Economy 7 not working through old meter - will smart meter work in apartment block?

No, I was discussing smart meters with the original electrician who attended to test the water heater - he said smart meters sometimes don’t work correctly in apartment blocks, due to the large amounts of steel in the walls blocking whatever signals they use to communicate with the meter. For example, if it works on mobile signal, well I’m on the same floor as the meter room and my mobile signal, when unassisted by wifi, isn’t particularly good. Others on here didn’t agree about that - I’ve asked the neighbour that on the off chance he finally gets his phone call tomorrow to ask them outright if the problem is that they have been unable to send commands to the new meter. 
 

I don’t think he should switch suppliers at this stage either, I’d give it a bit longer and see if any progress can be made - but he’s spending hours on the phone to them every day for absolutely no progress and you can see why he’s getting frustrated with it all. Next step we think is to try and canvas more neighbours (we have heard another flat might have had a problem with their storage heaters too) and see whether those that have had their meters changed previously still have their economy 7 supply or not

OK, I understand, thanks.

When a smart meter is installed, some of the configuration has to take place ‘over the air’ (OTA). The engineer who installed your neighbour’s meter said that he’d checked everything - that wouldn’t be possible if the meter wasn’t in communication with the network. Communication is two-way - the whole point of the smart meter revolution is that the meter can send energy data to the supplier when asked to. 

Did your neighbour get an In-Home Display along with his new meter? He should have, and it could be helpful in diagnosing the problems he’s having. 

He hasn’t mentioned one but I can ask - if so, what should he look for on it that might help?

Sorry, the sandman called before this response showed up …

It depends a bit on the type of IHD, but for example some of them show a convenient countdown to the next tariff change. The change should coincide with the heating circuit being switched on or off. The IHD may suddenly display a red traffic light when the heating equipment starts up just to show that the power draw has increased significantly. So there are two IHD signals that help the customer find out whether his meter is working properly to control offpeak heating.

IHDs don’t always work well in blocks of flats because of both the construction materials used and the distance between the meter and the IHD. But ’they have ways if making it talk,’ so it’s worth grumbling if the IHD - which has by law to be provided with any new smart meter - doesn’t work properly out of the box.

The latest from upstairs is that after another gruelling and lengthy phone call with what he now calls “the not-so-smart team”, the neighbour has been told they had checked the meter and found they could send signals to it, but it wasn’t sending anything back - I can only assume it needs to do that for the economy 7 to work - so the meter is being replaced again with a different type later in the week. 

That should have been checked on day 1, not ten days later! I wonder what the engineer meant when he said he’d checked everything.
     

No, a smart meter properly set up for Economy 7 can do everything it needs to do to control the heating equipment and power everything else even if it can’t communicate with the mothership. It does mean that it will have to be read manually once a month to make sure that bills are as accurate as they can be.

Have read elsewhere that sometimes to get the economy 7 working with a smart meter some changes need to be made to the wiring connecting the meter with the flat - this kind of tallies with the engineers saying that the way it was connected up was odd. But the same comment said that the meter engineers aren’t allowed to touch that, and the landlords will have to sort that out. 
 

The engineer on Saturday apparently pointed out another smart meter (an octopus-installed one) and said one like that would be your best hope, as it has a button on it allowing the engineer to send commands back to the network too. Neighbour is hoping that’s what they’re bringing this time.

Had a good nose around in the meter room myself this morning, another flat has had a meter installed by Octopus in the last couple of weeks which shows both day time and night time rates working, so clearly it is possible here - it’s just that OVO can’t get it right.

I’ve also had a closer look at the one they put in for my neighbour (that will be removed tomorrow apparently) - it doesn’t appear to have two separate rates on it. It shows only IMPRT, which as I understand it is power used by the customer, and EXPRT - which my research suggests is the amount of power sent back to the grid by customers who have solar panels etc. and can do so. Obviously that reads 00000 because nobody has that capability here. So as far as I can see, there’s no way to physically read separate daytime and nighttime rates off it. Surely this must be wrong? There’s no way anyone should accept having a meter they can’t physically take a proper reading off themselves

If the meter is configured for peak and offpeak usage, there will be a sequence of button presses to see the contents of the two registers. We’d have to know the precise type of meter to be able to help with that - a photo would help a lot. That would also tell us what sort of communication it’s set up for, and the cables connected to it would tell us how it’s operating.  It’s good to know that at least one recently-installed meter in the room is apparently working properly - although you can’t tell from looking at it whether it’s sending data back to HQ.  

