THTC / Separate Radio Teleswitch and Meter- Can I get a smart meter?

You get personal messages within your online account?  I don’t see a ‘messages’ section on mine, but they do send me emails.

We got a message on the home page saying we could have a smart meter.  There was a "book now" button which I clicked and there was a choice of appointments. I chose one and got an email to say the appointment was confirmed. That was yesterday....and I knew it was too good to be true. Today an email arrived saying the appointment was cancelled....but we can book another one!! There's no way to book another one because the link on the home page has now changed to an advert for an energy saving check. 

Waiting patiently for Blastoise186 to share his news on the way forward for us...🤞

Nothing new from me at the moment I’m afraid. All I can say is that my contact - and the Forum Moderators - did an initial look-see through the article and couldn’t find any obvious errors. It’s now with an entire team to dig deeper and go through it with a fine tooth comb.

What I can tell you however, is that a lot of people behind the scenes agree that it needs to smash it first time and my article isn’t the only thing that needs to be that way - literally EVERYTHING related to the RTS Meter → Smart Meter Migration needs to be absolutely perfected or it’ll all implode in a giant fireball.

With that being said, we intend to have it cover as many RTS Meter types as we can reasonably do the research for - what’s happening with THTC is definitely on the to-do list for it and the current draft has some of that already written in.

Until they approve, I can’t have it posted publicly. Forum Volunteers do get early access to this stuff (and more!) though - you might receive an invitation to join us if you stick around and help out for a while.

I will let you in on a secret or two though. Firstly, the project in question has had an absolute ton of man hours ploughed into it. If you just consider the time I’ve spent doing my own research and handling stuff here on the Forum, you’d be talking roughly a couple of hundred hours or so. If you add in OVO’s teams… We’re talking probably 10k+ man hours so far if you factor in everything RTS related.

I can also tell you that at one point (back in ~2020), the industry was considering the option of using the Secure Liberty 114 which has seven terminals and might have worked… If it wasn’t for the fact it’s a SMETS1 unit and the industry REALLY didn’t want to be deploying any more of those after 2018… It would have just caused more headaches than it’d have solved - and that’s without factoring in the Twin Element functionality of that model. By comparison, the SMETS2 Aclara SGM1416-B that’s used for tons of Economy 7 installs is Single Element but has some extra magic tricks just in case.

For now, try https://smart-booking.ovoenergy.com again. If you ARE eligible, it’ll offer you a slot. Otherwise, try Live Chat at https://ovoenergy.com/help or 0330 303 5063 to see what can be done.

Thousands of man hours - at last we start to see action!  Can I suggest that doing a lot of research could have been avoided if only OVO had asked customers, who had already done hundreds of hours of research and the same number of hours writing to MP’s, for their feedback and experiences. As a person who has been researching THTC for over 12 years (its been in my home for over 26 years) I read a lot of misconceptions in this and other sections of the forum over the RTS service and its impending shut down and the implications on customers.

My tuppence worth for what its worth is that there is a distinction between “dynamic” and “dumb” radio switching. Nearly all (there are a very small number of exceptions) Economy7 and 10 meters that have RTS meters are actually dumb as they have set switching times dependent on the supplier so do not need radio teleswitching - existing SMET2 smart meters can carry out that function. You can see from a previous post there are solutions ready now(as of July) for “set” times but THTC that uses “dynamic” timing is “tbc”

The issue is with “dynamic” teleswitching where the times of the “cheap” (I use that word advisedly as they are not cheap) rate can vary daily.  In the case of the THTC tariff (other suppliers have differing tariffs e.g. Warmwise but use dynamic switching) the difference can be hours per day as the radio signal duration is dependent on the weather.  What is guaranteed by the THTC tariff supplier is that we will get between 5 and 12 hours “cheap” rate dependent on the weather forecast. So you can see that times can vary And herein lies the rub - heating and hot water must be on separate circuits to the rest of the household supply which normally means 2 meters and 2 consumer units.  To replace the 2 meters with a single smart meter capable of differing times of supply each day has been the problem especially as the smart meter installer has to ensure the installation is not to the detriment of the customer. This means that the customer should not have to change wiring within their house at their cost. Now that is a cost the suppliers do not want to have to bear hence the drive to find a solution now that the radio signal has to be switched of next June.

While I am at it, I should explain why I use the word cheap in inverted commas. How come suppliers can offer 4 or more hours of overnight cheap rate electricity at 6p per  kWh - actually OVO have an EV tariff of 7p per kWh at ANY time for compatible EV’s - yet customers on their “cheap” rate for heating have to pay, in my case, 19.6p per kWh.  This is a total rip off as the customer on THTC tariff has no option to change suppliers as other suppliers will not touch them or even quote as soon as you say your existing tariff is THTC because of the dynamic switching times. The only alternative is to rip out their electric heating and replace it with an alternative. AND you still have the hassle of getting the smart meter installed to replace the 2 MPAN setup at present.

I see however that OFGEM are running out of patience with those companies who are dragging their feet over smart meter installations and “smart” meters that don’t actually work.  They wrote to companies at the start of the year highlighting their concern on the lack of movement on this issue.  They have now opened a formal compliance notice against companies who are not meeting their obligations under the terms of their licence - including OVO. This appears to have instigated the “thousands of man hours) quoted above.
Ofgem opens compliance engagement into British Gas, EDF, E.ON, Octopus, OVO and Scottish Power relating to smart meter obligations | Ofgem

It should be noted that the opening of these compliance cases does not imply that Ofgem has made any findings about non-compliance. 

