Best answer by NinjaGeek
View originalWhy is the tariff rate on my smart meter and Chameleon In Home Display (IHD) wrong?
Have you tried restarting the smart meter display by turning it off and on again to see if this will help re-sync.
Thanks
Matt
Ah dude, I am sorry that didn't work. In my profession that normally works when I ask customers to do that haha. Ok, the best thing to do would be to speak with OVO amazing customer service. I would advice you give them a call on 0330 303 5063
Updated on 15/12/22 by Emmanuelle_OVO
Good spot on the mis-match between your unit rates on your online account and Chameleon In Home Display (IHD).
It’s worth checking whether the discrepancy is just due to the VAT. Your OVO online account will usually show your unit prices excluding VAT whereas your IHD may show the same prices including VAT - if the difference between prices is 5% this will explain things.
If the price difference isn’t down to the VAT (ie. its more or less than 5% difference) the tariff information on your device may need to be updated. It may be that you’ve recently had the meters installed or your prices have recently changed and the rates loaded on to your meter haven’t quite been updated. In this case reach out to our Support Team to get that corrected. It is worth bearing in mind the following:
Usage costs on your IHD may not 100% match your daily charges
As the prices loaded on to your smart meter and IHD aren’t automatically linked to the rates on your account, inaccurate prices seen here won’t affect the accuracy of your bills. For this reason we’d always advise the actual usage charges on the ‘Billing’ page of your online account, if you’re worried that your IHD is showing incorrect information.
If you’ve got a Pipit IHD but are seeing the same issue - check out this topic for more advice.
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Great, only problem is that because I contacted ovo to resolve the issue I think that I have now lost my duel fuel discount for this quarter according to the new rules regarding the payment of the discount.
I think this very unfair unless the powers that be agree that I was reporting a fault in which case my discount remains on my account.
Gas usage for 'today' shows correctly and shows the kWh usage and correct cost data. Navigating through the historical data to show what I used yesterday / last week / last month and the kWh usage seems right, but the cost is wildly out. It's basically showing a cost of £1 per kWh, so if I used 200 kWh last week, it shows a cost of £200.
The data for electricity looks like it's showing correctly.
Gas appears to be OK. That shows correct. Has anyone else had this problem. Cant find anywhere on Display unit where it shows tariff per energy. Have tried phoning but after a 45 minute on background music, I passed the 6pm cut off.
I hope that the display unit is not reflective of the tariff shown at Accounts, if it is HELP.
I don't (yet) have smart meters, but what you've reported doesn't surprise me. Almost the last thing which gets done in the process of Smart Meter implementation is for the Supplier to send tariff data to the meter(s).
Prior to that, the IHD will pick up whatever numbers happen to be held in those memory locations within the meter(s). I would've hoped that these locations might have held reasonable default values. But perhaps that would be regarded as "worse" by some users. After all, you can at least see that the initial weeks of readings are erroneous.
This won't affect your bills at all. They are calculated separately based on sequential readings obtained from your meter(s). The necessary corrections for things like calorific-value of gas are all computed internally by OVO, and those algorithms are subject to scrutiny by Ofgem.
I know that my actual charges will be based on meter readings submitted to OVO so I'm not concerned about the charges per se but one of the reasons I opted to switch to smart meters was the ability to accurately track usage and cost day to day, week to week. Right now, I can't do that with my IHD as the historical info is wildly inaccurate. (I can't even track my usage through MyOVO - see post here.)
I don't know if the tariff issue I have is because of a problem with my meters or whether this is just part of the normal transition period, and as you say is still waiting for the update to the tariff info in the meter. However, the guidance in after your smart meter installation suggests it should work 'right away' so I'm thinking it might not be normal and something's gone wrong somewhere:
[h5]My smart meter has been installed. Now what? [/h5]
Your smart meter should start working right away, so you don’t need to do anything. It’ll start clocking your energy and sending us meter readings regularly.
You can simply enjoy using your In-Home Display (IHD) to keep an eye on your daily, weekly or monthly energy use. And the cost, kilowatt hours and carbon emissions.
If it is normal to have to wait this long after installation, the question is how much longer will I have to wait for my tariff info to display correctly? And it is is the norm, the guidance above should be updated by OVO to correct the 'it should work right away' to something like 'you will likely have to wait 8+ weeks for it to work'.
I've got to admit, two months in to my smart meter experience and I'm not very impressed so far. I was looking forward to being able to track usage and cost more accurately but given I can't do this yet, it's not been a great user experience.
Also does the total charge (£31.19) mean the present billing period? Not from the date the smart meter was installed?
The difference in price you've mentioned is VAT, which is 5% for energy. Your contract should state that those prices aren't inclusive of VAT. The charges on your IHD do include this.
If you could post a photo of where you can see 'total charge', we'll be able to let you know whether this is the bill period or since installation.
Cheers
Hi my electricity traiff is showing correctly. However, my gas tariff is out by a factor of 10.
