Can I have a smart meter with an Economy 7 plan?

You’re welcome @Megha , glad I could help. :)

Probably the ONLY feature that might not work, would be the ability for the smart meter to automatically flip the storage heaters on and off at the appropriate times, in order to make sure they only ever run during the Off-Peak rate. However, if your storage heaters have timers anyway, you can probably just set the timers manually to match your tariff.

As long as you’re OK with that quirk, you should be good to go (to be fair, it’s not the most critical feature in the world for a smart meter to have).

Yep @Blastoise186 I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there. 

@Megha it does sound like you’ve got an S1 Secure smart meter. See the guide here. There are two models: Liberty 100, and Liberty 110. 

The 110 is the 5th port meter. If you have a Liberty 100, you can have it set up in economy 7, but you won’t be able to have specific appliances connected to the off peak register only. 

Let us know a bit more info on the set up, meter type, and ideal arrangement and we can go from there! 

@Tim_OVO @Blastoise186 : thanks for the responses 

chatted with someone from the support team this morning and it appears that there is a software issue which isn’t allowing smart meters to use economy tariff currently and there is no timeline for when the issue will be rectified 

Thanks for the update, @Megha - that would explain it. 

We’ve not got this on our known issues on the billing platform list, which moderators and volunteers have access to. So I’ll do some digging on this issue and come back here with an update. 

So for now, where does this leave you, @Megha? 

If the issue is not likely to be fixed anytime soon then I would look to move to another provider who can offer me an economy 7 meter and tariff

Thanks @Megha ,

If you’re able to, could you snap a photo of your meter? I’m almost certain that the one you have should work fine, but knowing what you’ve got might help us to check.

Have tried to attach it do let me know if you can see the picture @Blastoise186 

Thanks @Megha , that came through nicely.

Your smart meter is a SMETS1 Secure Liberty 100, but is on the list of meter types which will get the SMETS2 upgrade. Even as a SMETS1, it’s fully supported by OVO as that’s what OVO were deploying when they were still doing SMETS1 meters.

@Tim_OVO should hopefully be able to dig deeper and see what’s going on. As it stands, the issue you describe isn’t on the list of known ones I have access to. But we’ll keep you posted with any news.

Seems like some software update for the smart old meter to allow Economy 7 tariff to be billed correctly.

although I’m not sure why it should be an issue if my Meter is sending readings every 30mins surely they can see the usuage per hour and Bill it that way 

so not sure what additional software needs to be fixed before it will work

thanks 

As far as I’m aware, the Economy 7 element is handled by the Metrology Firmware within the meter itself, rather than the Communications Hub firmware. Both parts are kept separated from each other to allow the Communications Hub Firmware to be updated without interfering with the Metrology Firmware - the latter of which never usually changes during the service life of a particular meter. I think it’s something to do with compliance or regulatory approvals which means the Metrology Firmware mustn’t be tampered with. Something along those lines.

As such, there shouldn’t be any firmware issues on your meter that would block Economy 7 which I know of. Economy 7 requires the meter to maintain two separate registers to track day (peak) and night (off-peak) usage independently and I don’t think having a smart meter can bypass that.

Tim’s on the case for you. :)