There it is

Unfortunate that we can't see the tails (the wires coming out of the the bottom of the meter) to see if there are 4 or 5 of them.

However is that your meter, the bloke upstairs meter, or the Octopus customers?

I ask because you said that yours was an old meter, but the one in the image has a brand new 4G communications hub and the card says it was fitted a week ago on the 27th May.

​@Nukecad That’s the neighbour’s, I think, that is scheduled for replacement because ‘it doesn’t work’. It has a 2A ALCS on board, wired to (one or other of the) 100A Proteus contactors alongside the meter. Don’t ask me how that works ...

​@ConfusedJim Thanks for the photo! We won’t go into details about this meter since it sounds like it’s about to be replaced anyway. As I remarked earlier, there is a complicated sequence of button presses to get to the peak and offpeak register readings. If you (plural) want to play with it, try this:

1. Press the right-hand button and hold for a second. The display should change to Main Billing or similar;
2. (I think) Do the same again, and again. This should take you to a screen headed Bill | My bills;
3. Press the right hand button twice - with any luck, you’ll get to Bill Advancd;
4. Press and hold the right hand button for a second. This will with any luck take you to Adv TOUMtrx.
5. Press and hold again. You should now begin to see the register readings, headed RATE1 and RATE2. RATE1 should be the peak reading, RATE2 the offpeak one. Use the buttons to go up and down the list.

I said it’s complicated! It doesn’t matter much if you lose your way - just wait a bit and you’ll return automatically to the beginning again. If you get the same sort of meter, you’ll have had some useful practice.

PS The instructions are in this document, if you can make sense of it.

Yes it’s the neighbours soon-to-be-removed one. Yeah having had a crack at that nighttime rate still showing 00000. Let’s see what tomorrow brings…

Congratulations on finding your way through that quagmire! If R2 is showing zero, that’s clear evidence that the tariff switching isn’t working, regardless of whether the ALCS is doing its job or not. Since neighbour doesn’t have any power to his heating equipment, it’s fairly obvious that the ALCS isn’t working either. Both of those are remotely configurable, so it sounds as if exchanging the meter is a good idea. 

Did you notice any flashing green lights on the Communications Hub? They tell you whether the meter is in communication with the network or not. If things are as they should be, at least two of them (WAN and HAN) should flash at 5-second intervals. Anything else and something’s not right. 

You might also spot a red light flashing occasionally just outside the top left-hand corner of the display screen. That just shows that current is flowing through the meter; the shorter the interval between flashes, the more power (kW) is being drawn. 

Ok having had another bash through your instructions (think we did it wrong first time), it shows rate 2 as 00010. Economy 7 used to be rate 4 on our old meters though, could that be an issue? Have read somewhere that OVO charge all energy used during off peak hours (whether on an economy 7 appliance or not) at a cheaper rate on a smart meter, is that correct?

We’ve got four lights flashing as you say, the two you mentioned plus another that says SW and another that says PWR. 

Here’s as good a pic of how it’s wired in as I could get

Great! I see what the engineer meant about switching the neutral: I don’t know enough about that sort of switchgear to be able to say how it should be done, but power to the heating equipment should be controlled by the little white box on the left. The thin grey cable alongside the blue one carries the signal from the meter telling the contactor in the white box when to switch on and off. It looks odd to me ...   
    

If you’re seeing 10 kWh on RATE2, then that should be the offpeak reading. RATE1 gives the peak. So my remark about the tariff switching not working was wrong.
    

Yes. If the heating equipment (both space- and water-heating) was working, you’d be seeing quite a bit more than 10 kWh on RATE2. Those 10 kWh are just everything else running at night during the offpeak hours - fridges, freezers etc. - along with (perhaps) a kettle and toaster if they’re switched on before the end of the offpeak period, whenever that’s supposed to be. It could be 08:00 or even 08:30 - do you know?
    

