I think there's something wrong with my traditional E10 meter readings, it looks like they've been swapped around?

OK, that’s a real cause for concern. I’d really like to see the evidence for this situation; other cases where we’ve seen E10 customers billed for offpeak usage at peak rates and vice versa have apparently resulted from misconfiguration of their smart meters. That’s clearly not your problem, so the fault seems to lie with billing.

It would help if you could post screenshots of:

• your Plan page showing the rates and timings;
• your Readings page;
• the Electricity in detail page of your latest bill showing the charges and readings on which the bill is based.

(None of that contains any personal information you’d want to keep private.)

It should be fairly obvious from these images where the fault is arising, and it will simplify making your case to Support: if you use webchat, you can copy the images into the chat to get them added to your account notes. 

Hello again Firedog, you had better know one or two other facts which complicate matters. Firstly the meter is faulty with regard to the time. I have included two screenshots of images I took where the time of the images being taken does not correspond with the time on the the meter clock- currently it is running approximately 4hrs 42 mins behind GMT. 

SSE, as it was then, sent an engineer to change the meter but he advised me not to go ahead with this because I would lose evidence for the incorrect readings. He agreed that the readings were the wrong way round but also checked the wiring to see if the meter had been installed incorrectly, which it hadn’t. He was supposed to let SSE know his findings. I subsequently contacted them on their complaints page but received no response.

That all said, using the timings on the meters, and having looked at the information you asked for, it is now clear to me that Rate 1 is Peak and rate2 is off peak and therefore I am correct in thinking the readings are the wrong way round on my bills.

Thank you very much for directing me to the information needed for proof of this, however, I would be grateful if you would confirm my conclusions please.

Thanks again!

First of all thanks for all the time you have spent on this and for your advice.

Having raised the issue of the faulty clock, I think that it is probably irrelevant anyway as the meter shows what rate it is recording at any one time with NOW on the display, and therefore I think that the readings are correct (albeit the wrong way round) and the meter just switches to a different rate as it should according to the time schedule for Economy 10, but 4hrs 40mins out.

As far as the low usage is concerned, especially recently, this is due to two things. It is a second home and we switch off all circuits on the CU when we are not there, and secondly we have stopped using the storage heaters even in really cold weather as they are so expensive to run especially as we are being charged at peak rate for them. We rely on a woodburner, plenty of jumpers and a thick duvet.

You’re absolutely correct, it’s a lovely spot and we’re very lucky to have it.

I’ll now write to OVO using the web chat as you suggested and include appropriate evidence.

Have a good weekend, you deserve it!

Hey @Jack Oat,

Welcome to the OVO Online Community,

Did the support team get this sorted for you? 

I can see Firedog has already given some brilliant advice here, just wanted to add, an easy way to check which register is peak or off peak is to see which register clocks during ‘peak’ hours.

That’s presuming a customer knows what hours are peak or off peak, usually simple for Economy 7 and more difficult for Economy 10. 

Yes, thank you I now have the evidence I need to ask for my meter readings to be reversed and ask for a refund.

Firedog was excellent, thorough, prompt, knowledgeable and gave good advice.

My meter reading this month is lower tha last months 

I'm guessing that this is the meter reading that you gave? I don't think that is possible if the meter is read automatically. i.e. You have a smart meter. If it's a manual reading it's possible you made a mistake with the previous reading. 

Perhaps you could give us more details so we can identify any possible issue. Many thanks for reaching out to us.

Peter

As Peter E says you will need to give us more details for anyone to work out what may have happened.
In particular if you could tell us the following:

• Where are you seeing these readings? On the meter itself or on your billing/account?
• What was the reading last month? If on the billing then was it an estimate or one that you sent in?
• What is the reading this month? If on the billing then Is it an Estimate or one that you sent in?

Without knowing the answers to those questions we are just guessing.

Hey ​@MoiraF 

I’m glad to see a couple of our community members have already stopped by with some useful questions so we can try and help further. 

It’s tricky to tell from what you’ve said so far what might be wrong, if you could answer some of PeterE and Nukecad’s questions that’d be really helpful and we’ll do our best to help you out.