I dont know why I didnt spot my lastest issue earlier….

Of the two readings my meter gives out, the website shows the higher one as off peak yet on my billing its the reverse. It seems such an obvious error

I also sat in my meter cupboard at various times over the weekend re-proving to myself that the meter only changes tariff rate twice a day (ie not E10 despite what it says on the My Plan page on the website

I think all in all….im going doolally lol

Have you heard back from your Ombudsman case handler @MikeMilf?

I’ve take a further look into this and I was wrong, I apologise. if you don’t receive the outcome you are looking for you can reject the Ombudsman decision and pursue your dispute through other methods, such as through the courts. 

Their website advises: In a limited number of circumstances you may be able to appeal our decision, if new evidence has come to light since you submitted your dispute or if a material error has been made.

Citizens advice might also be an option if you’re unhappy with the Ombudsman decision.

In ther interest of absolute fairness to the Ombudsman, he did ring me today but only to acknowledge that the techincality of the evidence had surprised him a bit. He has asked me to make myself available for a couple of hours on Friday to go through things in detail and come to a list of requirments I would want in order to consider this matter resolved

When I said a new car and a caribbean holiday he did at least laugh!

I guess theres a decsision to be made as to whether I push for E10 to be made to work, or accept a switch to E7 which may give me electricity providers to switch to if things go bad

Decisions decisions…..

Setting aside the question of redress for all the extra expense you’ve been put to by this silly situation, and judging by the evidence you’ve provided, I’d say that all you need to get things working as intended is for OVO to configure the meter’s TOU to match the tariff you’re signed up to. The prices are right, but the timings are wrong. If they say it can’t be done, say you’ll sue for breach of contract  (I hope you’ve got a screenshot of your Plan page in case they get a sudden urge to amend it on the sly.)

You’ve been paying E10 prices for a long time, so you should be getting E10 service with its cosy afternoon and evening heating boosts. E7 would be much less comfortable.

LOL funny you should say that @Firedog….

In case Ovo decided to ‘amend’ the plan page I took a screenshot on 31.01.24 showing me on normal E10 plan and times.

I also took a screen shot of the plan page on 28.02.24 showing me still on E10 but with all the flipping times reversed!

Yes I still have these and looking on my Plan page just now it still shows ‘inverted E10’ times

Edit OH FFS…...looking on the website it looks like they have revised my bills yet again. These ones now dont matcht the ones they submitted as evidence. This is making my damn head spin

@Firedog  this is all to do with the reversed reads supplied by SSE im sure. They are now billing me with the higher reads as off-peak. If you look at the spreadsheet i shared with you at the weekend and have the left column peak / right column peak with opening reads of 1612 peak / 2313 it all looks consistent except its my peak readings that are shooting up when my night storage heaters go on

Is this consistent with the possible incorrect meter configuration we worked on where the meter is possibly sending the true offpeak reading as peak? Or is it due to the E7/E10 mismatch?

I think an engineer sitting here with my meter and all my bills would struggle to make any sense of this.

I really need a break from this...god knows how i explain all this to the Ombudsman Friday

Let’s nail fast now which register is which. Take meter readings of both registers (TOU Rate 1 and TOU Rate 2) at 08:00. Use at least 1 kWh over the next couple of hours, then take readings again at 12:00. Both of those times are within the same peak rate period whatever tariff you’re on, so whichever rate increased over that four-hour period is the peak rate register. The other one should have stayed the same. Post your results here.

Post a screenshot too of your plan page showing the Prices and unit rates, and another one of your meter reading history since 1 March. 

Then we’ve got all of the rest of Thursday to set you up for Friday’s entertainment. 

Thanks mate please see below for meter readings since 01.03.24. Not really typical as I have been over at parents for 4 of those days helping out

and see below for screenshot of the Plan page on 29.02.24. It is still the same today having started showing the reversed times sometime after 31.01.24

Marvel at the incorrectness of it all lol

Will take the readngs at 08:00 and 12:00 as you suggest. Will do some wasings to make sure we get some usage

@Firedog Have uploaded the usual 3 pics into the shared folder as of just now at 07:05 (still peak time on either E7 or E10 in theory)

Suddenly realised I have an early client meet so need to get out the door….will defo do the next reads at 12:00 as suggested

Look like they really have reversed the tariffs!