That’s really good news. The 4G hub is apparently connecting to the network as it should. WAN is the smart meter network, HAN the home area network that’s supposed to connect to the In-Home Display I mentioned. Details here.

I wonder what the next engineer will say about that wiring. It could be all right, in which case it looks as if the problem is as I said before: the ALCS isn’t properly configured (if at all - we’ve seen that before, too!). I don’t know whether OVO’s extremely helpful tame meter guru has a moment to look this over, so we’ll ask anyway - are you up for it, ​@Lukepeniket_OVO?

So rate 2 is now the off peak reading, but previously on the old meters it was rate 4. There is a rate 4 (and 3 for that matter) on the new smart meter showing 00000. Should the off peak not still be on rate 4 rather than rate 2?

This is my meter (the original) and how it’s wired in if that’s any help

No! The wider system (i.e. the one that transmits data to your supplier via DCC’s secure gateway) works best if what the meter sends is either a single rate as Rate 1 or two with Rate 1 as peak and Rate 2 as offpeak. When meters were read manually, it didn’t much matter what the rates (often referred to as tiers) were called so long as you obeyed the meter manufacturer’s instructions to take the readings. Now with an automatic system it does matter!  

News - OVO never arrived to replace the neighbours meter, they sent him a message to say that they’d escalated his complaint to a “Customer Resolution Specialist” and he’ll hear from them in the next five working days.

Meanwhile, I’ve been to see the neighbour with the new Octopus meter - he’s got the same story, the meter change hasn’t restored his economy 7, and it’s been in nearly a fortnight now. 
 

I also finally managed to get in touch with another neighbour, who we’d heard from the building management company had had the same problem. They said that there’d been damage done to a cable in their flat (mentioned a “timing cable”) while some decorating was being done, but the cable had been repaired and now everything was functional again.

Can anyone glean any clues from any of that?

By the way Firedog, I asked the neighbour if he’d been given an IHD when I saw him earlier and no, he wasn’t given one. I thought they had to provide one, no? 

Hello again Jim 👋 I hope you’re not getting even more confused by my ramblings! 

Thanks for the picture of your meter. It’s one of the latest, and probably last, of the meters specially constructed for RTS. It seems to have been neatly installed, but you’d have to be a competent electrician to be sure - my archaic mechanical engineering degree doesn’t help me much here, I’m afraid.

The sticker at the top of it and the details on the Meter Exchange (MEX) label alongside it are quite revealing. The sticker shows that what the meter shows as RATE1 is registered as R02, while RATE4 is registered as R01. Then the meter engineer calls them L and N, meaning (I think) Low and Normal (price, that is). If you were told that RATE4 was offpeak, then the confusion is complete! I think it was normal for Economy 7 in those days for the first tier (R01) to be offpeak, Low register with the second (R02) for peak, Normal. The advent of the DCC meant that had to be reversed. I know - I ended up with months of discussion about this with my own meter, which eventually led to its being exchanged for a shiny new SMETS2 device in 2023. Even then, they got it wrong and the registers had to be reversed (remotely) a few days after installation. When your new meter is in place, you should take a moment to check that they’re the right way round for you. The MEX label also shows that your meter is a second-hand one, two years and several hundred kWh old on installation. 

To your latest question, yes, I’m fairly certain that the supplier is required to provide an IHD with every new smart meter. It might be that the engineer just didn’t bother because it seemed obvious that it wouldn’t work in your block, or that he just didn’t have the necessary kit in his van to make it work. See the results of a Google search I just ran: smart meter installation code of practice - Google Search. While you should never take Google’s AI Overview as gospel, you might make note of it in anticipation of your own installation to come.

Firedog, what you call your ramblings are literally the only helpful advice we’ve had from anybody over the last few weeks, everyone else from letting agents to OVO haven’t been anywhere near as generous with their time and knowledge as you have. If we were ever to meet I think me and my neighbour would buy you a pint or five! We really appreciate your help.
 

Do you think there’s any chance that this story from the other flat about the damaged wire could have caused everyone else’s issues? For me, the fact that smart meters from two different companies haven’t fixed the problem really does suggest that the problem must lie in the building