THTC meter - Removal Request

Hi folks,

I am trying to have a redundant THTC meter removed from my house and OVO seem to be refusing to do this. Can anyone help explain what I should do? Some background info below:

We moved to a property in March last year in the west of Scotland. The property has two meters with a THTC setup running storage heaters. We are getting the storage heaters removed in February and an air source heat pump installed. 

Once this work has been carried out there will be nothing running from the RadioTelemeter (THTC) meter.

I have contacted OVO by phone yesterday to request that this meter be removed once it is no longer in use. The person I spoke with said that OVO would not do this because doing so would stop the other (ordinary) meter working. They weren’t able to explain why this would be the case. After some time on the phone I was told that if I emailed OVO with evidence that the THTC meter would not powering anything then they could arrange for it to be removed. This seemed like a positive outcome although it was not clear why we were initially told in the call that removal wasn’t possible.

I sent an email last night attaching the quotes from our electrician and heating engineer for removal of storage heaters and replacement with heat pump etc. I got a positive response this morning:

I am Stephen from account management at OVO energy after reading your email we can go ahead and do that for you but i am going to give you extra information so to proceed with this job there is a charge due to the nature of it I would like to clarify that your okay with that and if you are i can go ahead and get you a price and and book the job for you.

Again this seemed positive and I asked Stephen to go ahead and give us a cost. I then had response email from Nahim:

Apologies for the confusion form what Stephan said but as of right now, appointments for removing THTC meters aren't available. We appreciate you gave us confirmation the property's heating system is no longer dependant.

However we are working on a new meter type that'll basically replace the current two meters and you'll get one meter. The meter will reveal at Spring and you'll get an email when your free meter upgrade is ready

As far as I understand it the ‘new meter type’ mentioned has been in development for years and has been repeatedly delayed. I have little to no confidence that it will arrive in spring as promised above. It isn’t clear why we should be expected to wait for this.

Ontop of that our experience from speaking to neighbours and friends locally is that smart meters are useless in this (rural) area since they are not able to connect to a radio mast for communication. Any smart meters fitted simply operate as ‘dumb’ meters in this area.

Can anyone give us some hope that it is possible to get the redundant THTC meter removed as we have requested? Is there any technical reason why this wouldn’t be possible?

Failing that at least any good reason why we should have to wait for the new meter to be developed and rolled out? It seems in this instance that whilst waiting we’d have headaches if we wanted to switch supplier etc because we’d have a strange setup with a redundant meter and two MPAN numbers associated with the property. This could go on indefinitely since the new meters are not yet launched.

Below is a photograph of our current setup incase this is useful:

We’d really appreciate any help on this!

Thanks