RTS meter switched - how does economy 9 work?

Economy 9 actually makes ALL usage run at Off-Peak rates during cheap hours.

You don't need to do anything. The most you need to do is make sure the immersion heater is on the Off-Peak circuit, which any electrician can do with permission from your landlord, purely to ensure it doesn't run outside those times. 

I understand what econ 9 is but nothing is on the off peak circuit apart from the storage heaters.  So an electrician can connect up everything to the off peak circuit and then I can switch to econ 9 because as I understood it I am still on the old tariff?

Thank you, that’s reassuring. 

It sounds like the engineer didn’t do a very good job of explaining the new situation. A smart meter managing Economy 9 means two quite separate things:

• There is a timetable inside the meter which tells it when to record peak usage and when offpeak. This ‘tariff switching table’ is set prior to or during the installation,
• There should be a switch (called ALCS) inside the meter which turns a separate heating circuit on and off. The on/off times should coincide with the tariff switching table. This circuit will power storage heaters and usually the water immersion heater.

It may be - as Blastoise suspected - that the water heater isn’t on the same circuit as the storage heaters. This won’t necessarily matter much if the immersion heater has its own separate timing control as many do. Your photos will help clear this up.

The tariff you’re on doesn’t affect the meter’s operation. The tariff rates (peak, offpeak and standing charge) should have been sent to the meter so that it can display the current rate at any time and do some cost calculations, but more importantly so they can be passed on to the IHD so you can get an idea of how much you’re spending. Can you see the rates on your IHD? Do they match with what you were told Economy 9 would give you?

The engineer said the two small boxes on the left would need to be connected up and one of the cables from the meter disconnected.

Thanks for your reply. The  IHD on the home page says “your tariff will change”

When I go to account on the IHD it says 29.75 credit tariff per kWh and then 61.66 standing charge. The one I have been on has been 26.36, 22.07 and 58.73 standing charge.   

I looked up ovo plans and prices for my postcode just now s) (crkey there’s a lot of different plans) and found the one I  have been on - Warmer Home 2 rate (heating) by looking for the prices I have been paying.  The list didn’t include any econ 9 or 10 though.  I’m in PH9.

Just checked before bedtime, IHD now says 20.63, So that must be the off peak rate.

Thank you. I’m not sure what the engineer was talking about. 

First, it looks as if the tariff sent to your meter is the one called Simpler Energy - 2 Rate, a variable tariff that will drop a bit next month. The quoted rates are currently 29.75 p/kWh peak, 20.63 p/kWh offpeak and 61.66 p/day standing charge. That is only part of the picture, though: you also need to know what times the meter has been configured to switch from peak to offpeak rate and vice versa. The IHD, which seems also to have received the tariff information, should give you an hour’s notice of each tariff change with a countdown scale, so watch out for that. 

The next part of the jigsaw is the switching times of the circuit that’s intended to power your storage heaters and water heater. They will normally be identical to the tariff switching times, but we’ve seen several new installations where they aren’t. Do you have any way of spotting when a storage heater starts charging up? There might be a red indicator lamp on its socket plate on the wall, for example. The IHD will normally show its orange or red traffic light when a storage heater starts charging, just to show that more power is being drawn than usual. The Now button on the IHD will show the current power draw. This might be 1.5 kW for a single storage heater, but I can’t imagine what it would be for seven of them and possibly a water heater as well. 

As regards the wiring, the meter tail marked LLL in your picture is - I think - sitting in front of one marked LL. These are the line cables powering the whole house; storage heating equipment should be on the switched circuit fed by the LLL cable, with everything else on the constant circuit fed by LL. If you follow the tails to the Henley blocks to the left of the meter, you’ll see one of the the continuation cables is marked S - which could mean Switched or Storage - and another is marked D, probably for Domestic. You may be able to trace the cables from here to the consumer units containing the circuit breakers for the different bits of the house wiring. I can’t imagine which of the cables from the meter should be disconnected or why. 

The VAT-inclusive Economy 9 rates for your DNO area are currently 30.06 p/kWh peak, 22.58 p/kWh offpeak and 61.66 p/day standing charge for payment by Direct Debit (± 0.01 p rounding error). 

If you’re at all technically-minded, you may want to download and keep the user manual for your meter. It’s not really light bedtime reading, but it will show you how to tell whether the switched circuit is live or not, for example.  

Thanks for your help this forum is really good.

I know how to check when the storage hheaters come on (immersion was never on off peak) I don't think the new tariff prices are the same as the ones now showing on the ihd. I just needed to be sure that everything will switch to off peak.

I've not checked the off peak times yet.ihave the times given on the phone when I made the appointment but will definitely need to check as the storage heaters have to be programmed to come on.

I think it was the LLL cable the engineer said needed to be disconnected.

Haven't looked at the readings on the actual meter yet. It's not in the easiest spot to see but also I lost my specs at the weekend, also my excuse for any typos!

Hi, I managed to see the readings on the meter - rate 1 was 5kWh and rate 2 was 0 but I haven’t used anything that uses a lot of power since the meter was installed on Monday. So I waited till the off peak came on - light by a storage heater- and put on a washing and the immersion heater. Rate 1 stayed the same and Rate 2 is now 4kWh.  So everything is running on off peak (not that I didn’t believe you)  Just need to double check the times it goes on and off now but thank you for your help-you must know what you are talking about! 😊

​@borage welcome to the OVO Forum.

I’m glad to hear you’ve got to the bottom of things, and ​@Firedog / ​@Blastoise186 thanks as always for sharing your amazing knowledge 💪.