Sorry for the long winded reply.

Totally agree with the comment re the "cheap" rate that's 19.6p per kWh. The least OVO could do, to compensate us for the length of time they have been looking at a solution, is give us a really competitive tariff. We might even stay with OVO after this is all sorted out!!! 

That’s because stuff like Charge Anytime can act like a guided missile and gobble up spare super green mega cheap eco juice in the exact 30-minute slots where it’s available - RTS stuff like THTC cannot do that. This is just part of the reason why CA is so cheap in comparison.

As for the rest? If you manage to score an invite to the Smart Meter Lab at OVO’s Bristol Office… Let’s just say a friend of mine works there and he could quite literally talk to you all day about RTS, THTC and Smart Meters. I’ve made use of two such invites to date - and they help a ton.

The easiest method that we know of to score said invite without being OVO Staff (and specifically OVO Staff assigned to work in said lab) is by becoming a Forum Volunteer on the OVO Forum - we get invited down there from time to time. Perks of the job, so to speak.

If you did your research properly, you’d also know that OVO has Heatwise among the tariffs on it’s books - this almost identical to Warmwise but a slightly different setup. Ultimately, OVO’s tariff range was never just Flat Rate, E7, E10 and THTC - there were literally TONS of stupidly complex tariff and meter types that OVO inherited from SSE.

Oh, and OVO has Warmwise on its books too - that’ll be because of SSE Atlantic that got folded back into SSE before the SSE to OVO Migration ever happened.

Thanks for your insight. I’m afraid I don’t understand why it’s so difficult to replace these old two-meter systems with a single modern one.

However, having separate circuits for heating and hot water is quite normal for those on special arrangements like Economy 7. I’m not sure that it’s necessary, but it may simplify things a bit. It hasn’t been a requirement to have separate meters for these circuits* for many years, and I suspect that originally it was an anti-fraud measure designed to prevent customers from running other stuff at the cheap rate. It should be a simple matter to feed separate CUs from a single smart meter, with no other rewiring needed (I have three CUs in my little one-bed cottage allegedly heated by cheaper E7 electricity). 

This may be part of the problem, though. Unlike Economy 7, Economy 10 plans allow for cheap-rate periods in daytime, typically 1-4 PM and 8-10 PM, to get round the problem of storage heaters running out of steam before they’re most needed on cold winter’s evenings. It may be that these plans are often so much more expensive because there’s nothing - other than a separate heating meter and sealed CU, that is - to stop people doing their washing and drying, cooking and washing-up during cheap-rate daytime hours. You can imagine the effect this would have on the inadequate distribution networks Blastoise mentioned. 
  

*  Here’s a 30-year-old dual-rate meter with an electromechanical timer that switches power on and off to the heating circuits and also switches between registers on the meter:
  

And if you read my post correctly you will see that I said I had researched THTC over the last 12 years - why would I research tariffs that are not available in my area?

Tons of stupid tariffs they inherited? - that only proves to me OVO did not carry out due diligence during their audit of the sellers books. And research shows that these tariffs available in  Scotland were introduced by the then legacy suppliers to prevent them from investing in the network as it did not have the capacity to supply all those customers who had no access to alternative gas supply. Hence load managed areas in many parts of Scotland (now belatedly being corrected).

Also, you stated in a much earlier post that we have to stop using the old legacy supplier names - you told me off for that and here you are quoting them willy nilly!

Actually, many of these tariffs - if not all of them - were created by the electricity boards prior to the privatisation in the 1990’s, a time when pretty much all roles were handled by a single entity across an entire region. Following the split, the DNO role and Supplier role were effectively split up and demerged into different companies - which is partly why we have the current system that exists today.

OVO and SSE (nor ANY other Supplier) did not create THTC - a predecessor to the whole system did. It was those predecessors i.e. the electricity boards who refused to invest in the infrastructure - and later the DNO’s up north who took that stuff on.

These tariffs were a necessary evil back then and unfortunately - to a lesser degree - remain a necessary evil even to this day. The reason that the Forum Volunteers here do all this research is to have as much coverage as possible. I’m nowhere near Scotland and yet I still have a pretty decent knowledge of what’s going on with the grid up there - I have industry contacts for that.

As for lack of due diligence? Please provide proof to back up your claim, otherwise it’s easy to be picked apart as speculation. Do you seriously think OVO wouldn’t have looked into that after all? I know for a fact, they did. Ultimately, SSE wanted to quit the retail market and if OVO didn’t take that part of the business on, someone else would have eventually had it dumped on their doorstep instead.

The only way to get the full story is by digging very deep into non-public sources - even I struggle to do that.

While I’m at it, the thousands of man hours I referred to is NOT just for research. Sure, Research and Development is definitely in there, but you’ve also got stuff like:

• Customer support
• Designing and Testing stuff
• Writing TONS of new code across loads of systems around the industry - and not just OVO’s systems
• Upstream manufacturing
• Engineer Training
• Deployment

And a whole bunch more. Even just deploying a fairly bog standard Ubiquiti UniFi and Google Workspace setup (this doesn’t even factor my more powerful tools and toys like Addigy, Faronics Deploy/Deep Freeze Cloud, Ninite Pro, website builds and Sophos Central) takes me around a day or two to deploy just for a small business, so try scaling that up by a few million sites and you start to get some idea of just how big these projects can get.

Oh, the day or two deployment time is also factoring my ability to speedrun because I’ve done it enough times at this point. Previously it used to take me up to a week!