@pegem  Yep indeed...but at 31.01.24 I have a screenshot showing everything was okay on the plan page. What they are doing I have no idea

@Firedog I have uploaded the 3 x 12:00 pics onto the onedrive and the conclusion is pretty clear:

TOU1 increased by 5 Kwh

TOU2 stayed static

Active tariff was correctly showing peak rate of 32.62, therefore meter thinks TOU1 is peak and is supplying readinfgs to Ovo on that basis

Thats all fine and dandy, but if you arrange the readings spreadsheet we shared to accomodate this, I am left with the colder recent months showing a much greater increase in peak readings rather than offpeak. With night storage heaters surely that shouldnt be the case?

Of course I still have the other issue that the meter is changing on E7 times not E10

As always, thanks for all the (remarkable) help

Yep, that is incontrovertible. Comparing with the latest readings, OVO is also recording TOU1 readings as peak and TOU2 as offpeak. Well and good, but …

You also have readings taken at 21:07 on 3 March that show the Active Tariff Price as the higher, peak one when it should be the offpeak one according to E10 (offpeak 20:00-22:00). Conversely, readings taken at 05:15 on 4 March show the Active Tariff Price as the lower, offpeak one when it should be the peak one according to E10 (peak 05:00-13:00). Other readings you have shared with me suggest that the meter registers are switching according to the E7 calendar (offpeak 00:00-07:00, peak 07:00-00:00). This is what has to change.

I’ve said before that the details on the Plan page are inviolate, because they represent the contract you have with OVO to provide electricity at specific prices at specific times of day. If as you say these details have recently changed (and the new details are being applied to your bills), OVO are behaving fraudulently. I hope you’ve shared this intelligence with your EO case handler. If you have your February bill, perhaps you could share a picture of its Electricity in detail, or otherwise a screenshot of the same data (Meter readings and Charges) from your Billing history. 

Let’s take it from there.  

Yes Ive shared all the data with him, but it remains to be seen (tomorrow) whether he’s taken it all in

Unfortunately, my current billing period ends on 08.03 so it will be ‘bill pending’ tomorrow. I’ll admit to having got confused on my billing as they are now on their fourth version with the latest sneaking through recently. I will have to draw the ombudsman attention to the fact that the bills submitted as evidence have now been superceded

If you refer to my spreadsheet, the lower peak readings need to be on the left with a start read of 1612. Whilst this does look okay it still doesnt explain the rising out of sync peak readings in the cold months

Im going to spend this evening summarising all the things that are wrong so i can chat calmly tomorrow. I hope he’s a good listener lol

I’m not sure I understand -  I don’t see any particular rise in peak usage. If you do, one explanation I can think of is that your meter’s ALCS is turning your heaters on 13:00-16:00 and 20:00-22:00, in line with the ‘proper’ E10 off-peak timings. But because the meter itself is only recording offpeak usage 00:00-07:00 (E7 timings), all that daytime heating (assuming there is some) is being clocked as peak usage. 

I can’t make any sense of your historic meter readings, because night and day usage is so similar. Your meter reading history for January-February would clear it up. I think I mentioned before that if I assume that your consumption has been constant for the past two months, adding Jan-Feb usages to the 8 February readings produces almost exactly the same figure for both peak and offpeak, so that’s no guide at all.

The meter doesn’t lie. Unless you see at some stage of the reading history a jump — by which I mean the Register column looking like this:

    Peak

    Offpeak

    Offpeak

    Peak

    Offpeak

    Peak

— then those registers are doing their job of recording peak and offpeak usage as they’ve been told. I’m not sure if you’re suggesting that offpeak usage according to those readings is being shown on bills as if it were peak usage and vice versa, but I find it unlikely. That’s why I asked to see a recent one or two. 

Whether the SSE closing readings were incorrectly reported or not is easy to establish: the first reading under OVO’s regime cannot be lower than the corresponding one  was under SSE. 