My gas tariff (incl 5% Vat) is actually (according to my bill)
- 23.31p/day standing charge
- 2.13p/day usage charge
However the IHD is showing figures 10 times lower at:
- 2.33p/day standing charge
- 0.21p/day usage chharge
Hi there
It sounds like your IHD has somehow gotten out of sync with what it should be saying. If you have a chat with the support team, they should be able to try forcing it to pull down the correct details again.
It sounds like this topic was also related as well.
I’ve moved your question over to this topic,
As the bug blaster
I’ve been advised this can often happen after install. Was the meter recently fitted?
Hi
My personal theory is that when new meters and/or IHDs are first installed, they have to start by assuming a blank slate and not show any tariff data until it’s downloaded for the first time once the meter starts to communicate with the supplier. Until then, it’ll either show nothing at all or something completely random that doesn’t make sense.
In theory I would imagine that once the Communications Hub on the electricity meter has pulled down the tariff details, it should be able to broadcast that out to the rest of the HAN (mainly gas meter and IHD) once they next check in. And this then set up the correct details so that you don’t get bad info.
If it doesn’t sync, that prevents it from pulling the numbers down.
Mind you
Either way, having the support team force a resync should get your IHD to pull down the right details. If you give the support team a call right this way, they can probably trigger a SMETS Command while you’re on the phone.
Do let us know how you get on too. :)
If not supplied to ovo already, this maybe helpful in speeding things up for you.
Tom...
The request from ovo per there email. (Along with your account #, name, etc)
Can you please supply a photo of the IHD and the usage that you can see.
Could you also answer the following questions. We apologise if you have answered these before.
- Please confirm the GUID on the underside of the IHD. This normally starts "0C-A2-F4"
- Please let us know if the Wifi symbol is showing on the top left corner of the IHD screen. If so - is this flashing or solid?
- Please confirm if the correct time is showing in the top right corner of the IHD screen.
- Please estimate the distance between the electricity meter and the IHD. Are there any large metal objects or obstructions between them?
Once we have received this we can look into this further for you.
Ooh, nice one
Meanwhile, I’ve just had an email from OVO literally 20 seconds ago, telling me my smart meter is about to go live again. (Yay!) :)
Tom...
That’s understandable. But you do get the honour of me saying that you’re basically a brilliant platform destroyer! An account with a setup like yours is a perfect example of an edge case that hardly anyone thinks of, so it’s not surprising if that causes most billing systems to implode. You never think it’s possible until you discover (to your horror!) that someone comes along and completely smashes your system to pieces.
However, I believe the one OVO currently uses is custom built in-house by Kaluza, so I don’t believe there’s any kind of middleman that has to be convinced to fix bugs like these.
I guess it will probably also help to include supporting other unique edge cases too. One other combination that’d likely break it might be a single account with:
- One non-smart electricity meter
- One smart electricity meter running in “normal single-rate mode”
- One three-phase/Time of Use/Economy 7 electricity meter
- One non-smart gas meter
- One smart gas meter
In a way, it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea if the platform was enhanced to cater for that kind of completely extreme edge case! You never know if there’s someone who actually has that...
On 31 March I renewed on Better Energy tariff with OVO. I expected the rates on IHD to update automatically, they didnt! Should be 22.89 standing charge & 16.74 unit but still showing old rates 28.77/15.87. Contacted via chat on 3/4 & was told (Holly) unit should update in few days and I should switch unit off & on (the answer to everything!). Nothing changed so sent email & got reply:
"Thanks for getting in touch, I'm sorry this is not showing on your device, it is something that usually updates automatically and doesn't need any intervention from ourselves or yourself, in this instance if it ha snot updated in the next week give us another email and we can investigate more.
Kyle"
In my eyes saying it should have happened but hasn't so wait and see if it does and if not contact us again is not an answer! Anyone else had this problem with moving to new tariff and IHD not updating?
Not going to waste time on what is just an annoyance so if OVO can't load correct tariff to IHD I'll live with it till contract expires.
So much for 'smart meters' helping to reduce usage and save money!
Hey there
Welcome to the forums. Could you fill out your profile for us? It helps me to to make sure I can give the right advice. :)
It sounds like there’s a few possibilities here. Don’t worry about being billed incorrectly though. Regardless of what the IHD says, the correct tariffs will always be loaded into MyOVO and you can double check everything there.
It sounds to me as if one of these two cases are most likely:
- You’ve only just renewed and the new contract hasn’t started yet. If you still had a few days left on the existing contract when you renewed, OVO will generally allow that one to run down first and then automatically switch over to the renewed contract on the agreed start date.
- If you’ve only recently renewed and started the renewed contract, it can take a while for the updated tariff info to be downloaded. On average, it can take a couple of weeks or so due to how smart meters and IHDs work. As long as your IHD remains in range of your meters, it will show the new tariff rates once they’ve been downloaded.
If the IHD fails to download the tariffs at all after a few weeks, it should be possible for OVO’s Support Team to force it to pull down the details by using SMETS Commands to update the details from their end. It shouldn’t need a Comms Hub Reset for this, as there are dedicated SMETS Commands for downloading tariff rates without a reset. Sorry for any trouble there!
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