I think my meter is clocking too fast - How can I test if my high usage is due to a faulty meter?

@Jess_OVO the original post came about after me noticing in MYOVO consumption that my consumption had almost doubled.

It was after that when I checked the readings and saw that jump on the meter itself.

1. According to MYOVO readings, the last officially sent reading was 14/07 = 55304
2. By the time of my checking the meter after noticing the above on 20/07 = 57884
3. According to MYOVO a manual reading on the 27/07 = 55493

Something is obviously askew somewhere as the reading on 27/07 is significantly lower than the reading on my meter on 20/07 and I’m confused by that reading (55493) as I dont recall having submitted it.

The manual reading in MYOVO does not fit with any reading I recorded with photographs for 27/07 date. In fact the readings I have recorded show values of 57987 at the end of that day.

Silly question, am I reading the meter correctly:

1 press 9

2 display kWh

3 record value

4 that value is the consumtion

I have mentioned before that the RED LED’s seem to flash in strange patterns at different times when I check the meter and NOTHING unusual in terms of consumption is going on.

Is it me?

@Jess_OVO@Blastoise186@Transparent@Tim_OVO 

Hi All been a while I know but I thought I’d keep this updated. The current situation is “the meter team are aware” (whatever that means) and my meter is clocking a average of 13.70 kwh pd for the past 40 days. I did try to register an up to date reading on the site and it flagged up a warning that the numebers didn’t look right and the today it just accepted it???

Our gas meter is sending accurate readings  and is immediately adjacent to our electicity meter.

Has anyone seen or heard anything that might why our meter jumped 2500Kwh in just 6 days (that’s why I came here) at all?

Does anyone know what the “Meter team are aware” actually means, what are they doing, how are they doing it, how do I know what they are doing is right and accurate?

We were given an excess usage bill (>£400) at year end and we’re deeply concerned now that this also was inaccurate but dont know how to challenge it. Anyone suggest anything?

Finally our DD is astrononmical (>£200mth) and I can’t seem to get it down which is concerning. “MY OVO” advises that I’m set to be £92appx in credit at year end and I can now reduce by a few £??? Yet I’m currently over £400 in credit!! ( yes I know we havent been through winter yet...)

update after inputting the meter read above it now tells me that I’m underpaying and I’ll be in deficit by £500 at year end and to increase DD to over £300pm!!!!

Thanks

What I find ‘interesting’ about this situation are the following:

a: that a SMETS1 Smart Meter can ‘overclock’ at all. This suggests a fundamental flaw in its design. It may not necessarily be within the software. It could equally well be the current-detector.

But these meters have been through cyber-security scrutiny to ensure that they can be sited in ‘unguarded’ meter cabinets without threat to the country’s energy supply system. So someone should be keen to analyse this particular meter and ensure that it hasn’t been adversely affected by any external influence. That could be anything from a magnetic field to a software hack.

b: that there’s no software ‘sanity check’ being done by OVO to verify if any unusual usage exists.

This is relatively easy to do. After all, most sudden changes in energy consumption will be due to a particular device being connected. I bought an EV a few months ago which has increased my base-line electricity usage by 2½ times whilst it’s charging. But it obviously doesn’t charge 24hrs/day!

A sensible sanity check on @fatbloke88’s usage should easily be able to show that there must be an ‘energy leakage’ somewhere!

After all, if this was an errant gas meter, such a constant jump in supply would indicate a leak that needs immediate attention.

Any such energy usage anomaly should generate an alert from the Billing System software that gets passed immediately to the Meter Engineering Team!

c: What would be the case if the situation is reversed?

What if there are a hundred meters out there which are sending erroneous data, but the customers haven’t noticed?

Would it make any difference to OVO if the meters were under-clocking and the company was losing money?

d: We discussed the proposed Betelgeuse option nine months ago. Such a method of displaying the usage-data would be more capable of showing up such a faulty meter.

Betelgeuse presentation extrapolates the energy-usage forward to verify that the account will be in credit at the end of the contract. So an over-clocking meter would have a profound effect on the end of the curve, thereby alerting the customer and OVO that something had suddenly failed at a particular point in time.

