Can Energy Suppliers manipulate smart meter reading remotely?

@knightbeat I think we would be interested to know where you heard this or if you have any link to a document or site which is the source of what you’ve heard. As you can imagine there is currently a ‘sensitivity’ surrounding issues of this nature and it would be useful to trace the source to see how this was followed up. It’s unfortunate that rumours spread from casual comments and the truth is that Smart meters are an accurate and very useful way of monitoring and controlling your energy usage.

OVO encourage customers to enrol in their Power Move initiative that enables customers to get a significant discount on their bill for moving their electrical energy use out of the peak load times and this is only possible with a Smart meter. In the future flexible tariffs will enable even greater saving over the year by users targetting their energy during times of low wholesale energy prices with the usage captured by a Smart meter.

Peter

Gonna comment on the Remote Disconnection functionality.

Yes, it is true that the feature feature does exist. HOWEVER, the use of it has been locked down so tightly that it’s almost impossible to use - and pretty much all suppliers have mutually agreed not to use it outside of the most extreme last resort cases.

The same rules apply to Remote Disconnections as for Force-Fit Prepayment or Warranted Disconnections - the supplier MUST try absolutely every other possible solution first and even then, there’s another 50,000 years of red tape first…

TL;DR it’s a thing that exists, but in reality almost never gets used.

I am dealing with a UK energy company where I have a A1700 / Elster PB3 HH meter installed (large house as opposed to a commercial building).  This meter has recorded continual usage for several years and I am disputing a specific billing period over several years , as their billing invoices are far in excess of the actual meter reading, by a factor of some 20 - 50% and far above.  A few years back the local utility engineer said it seemed the meter was pulling estimated usage every 30 minutes rather than an actual reading. I will add here I am not an electrical utility specialist though do have a software and tech background.

When querying this we get the following reply “For HH supplies, the meter records a reading for each half-hour interval throughout the month. This data is stored and collected remotely. XXX then receives the interval data and bills you for the total consumption for the month. The meter automatically resets for the next month.  Invoices shows the total units consumed for the billing period, not a single meter reading.”

I cannot understand how a meter reading can be manually adjusted or reset remotely.  Further, I am not sure on reading the specs of this meter we have it’s even possible to do remotely.  I get “An analysis of the Elster A1700 commercial and industrial energy meter (specifically model variant PB3CABYCT) confirms that the utility company does not possess the functionality to remotely reset the main cumulative kilowatt-hour (kWh) reading, either partially or fully on a periodic basis. 

Analysis of Monthly Resets

The only data points that reset on a monthly basis are related to demand management and billing cycles, not total consumption:

Has anybody heard of UK utility companies having the ability to manually adjust meters in this way?  My argument is why are we paying you any more than what is on the meter, their argument is we billed you for your actual consumption (which I paid until we checked it) and we reset your meter monthly to what you see today.  I didnt check all the meter readings monthly in those days.  any advice , feedback most welcome.

If @Blastoise186 can help as he seems to be the meter guru, I would welcome his comments.

Meter readings are directed via DCC and from there to the energy provider.

What can happen is that the energy provider uses estimated readings rather than actual if readings are not regularly reaching them.

There should be a continuous register on the meter where you can look at total usage. The only ‘reset’ available is internal where the meter would record daily, weekly and monthly usage.

The reply you got was incorrect.

There is no ”automatically resets for the next month” whoever said that doesn't understand properly how smart meters work.

Remember that people answering the phone to customers don't usually need training in technical stuff, only with billing/account stuff.

Generally the meter itself stores 13 months worth of readings and then the oldest stored days reading drops out as each new days usage is recorded.

​@HKT888 thanks for your post.

I’m wondering whether the readings coming through to them were from a different register on the meter, eg you were looking at the readings for ‘rate 1’ on the meter, but the company you’re with were receiving reads from the ‘total’ register. Very difficult to know what’s happened here. Please keep us updated as to how this complaint pans out.

Hi HKT888,

When I read your post it raised my suspicions that your meter is a Maximum Demand meter that is usually for businesses running machinery of reasonable size. The give away is the HH bit, which means that it reads every half hour’s maximum draw. So your highest draw in any particular half hour will dictate what your final month end bill will be. The older electromechanical versions of these meters had a needle on a dial that was driven up by the meter each half hour, then the meter would drop back to it’s zero each half hour leaving the needle where it was. So if the needle went say half way up its scale in one half hour, but only a quarter for the rest of the month, your bill would be based on that highest half hour pull.

When these meters are used in industry, I have always encouraged my industrial customers to start their big motors in stages rather than all together. That helps because when the biggest motor is up to speed and fully online, it then helps the others to get going by it’s regenerative effect. Also I encouraged them to start the first batch of motors 5 mins before the hour or half hour, then the rest 5 mins after.

If you aren’t running any biggish motors for production, I wonder why you have a Half Hour meter installed? You know what you are running better than I but I hope this info helps in some way.