My new home has a Total Heating Total Control (THTC) system. How do they work?

Hi @Officer_Crabtree,

Welcome to the OVO Online Community.

Total Heating Total Control (THTC) systems are more complex that most Economy 7 set ups, when you contact Support to set up your account they will discuss your options in more detail. We have advise in these similar threads which you might find helpful:

Here is a great guide about what to do when you move into a home supplied by OVO Energy: 

With your Solar Panels you’ll need to contact Octopus to set up your Smart Export Guarantee. 

You can book in a smart meter through your online account once you have set up your new account with OVO. 

Hope this helps. 

Unfortunately, THTC setups are also a nightmare to migrate to Smart Meters. There’s only one known S1 Smart Meter capable of handling it

Thank you both @Emmanuelle_OVO and @Blastoise186.

So having had a bit more of a read it seems like the only current options for supplier are OVO or SSE, if that’s correct? Apart from the one strange incident of EDF… and here with octopus.

The biggest problem for me is I’ve never had or even seen this heating system before, so I’ve no idea on how any of it works.

Therefore I’ve no idea on if I should try and get the meters switched to economy 7 or 10 or try and get a single rate meter installed. Then again, I don’t even know how to take a meter reading from this setup. I seem to remember there were 2 different KWh numbers on the digital meter.

Hopefully I can get back there later today and see it in more detail now that I know what the system is even called!

Re; solar panels. I’ve yet to hear back from the council housing officer, but I believe that the council get the money from the SEG. I was told over the phone that SSE have a contract with the council for that.

Thank you once again!

Edit: Just read on the MSE forum that E7 in scotland is 8.5 hours. Is that true?

Your landlord must provide you with instructions for operating the system. A smart meter will be the very least of your concerns when you move in.

Thanks @meldrewreborn 

There were a pile of books in the corner of the kitchen, I had a quick flick through and most were about the storage heaters. Hopefully I can bring them to my current place tonight.

Thanks once again!

No worries. It’s probably worth mentioning that very few suppliers are actually capable of properly handling THTC setups and the last time I checked, Octopus didn’t seem to be one of them. I know OVO is planning to support them as part of the SSE to OVO Migration, but I’ve not asked for a status update in a while.

Sorry to bother you @Tim_OVO but has there been any progress on that?

By the way @Officer_Crabtree , it’s really, really important that you know how storage heaters work. If you get things badly wrong, it can end up costing you hundreds or even thousands of pounds in wasted electricity.

SSE has guides for this which you can find at https://sse.co.uk/help/electric-heating/electric-night-storage-heaters . I definitely recommend checking them out. The information at https://sse.co.uk/help/electric-heating/other-two-meter-tariffs is also relevant, as it may help you to better understand how THTC works.

Because those pages might cease to exist in the near future, I’ve also created a permanent snapshot of them and submitted those to the Internet Archive. They’ll be available soon!

Thank you so much @Blastoise186, you’ve been a great help so far!

I’m on my way to the new house soon to pick up keys etc so I’ll having a good look at the meter system whilst there and I’ll pick up the mountain of instruction books whilst there.

I was told today by the council that I have to register with SSE first regardless of who I would want to switch to, as the council has some sort of contract with SSE regarding all their properties.

What I’ll probably do is phone up the SSE complex heating team and see what they can do to help, especially regarding opening readings. Then I’ll phone up https://www.scarf.org.uk/ and try getting some help from them regarding keeping the current meters for now or changing them out.

As promised!

https://web.archive.org/web/20220916145932/https://sse.co.uk/help/electric-heating/electric-night-storage-heaters

https://web.archive.org/web/20220916145959/https://sse.co.uk/help/electric-heating/other-two-meter-tariffs

These are permanent links. Even if the SSE site itself changes or gets closed down, these archived snapshots will still work.

I’ve also gone ahead and uploaded a few other related pages to the Internet Archive as well. If you’re browsing anything on there and run into a page it hasn’t captured yet, please feel free to hit the Save Page Now button on the error page and the Wayback Machine will grab it immediately. It’ll become available in the archive usually within 30 minutes.

Here’s what I saw in the fuse boxes when I got back in their last night.

I thought with THTC things like your electric shower were on the off peak rate 24/7? I’m certainly no expert, but it seems to be on the same circuit as everything else if its in the same box as the oven etc…

Does that then make this economy7?

No idea if this has any real relevance but the RTS meter has 6 cables coming out of it.

The white analogue meter has moved so I presume that is the standard system that is always on the peak charge? However, that means the grey digital RTS meter must be for heating, a meter for electric storage heaters that was installed all the way back in 2004 must SURELY have recorded a higher use than 16359KWh?