It was that topic which resulted in the formation of a Tech Treehouse in which software discussions concerning the Billing System could be fed back directly to the development team. What’s happened with all that feedback?!

Has Betelgeuse entered a black hole?

currently waiting to speak to someone on CS I need to get a formal complaint registered about this and make sure I am not billed  for stuff I’m not using

Thanks for the updates you posted today and over the weekend, @fatbloke88. Given the big numbers you’ve outlined, our Support Team will be very understanding of you wanting clarity. As they’ve mentioned this already being assigned to a team, there’s a chance you’ll need to give them some time to get to this, but yes a web chat should be able to confirm this. 

EEEEEEEEEKkkkkkkkkkkk!!!!!

What is going on here?

 

It does look like a spike in usage, @Simon1D - sorry for pointing out the obvious. For the sake of a comparison, what you were hitting for most of July is closer to what I am using now. So this jump that took place on the 27th July, has anything changed since then? You can refer to Jess’s guide at the topic for your options for diagnosing this. 

@Transparent the Direct Debit calculator does this pretty much, I mean, it’s pretty similar wouldn’t you say?:

You can visualize the payment amounts, split out per fuel or combined, you can see how that compares to payment amounts etc over time...

I found myself re-reading some of the thread following the post to which I just linked. It’s sad, but I wonder if we were within an ace of getting the Ovo technical people to explain themselves, here (apologies for linking to the Tech Treehouse, a closed part of the forum) but the key quote, where Tim is relaying a comment from them, is

With hindsight, I regret not latching on to that offer. I wonder, @Tim_OVO - do you think we might get more info? (if only in the privacy of the Tech Treehouse).

Instead I launched into an explanation of how I thought estimating should be done. Bad move by me. Focus. I need to focus more, and better...

UPDATE: apparently at some point, someone somewhere registered ours as a dual rate meter…. bear with me;

That means when I press “9” on the meter I was getting total consumption from both Day & Night registers even though there is no night register… ok so far?

Now when they advise me to press ”6” and look at a range of data there is a reading in there of kwh which is more in line with what is expected

Using this data I get an ave consumpotion of 16 kwh/pd since mid July (I think I’m ok with that)…

Here’s where it gets confusing;

last year Mar20 - Feb21 they tell me the meter reading which were being sent automatically showed a consumtion ave  995 kwh /pm hence the reason Iwe were asked to pay a large end of year settlement value.

I am now confused, because NOTHING in our consumtion use has changed in the last 17 months yet our consumption pattern was well over double the volume that we are now using and since I’ve been keeping an irregular eye on…

Just going to have to keep a wary eye as we go through winter..

Great to see that there’s a solution here. I don’t know why I never even thought of that one! I’ll try to remember this in case it ever affects anyone else in the future.

Admittedly, this is another reason why I’m not a huge fan of the overly complicated interface with the Secure Liberty meters (It’s definitely not the worst one ever though!). While having a full numeric keypad is useful for cases if you’re on PAYG and and you need to manually punch in a UTRN to top-up because it didn’t go through automatically, it serves little purpose for anything else - especially if you’re on Pay Monthly. And besides that, the majority of IHDs also have PPMID (Prepayment Meter Interface Device if memory serves) capability anyway that allows a customer to enter a UTRN code via the IHD and send it to the meter from there. Most of the other manufacturers have just two or three buttons instead which is a lot simpler and Aclara goes the extra mile by utilising the giant displays to clearly indicate exactly which register you’re looking at when taking readings - and does a pretty good job of using plain English to label them - rather than complicated short codes that confuse even me sometimes.

I’m still learning what all the buttons do on Secure Liberty meters and I can’t practice on Raichu because it’s an S2 Aclara. Luckily there’s a few guides around that I can read up on.

You’re far from the first person who has been caught out by those confusing buttons, and I doubt you’ll be the last. 

I’ve experienced a similar issue @fatbloke88 

From what I’ve seen of the way the Billing System works, there is only limited capability to revise the usage readings for previous days where estimates have been applied.

