Can Energy Suppliers manipulate smart meter reading remotely?

Has anyone's opinion on this changed? My electricity from December and January this past year were double what they were the year before and I have gas heat. No new appliances or hybrid cars or any of that was going on. I just had my electric supplier come out and check my meter yesterday. They haven't gotten back to me but I know they were here. I do think something fishy is going on especially the way they talked to me on the phone

I stand by my word.

Please post photos of your meter.

Yes they can be. Smart meters are another farce so they can charge what they want, when they want, irrelevant of the consumer. If I were you I'd leave and go elsewhere to a company that would respect you because OVI certainly doesn't.

Once again, I stand by my word. The meter readings on the meters themselves cannot be manipulated remotely - that’d be totally illegal. And besides, there isn’t even a SMETS Command for it anyway - no SMETS Command = not possible. Only the manufacturer can do it - and in those cases, the meter probably won’t ever go back into the field after that anyway, making it irrelevant. Even if it did later go back into the field, the new Start Reading for the next customer would commence at whatever is on the meter display at that time, which in turn becomes the new “Zero”. This is the same arrangement as for meters that were removed from service for any reason, deemed suitable to re-deploy, put into the spares cupboard and later deployed elsewhere - the new “Zero” would start at whatever those meters said at the time of the re-install. It’s not like a car where you can just hook up a laptop to the OBD-II port, fire up some software and press a few buttons to clock the mileage back!

Suppliers likewise cannot charge “whatever they want”. This industry is heavily regulated, suppliers have been smashed to pieces in the past for attempting exactly that.

You can believe whatever you wish - I cannot force your hand. However, that doesn’t mean it’s true and you cannot force everyone else’s hand either.

As for using scripts, sure I’ll admit that do use them - I’ve even written a few in my time. However, those scripts of mine do not work here because they’re designed for a completely different use case - batch files to use with Faronics Deep Freeze Cloud don’t exactly work well on an energy related Forum, something to do with the lack of polar bears... But on the Forum, everything I write is totally handwritten, such as in these threads.

The closest thing I use on the Forum to “Scripts” are a few macros I programmed into my mouse to help with common tasks, such as refreshing pages or loading tabs in certain ways - they only affect me though. The closest I’ve ever come to having “automated posts” is a few macros that automatically type out very short phrases that I program in, such as links to stuff that I’m constantly typing out - the Forum Moderators are usually OK with that since I’d have probably typed it out manually the exact same way anyway, but also because I still manually review the content before I hit submit.

Blastoise is correct. The readings are even sent via a central hub with a communication system designed by GCHQ to ensure they are secure.

Do your own research if you don’t believe it (rather than just looking at social media)

Are you referring to the size of your electricity bill or to the amount of electricity you consumed? The cost will depend both on the price you’re paying per unit and per day and on the number of kWh you consume as measured by the meter.

Electricity meters are precision instruments, calibrated to tight tolerances. While not unheard of, it’s very rare for a meter to record wrongly. The idea that the supplier is manipulating readings remotely is quite frankly fanciful. If you found that you had apparently been consuming twice as many units as the year before, you should first try to find out what was using so much more than you expected. You’re probably too late to be using the Insights page on your online account, because I don’t think you’ll find data going back more than three months. However, might be helpful to make sure your household profile is completed so you can get an idea of what is using most power.

Did you find out what was wrong with your meter, if anything?

Interesting reading of the above. I wouldn’t have seen this forum had it not been the fact that we were out today for a good few hours and on our return we glanced at our smartmeter remote readout unit in the hall and noticed it reading at least double the load that was switched on. We switched off the heaviest load but that didn’t drop it by the amount of load we had just removed, only two thirds of it. I then decided to compare the readout on the remote unit to that on the meter itself.

The meter read the same, so I scrolled through the meter readings a couple of times and it then reduced its reading & began to read what it should according to the loads we have on. We checked to see what other loads might have been left on, but nothing was, and certainly not enough to double the expected loading that is on. We will now keep a very close eye on this as we are in the throws of monitoring our usage and we are managing to generally keep it to within around 3-4 KWH/day.

After the Post office/Horizon scandal, I have become very sceptical of remote access, so this one will now be more closely monitored. I hope I’m wrong, but one never knows what teccies are doing behind the scenes.

If you request half hourly usage figures from your energy supplier you can see a graph of each days data via your online account.