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

I'll post photos tomorrow, on a ferry just now and the WiFi is pretty slow. The heat pump is outside, all that comes through the exterior wall is 12mm pipework that carries the refrigerant from the exterior unit to the wall mounted indoor units.

Hey @Infiltrator,

It sounds like the changes have made a huge impact on efficiency and quality of life. Did you do a lot of research when comparing installation vs. operation costs? You could even write and publish it as your own post if you like so you can share your journey from THTC to heat pump. I’m sure a lot of people on THTC who are having their meters changed may be interested to hear your story.

As @juliamc said if you could post some photos that would be amazing! 

Strangely I didn't take photos, odd as I've taken loads in the last few weeks! Anyhow the top photo of the outdoor unit is our unit but I've captured the photo from the installers Facebook page, the bottom picture of the wall mounted internal is from the installers Facebook page as well but it's not one of ours but we have 3 identical ones. 

The trunking is a bit misleading as each unit only needs a hole in the external wall to fit 2 x 12mm pipes (insulated) for the refrigerant flow and return plus power supply. On the photo of our external unit you can see the trunking leads to 2 external wall holes as we were able to feed 2 of the internal units through one hole, plus the power supply from the consumer unit to the external heat pump. Hope that helps.

That’s very interesting ! Much like mine on the outside; mine’s a split system with radiators, so I also have refrigerant piped from the outdoor unit. That means it’s never going to freeze (unless the Earth moves out of the suns orbit..!). Mine has an indoor unit with a heat exchanger to heat and pump water around the radiators. Yours looks much simpler 👍🏻 

Currently the BUS grant isn’t available for air to air heat pumps (unless that’s changed recently) but of course you were replacing an electrical heating system and BUS is for replacing gas.

Hi just got my new smart meter installed on 4th September. THTC to economy 10 They have made a complete mess of the installation. I only have one tariff rate now and according to customer services they can't get any readings from my meter and they don't know how to fix it. Have to book another appointment for another engineer to come out and see if it's a meter fault or if it's been wired properly. Scary stuff from ovo. Now I'm paying more for power than before. Incompantance springs to mind.

Hi @Noz1954,

I’m sorry to hear this. 

It may be worth raising this as a complaint if you haven’t done so already.

Hopefully this will be resolved at the next meter appointment. Please keep us updated with how you get on.

Last week I just had my old storage heaters ripped out and replaced with a shiny new heat pump, radiators and hot water tank.  And today an OVO engineer removed the redundant THTC meter and installed a new smart meter which to my surprise is communicating with the WAN just fine.

So, given I am not 100% off THTC, how long will it take for my account to update so that my address doesn’t show up as “complex meter” so I can start looking into comparing tariffs and potentially changing providers?  Should this just happen automagically or am I gong to have to go down the rabbit hole of calling support?

Hiya!

I’d say roughly six weeks to allow the entire industry to catch up with the Meter Exchange.

That coincides with the end of my fixed rate plan so that’s good.  I’ll try and be patient 😁

I now have the date for my smart meter install - 10th October.  Phone call with Tina was thorough and she talked me through the options available to me with E7, E9 and E10 being offered. I have agreed to E10 but I will be at cost disadvantage for my Quantum panel heaters where with THTC at present you get 24 hours at the cheap rate but my bedroom heaters dont fit in with the E10 cheap rates in the morning so this will be more expensive. On the plus side all my electricity usage during the reduced rate times will be at the cheaper rate so may be a case of swings and roundabouts. Tina did say that I could come back after a few months usage and if things were not working out for me cost wise, I should get back to OVO and discuss an alternative.  She was very professional and for the first time I felt as though I was speaking to someone who knew what they were talking about.
I talked to a neighbour of mine who has an identical system to mine and OVO installed his smartmeter last week.  The engineer came from SW England (I live in Aberdeenshire) and was up for a couple of weeks. I wanted to see how the engineer had installed the meter and the tails to the special switch disconnector for THTC systems in our estate (the disconnector has inputs for storeage, domestic, 24hour heat and water) and I noted that the new wiring from the meter exactly mimics our present setup so I was very happy that nothing required changing from the switch disconnector to our 2 consumer units.  So far so good. Hope I can get the same engineer.