Submitted meter reading wrong, I put some of the numbers the wrong way round - how to get it fixed?

Thank you for your help, I really appreciate it 

It seems to have been corrected now. Thank you for all your help

Hi Polly, looking at your 22 October and 25th October meter readings, the day meter reading has become night meter reading and vice versa. This happened to me around 19th Sept to 23 September and I was charged £388 for a single days use of electricity in my bill. I rang and reported it, followed by a second call to them about a week later. And then emailed them at help@ovo???ure of exact email. They replied with the following :

Hi Shashikant,

thanks for your email.

My name is James and I'm part of your account management team here at OVO.

Apologies for this ongoing issue with your electricity meter readings, the issue was caused by system error rather than human error in entering readings.

The issue has been raised with the metering operattion team to resolve, they have the information and need to fix this to then be able to re-bill your account correctly.

I can't give a timeframe for the operations team to resolve the issue sorry, once completed you will be re-billed to the correct costs with updated billing in My OVO.

I hope this helps to clarify things, but if you do need any more help from us, please let us know as we do have other options and additional services. If you or someone in your household needs extra support – for medical reasons or otherwise – there’s a lot we can do to help. Find out more about who we can help and how by clicking here. Or sign up now by filling out this form. 

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Thanks for your time,

James

Hope this helps Polly. I can't understand how a system error like this can happen. They only replied when I emailed them. 

Here’s an intriguing puzzle. I have a SMETS1 smart meter that provides readings to Ovo every 30 minutes and that is clearly visible in the USAGE section of my online account. I noticed recently on my account that for one days electric usage it showed that I had used 15.65KWhr but was being billed £2030.64 for that one day!!! Clearly something was wrong. Looking at my online account more closely I noticed that METER READINGS were now showing readings every day, whereas normally they show up just twice monthly. The most intriguing point was that on the day of the £2030 bill, the day and night online reading values had swapped over!! ie: if Day was showing ABCDEF as a value and Night UVWXYZ as another value, they had swapped over, so now Day was UVWXYZ and Night was ABCDEF!! Hence on the day in question there was a significant change in the daily meter reading values and I got a huge calculated bill for that day. The good thing is that my 30 minute daily USAGE data clerly shows the correct consumption across the day taht totals 16.65KWhr. Note this is all automatic data collection by Ovo’s Smart Meters and telemetry. Nothing to do with me enterring a value wrongly. It’s all Ovo’s ownership. The intriguing thing I find is that with the online values swapped over, the Day consumption (R02) is still incrementing according to the day time usage and the Night time consumption (R01) is still incrementing according to night time usage. Effectively they’ve just swapped indices. However when I manually read the SMETS1 Electric Meter over the last few days, the R01 is now incrementing according to daily usage and the R02 is now incrementing according to night time usage. So the SMETS1 meter values have swapped over.

I can only guess that there’s been a software update and this seems like a pretty significant software bug to me which should not have got through certification. If correct, I’d be surprised if I’m the only one seeing this.

I expect OFGEM would be interested in this issue. Come on Ovo, let’s see how quickly you can take ownership of this one.

There is the SMETS update process currently in place (not by OVO) but it begs a question on data integrity https://www.smartdcc.co.uk/our-smart-network/current-programmes/smets1-enrolment-and-adoption/

Thanks for the links and seeing it has been happening to others too is reassuring in a way. But I’m kind of surprised that the telemetry system can mess up like this. It really shouldn’t and it should be properly tested out. I am intrigued whether it is the handover to the DCC that is causing this.

I’m just dreading Ovo billing me more than £2000 and automatically shoving up a DD to compensate.

Thanks for flagging this, @Beprecise. 

I’ve raised this internally and highlighted that this has happened more than once. 

Can you please make our Support team aware so we can get a fix put in place?  

Hi @Beprecise back here with a really quick update. 

I’ve been advised that this is a known issue that’s caused by a first generation smart meter (SMETS1) being upgraded and enrolled to the DCC. That’s a lot of jargon but it means your smart meter behaves like a second generation smart meter and therefore can communicate with any supplier. 

When your meter gets enrolled, you should’ve had an email or letter to advise of enrollment and that the readings will swap over. I’m checking to see if the fix is automated as part of this. Either way if yours do swap and you get charged to this, our Support team are able to fix this issue once notified. 

I’ve chatted online with the account team and they have handed this over to the Investigative Team and my account has been put on hold, so at least I don’t need to worry about being billed £2000+ in one month.

I have never receieved an email saying my SMETS1 has been rolled over to the DCC but when I use https://smartmetercheck.citizensadvice.org.uk/meters, it says it’s working in Smart mode, (which I know), and then says I could change suppliers and it should still work as a smart meter, which implies that it has been changed over to the DCC.

It’s good to know that officially this is defined as a “known problem”. Just a shame that it hasn’t been fully resolved so that all this hassle could be avoided.

My readings have been the wrong way round for several months! Customer service are aware and sorting it. My account has also been frozen for 3 months . Customer service guy very kindly worked out my bill manually and phoned me back to reassure me that so far it's working in my favour and I'm more in credit than I thought. Still to scared to put storage heaters on though!