23.154p, the standard electric rate is 24.594p pkwh. WM1 is 14.301p night rate, 30.004 day rate. (I should say that we only pay one daily standing charge rather than two.) With our set up, it will be more expensive as my husband works from home during the day and we don’t have a timed storage heater - and I don’t know how our hot water system would work with this set up - would we need to put it on overnight or is that automated by an engineer when they change the meter?

The woman I spoke to went and enquired with another team. They have come back and said that the only thing that could be done if we don’t want WM1 is for us to swap out the storage heater for a panel heater (at our expense) and then a standard meter could be fitted. This is a flat rate of 24.594, what we pay for our domestic non heat electricity at the moment. They say that if we want to keep the storage heater, WH1 is the only option.

These are the only things that are available to us according to Scottish Power and depending on what we go for, they would fit a different kind of meter. (We are due to have this fitted on Tues 13 May.) My questions are:

• do these solutions sound reasonable to you? ​@Blastoise186 I know you were kindly looking to see what you could come up with - is there anything else I could go back with as a suggestion?
• Is there any reason why a standard rate wouldn’t be available to us if we kept the storage heater? We have the ability to turn our storage heater on at any time with the way that it is set up on the circuit. 
• If an ‘off peak’ meter is fitted, does that lock us into an ‘off peak’ tariff in the future with another energy company? Ditto with a standard meter?
• A general question - once the appropriate meter is fitted, am I then able to move to another energy supplier? I desperately want to be free of Scottish Power!

Both solutions leave us worse off and as far as I can see, SP haven’t taken ‘reasonable steps’ to ensure we aren’t worse off, which means they aren’t fulfilling their OFGEM requirements. 

Any advice is very much appreciated by me and my husband! The complaints handler is from the CEO’s office - can’t seem to go higher than that….