I think the ‘rule’ is this:

When correct readings are accepted, these are applied to the usage data going back in time until a day is reached when an actual reading was obtained.

I can’t confirm this, and I certainly wouldn’t condone it, but that appears to fit the facts such as I’ve seen them.

After that rule has been applied, any further amendments are effected by applying a one-off negative reading to bring the financial system into balance. There are two reasons for this:

a: it satisfies Ofgem regulations for the Billing System providing adequate invoices

b: it annoys the hell out of @Simon1D who is left trying to analyse historical usage containing negative gas usage

It was the issuing of incorrect bills and inaccurate estimates which landed OVO with a fine of £8.9m from Ofgem at the beginning of 2018.

As a consequence the Board of Directors decided to create their own new Billing System in-house, thereby removing the company’s future from the poor algorithms which beset the 3rd-party software.

So we might think that OVO would be highly motivated to be using Billing software which properly addresses incomplete, incorrect and estimated readings within customer’s usage records.

It therefore seems decidedly odd that the Board have now decided to distance Kaluza, who develop the Billing system code, from OVO Energy who use it to invoice us.

They’ve come full circle to the situation where OVO Energy is reliant on software from a ‘3rd party’ who will themselves not suffer from an Ofgem fine for incorrect and inaccurate billing.

The difference this time is that some of us customers here on the Forum have been busy isolating and reporting the bugs.

That leaves OVO with an option to avoid another fine from Ofgem, and instead to listen to its customers.

Hi everyone, 

Tim here your resident waffler and fact checker. Thanks for the update, @fatbloke88.

I want to make sure it’s clear here for you and anyone else that follows that we’re discussing the usage graphs, for a time period before you’ve been submitting actual readings.

The best way to get accurate billing has and always will be to ensure there’s actual meter readings on your energy account. Most of the time that means a normally functioning smart meter sending them automatically. Sometimes that means submitting meter readings manually. 

@Simon1D and @Transparent are referring to the usage sections, and I’ll be passing on some insight from Simon to the teams involved in this area on the online account. So far so good: Anything that might help us to visualise a member’s usage so they feel empowered to make energy reduction changes is a win for everyone. 

Here’s where things take a turn for the worse

This unfortunately is conjecture. See OVO’s statement on this fine here. OVO Group’s mission is to provide clean and affordable energy for all. Building that future ourselves is what we wanted. Kaluza (part of OVO Group) is doing just that. 

Likewise here I refer to my earlier comment about actual meter readings, billing, and the difference between that and your usage graph visualizations. 

This forum puts everything out in the open, for everyone to see. This is transparent, honest, and inclusive. If we all respond to that transparency with a relentless pursuit of accuracy when stating facts (which in itself is one of the house rules), these threads will be better off as a result. 

FWIW, and without any knowledge of what’s really going on in the present case. I am now confident that I have plumbed the depths, sniffed around the Mariana Trench, so to speak. And am now in the process of putting together a working demonstration of how missing data should be handled when it comes to making estimates.

I’ve actually learned a fair bit in the process.

Cheers all

Thanks for updates @fatbloke88 

Answers in no particular order:

1: You can’t take any issue to Ofgem. They’re the industry regulator.

If you exhaust the complaints procedure with OVO (unlikely), then you have the option to take your complaint to the Office of the Energy Ombudsman. OVO have a very high rate of complaints resolution, and they score highly on the  Ombudsman statistics for that aspect of customer service.

2: Repeating identical values within the Billing System usually indicate that there have been days of missing readings. When the next actual reading occurs, the usage is apportioned equally across the preceding days.

Note that this is not the same concept as an ‘estimate’. This is simply the mechanism used to assign genuine usage.

3: I’m going to defer to @Simon1D for comment on the different date format being used at the beginning of Oct’20. He’s been actively researching the issue of ‘missing data’ and may have observed such a phenomenon before.

It’s a bit too easy to assume that those 9 days where the figure was negative are to correct the obviously incorrect consumption reading of 2526.1 kWh for 30set20. But the maths doesn’t work, as I assume you already realise.