Hi ​@CazS ,

I’ll need to see photos of what you’ve got to provide advice. Please post them to the Forum when you get chance. It may not be purely because you’re RTS.

There is a HUGE effort to get all these jobs done before the RTS Service is fully turned off. I suspect yours will be done by then.

Thanks

I would be interested in the responses to these questions, I had a failed installation on the 29th November and according to an OVO rep in a phone call from me a few days later they were aware of the issues and would be contacting me within 3 weeks, obviously I haven't heard anything 

Thank you Blastiose186.  Here are some clarifications of my questions.

Do you represent OVO energy and if so what department, what is the contact details for the department dealing with my issue?

I asked what is the support for this process. To clarify what communication will I receive from OVO once the engineer assessment is complete. What steps and customer support are provided for customers with technical issues.

You have said you suspect it will be resolved by the cut off but what if not. The messages are quite threatening for vulnerable customers who do not change in time.

What communication will OVO provide for all customers about technical set up difficulties. I see an Ofgem paper mentions this but couldn't find anything on OVO.

What benefit does providing photos on the forum add when the engineer and that department should manage the issue. That is additional work for me and I don't know what I'm looking for.

You say it may be not purely due to RTS issue. What are the multiple known issues and options. Can these be published?

I’m afraid it’s very difficult for anyone to give the sort of personal service you’re asking for. At the moment, there are teams of meter engineers working long hours often far away from home to try and help the hundreds of thousands of customers with RTS systems, from Portland to Fair Isle. They will be doing whatever they can to make sure your old meter(s) are exchanged for a smart one in time, but one thing they don’t have enough time for is contacting individual customers. 

You ask what ‘known issues’ there are which aren’t specifically related to RTS. There are dozens of them, but here’s a simple one: smart meters are a bit taller than many older ones, so it’s not uncommon for the engineer to discover that there just isn’t room on the meter backboard to fit the new one. Of course there are solutions to this 

• It may be possible to mount the two halves of the meter separately, but that requires a special kit that an engineer won’t normally have in his van. 
• It might be necessary to move the service head (the box at the end of the cable bringing power into the house), which can only be done by the electricity distributor (DNO) at the supplier’s request.

We might have been able to spot potential problems if you’d done as Blastoise suggested and posted some photos of your meter(s) and the cables connecting them. It would also be helpful to know where you are in the country - the first part of your postcode is enough.

You complained that “the advice about tariffs has been poor”. Most customers with storage heaters controlled by RTS will be offered a choice of Economy 7 or Economy 10, which allow for charging the heaters at offpeak rates for between seven and ten hours a day. It’s then up to you to decide which would be best for you. The prices for these tariffs are all given on OVO’s plans and prices page.

You may find that you get more help in this difficult period by asking here rather than contacting Support, whose staff may not be as well informed as some of those who answer questions in this forum. But in order to be able to make helpful suggestions, we have to know a lot more about your current arrangement. The more you tell us, the better placed we’ll be to help:

• Where are you?
• What tariff are you currently on (see a recent bill for its name)?
• How do you pay for electricity?
  °  Direct Debit
  °  On receipt of bill
  °  Prepayment
• What heating equipment is installed? 
  °  Storage heaters - number, size and type 
  °  Other space heaters ditto
  °  Water heaters
• How many people are 
  °  at home all day?
  °  away during the day?

… and so on. This sort of information will help work out which tariff may be best for you and suggest whether any changes need to be made to the house wiring.

It is also worth noting that the OVO Forum is primarily manned by Forum Volunteers such as ourselves. We don’t work for OVO (so we don’t get paid for our time here!) and we can’t access your account or internal systems - this is intentional for Security/GDPR reasons as well as keeping us independent. We’re managed by the Forum Moderators (who do work for OVO) for the purposes of Forum Moderation and having a link between us and OVO, but otherwise we’re just volunteers who do a cool thing because we can.

It must be said that we can’t see any of the discussions you’ve had with either OVO or the Engineer - that stuff is locked up tight and far out of our reach.

Long story short on that part, OVO pays the bills and provides Forum Moderators to help keep the lights on, but the Forum Volunteers are the ones who get to run the show and we generally answer about 98% of all questions posted here. The other 2% are either from other community members or the Forum Moderators swinging by to cover the ones we’re not sure about - but in a handful of cases we might ask our industry contacts to stop by and give their thoughts too. Some of those contacts post directly, while others prefer to remain anonymous and ask us to post on their behalf. You’ll know when that’s the case because we usually drop a note to let you know.

Just so you know, if you wish to raise a complaint about a Forum Volunteer, or the something that happens on the Forum itself, the best place to do so is via email to forum@ovoenergy.com. Please don’t send those complaints via the Support Team or Complaints Team as they don’t manage us and it might get stuck. Just a heads up that malicious complaints (e.g. All Forum Volunteers are corrupt! without giving any evidence or explanation) won’t get a response so please make sure to add reasons for doing so as it helps to get things checked out. Only the Forum Moderators can access that inbox - Forum Volunteers can’t touch it and we can’t edit or delete anything that goes there so there’s no risk of us making it vanish into a black hole.

As for the letters and/or emails? I’ve seen examples of them so I know what you’re talking about there. The messages that have been going out do have to be strongly worded as I’m afraid it’s a necessary evil so that folks don’t just completely ignore them. It really IS a case of ignore them at your own risk because doing nothing means your heating and/or hot water will almost certainly break down in some way. Migrating to Smart Meters is the only way to resolve that - if we could tell you other solutions, we would - it’s literally part of the House Rules for us to give you all the options we can think of and the best possible advice we can muster - but in the case of RTS Shutdown stuff, there are no other options because the industry has determined that there is only one viable migration path.

Thanks for your replies.  Here is the set up. I would also be interested to hear from other customers who had been advised they have a complex set up and who have successfully had a proposal finalised and installed. Is there any advice you can give to support this process.

I would say that that looks like a well-organized orthodox RTS installation, but it might be daunting for any less-experienced meter engineer faced with trying to unravel all that wiring. I can’t tell from the photos which of those twin meters is which; I suppose that one is for anytime usage, the other for RTS-controlled heating. Your bills will tell you, giving the meter numbers and their associated readings. When you do find out, you might think of sticking a label on each to say what it’s measuring. The wiring for a single smart meter will be much less complicated.

The harvi monitor suggests that you have a renewable energy generator - solar PV panels, for example. This complicates the installation a bit, if that is the case. Are you currently being paid for any excess generated energy? What does the CT clamp do?

While OVO are trying to find someone to install your new meter, you might think of answering the questions I posed earlier - your response should help us help you.