Are my charges for Economy 7 night rate correct, even though it's switched off?

Hey @Turnip 

I’d be in agreement with our volunteers on this one from everything you’ve explained.

The meters don’t have on/off buttons and continuously record your usage - they cannot be switched off. With E7, your meter works on 2 timeframes - a day and a night rate (times vary per area), when the day rate stops clocking, the night rate kicks in. No matter if you’ve switched off the immersion or storage heaters, you can’t switch of the actual meter.

1 unit overnight is not an unusual or unreasonable thing to see, for things like the fridge which most people leave on all night, 365 days a year.

I understand you believe it’s not recording this usage as you’ve said everything is off, but even if you’ve switched the storage or immersion off, the meter will still clock any other usage during this time on your night rate - so if the fridge is on, the meter will clock that usage. Similarly, if you were to cook a meal or make a cup of tea during the off-peak time, this usage would be clocked on the off-peak rate, as that would be the only register clocking - the meter never stops recording your usage. They’re not going to not charge you for usage overnight - hence why the meters can’t be switched off.

Unless you’ve switched the actual electric off at the mains, and you therefore don’t even have the fridge running or any access to power, so therefore no usage could even occur, then that would be the only case we could imagine seeing absolutely 0.0kWh being used.

Otherwise we’d expect there to be at least minimal usage throughout the night rate. If it’s recording less usage than you think, and maybe more on the day rate than expected, then it may be that the time-switch is faulty, in that case, the meter would need to be replaced. See below a similar thread where the time-switch was the faulty for no usage recording overnight:

Our volunteers have tried their best to help and to understand the circumstances, and have given you all of the information that we would and then some, as they’ve even got experience with their own set ups to help back all of this up. 

I’ve linked below to a helpful topic on Economy 7 if you wish to take a read: 

If you’re still debating this matter then you can speak with the Support Team, but as Blastoise has said, the likelihood of the meter being faulty is slim, especially based on the information you’ve provided over the forum. It may be worth getting the smart meter installed so that you can view your usage in more detail and this may show you what’s using energy overnight. 

I’ve linked to another topic on situations where the meter is clocking too fast, this may help you judge whether you want to proceed with testing or not if you were considering going ahead with it.