Best of luck tomorrow 

Sorry that I didnt get to share the outcome of my phone calls with the Ombudsman on Friday, however I had a broadband package upgrade scheduled for today, but VirginMedia disconnected me Friday, earlier than I expected

In any event, was probably for the best that I wasnt around as I wasnt in a good mood at all. For any person going down the Ombudsman route I can only say dont get your expectations up

Basically whilst he was a decent guy, there was a real lack of a “can-do” attitude. In a nutshell, he proclaimed that the industry accepts thats E10 cant be implemented on smart meters and Ovo would thereore not accepy amy decision to the contrary. I referred him the fact that E10 had been implemented in @JessicaRose ‘s case, but he just went on about GDPR and I lost the will to live (before I lost my temper)

He also said he couldnt even take the email address of the senior lady at Ovo who got E10 implemented in 24 hours

It feels like all the effort put in compiling evidence (thank you so much @Firedog ) was a waste of time. It appears that Ovo can indeed rely on the mantra of “we dont support E10”

The formal decision is being published Monday. Of course I stressed the issue of Breach of Contract, as well as a financial adjustment re E10/E7 mixups. My expectations are marginally above zero. It looks like another instance of a institution with awful service being free to do what they want

Found this from @Emmanuelle_OVO 

• 

  

  Emmanuelle_OVO

   3 months ago

  I know that initially, when customers were migrated over they were changed from econ 10 to econ 7 as we didn't have the capabilities on our billing system to offer econ 10, we didn't offer econ 10 plans or install econ 10 smart meters.
  
  But now we offer econ 10 plans, I was hoping this would be possible?
  
  It might be worth raising a complaint or escalating it if you haven't got one already.

Really! they haven’t told customer services yet!

I was amused to read on Twitter the other day that Victoria Coren Mitchell had labelled Ovo the worst company she had ever had to deal with. Judging by all the replies, she wasnt alone.

Im sure some staff do their job professionally but the overall customer experience for me has been absolutely awful. Mind you thats probably true of so many large organisations these days

Hiring more staff and cutting down the ridculous telephone wait times might be a start!

Hey @MikeMilf and @pegem,

I appreciate how frustrating this must be for you,

OVO does support Economy 10 for customers with Economy 10 who switch to us. I believe the issue that you’ve both experienced is a configuration issue, rather than a tariff one. You should have been migrated to OVO on the same contract and tariff with the same timings and price.The only E10 exception to this is "Eastern E10" which is a niche electric heating product in Eastern region, that actually went to our Two Rate tariff rather than E10. They are traditional meters so won't have seen any change in timings. 

As you’ve now raised this to the Ombudsman I’m hoping that you get the resolution you’re looking for, it’s very unfortunate you’ve had this experience. . 

@Emmanuelle_OVO 

No offence, that all sounds fine and dandy, but Ovo on six occasions in our email exchanges stated “Ovo does not support E10”

Whilst I know that is a load of baloney from @JessicaRose ‘s experience, the Ombudsman took the (cowardly) approach that “If thats what they say, we have to accept it. Its recognised throughout the industry that E10 doesnt work on smart meters”

Personally as long as Ovo credit my account with the goodwill gesture recommended, I will move on to a new tariff, almost certainly with a new supplier. In my opinion, there is no desire to hold companies like Ovo to account and they will continue to give appalling service in some cases, with little fear of comeback

I just hope they comply with the other condition of his decision, which is to offer me all assistance to get my meter working correctly. I wont hold my breath

No offence @Emmanuelle_OVO but your customer services dept. including your complaints handling team, don’t know that OVO DOES support Economy 10 for customers with Economy 10 who switch to you. I agree with @MikeMilf . OVO have said on several occasions that they do not support E10. we have proved them wrong. It is definitely a configuration issue. In my case the Ombudsman has told OVO to reconfigure the TPR and ECAUL to move us on to a proper E10 plan. 

…..and I had the additional problem that my Ombudsman contact said he could not consider the facts I gave to him re @JessicaRose and @pegem. GDP...efiin R !!

Arrrrgh

@MikeMilf  That's ridiculous, surely he has a duty to consider all the evidence and surely he has access to the Forums the same as us. My man certainly seem to had a better grasp of the technical issues. 

Was pleased to see just now that the goodwill gesture part of the decision has already been credited to my account

Were Ovo so keen to make amends, or do they know they probably got off lightly? lol

Onto the other part….how long I wonder before they make contact re properly sorting out my meter and tariff? I wont hold my breath

That’s the easiest bit, both to do and to detect. I think the EO would be very cross if the compensation weren’t paid promptly, and probably slap a fine on top. I think you’re wise, though, not to be holding your breath in anticipation of a satisfactory sort-out. 

I’m glad to hear that you’ve had your compensation paid @MikeMilf. Keep us posted with your meter and tariff amendments, your advice might help other community members in a similar situation.