I’ve heard that energy suppliers can remotely control smart meters in order to even cut off the energy supply to a certain property. It made me wonder if they can remotely override the meter reading by adding extra units on top of the actual usage regularly. If they have remote control access to it, when/if a customer complains regarding an abnormal increase, they can even remotely adjust it so that the meter would not be seen as faulty during any inspection.
Is there a guarantee or a way to validate that this would never happen to smart meter users?
@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.
