Can Energy Suppliers manipulate smart meter reading remotely?

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.