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

Why smart meter wouldn’t work in the block of flats? It uses mobile phone network (unless you are in Scotland, it’s a bit different there) for sending data. It should be fine! I used to live in the high-rise building, and my smart meter worked perfectly. There could be some issues when you need your gas meter to send data to your electricity meter – sometimes they are too far away from each other. But even in that case there are some solutions found. But, if you are in the high-rise building, I’m sure you won’t have that kind problems! So, yeah, just book the replacement and let them do their job. 

P.S. My guess is that you were on Economy7 tariff, but when RTS was switched off, the cheap part of the tariff stopped working. 

The meter will work.

Whether it communicates by 3G/4G or by Long Range Radio the new meter should be able to communicate it’s readings to the Data Communications Company (DCC) and OVO picks them up from there.

If for any reason the new meter cannot communicate with DCC then you will have to send in readings to OVO, but that’s no different to what you do now with your non-smart meter.

However if your flat is too far from your meter then your In Home Display may be too far away from it to communicate properly.
It was/is a problem with blocks of flats, but there is something called ALT-HAN that should be able to help with that.

https://althanco.com/what-we-do/

https://althanco.com/how-it-works/

I just realised that when 3G signal will go off, smart meters will switch to 2G signal. Until their communication hubs (where possible) are replaced for 4G signal. Apparently this is one of the reasons why 2G signal is still being kept. Feels a bit strange to me.

It's not just smart meters that are keeping 2G going. smart bus stops and smart advertising signs also use, or can fall back on, 2G.

I'm not sure but think I read that some railway infrastructure also still uses 2.G

Thanks for the replies, they’ve been very helpful! Mobile signal is not great in our flat as we are on a lower floor, and I suppose there’s lots of steel etc in the way, but I bumped into a neighbour this afternoon and they said they have a smart meter through Eon and it works just fine, so fingers crossed all will be well. 
 

So should the economy 7 just start working again as before when the new meter goes in?

Very roughly - if you are North of a line from the Mersey to the Humber estuaries then you will be on Long Range Radio for smart metering. South of that it's the mobile phone signal.

Things are changing though, so while those sre the preferred methods they are not set in stone like they used to be. There is even smart metering over the internet coming for awkward cases.

Yes a smart meter can handle E7, but it needs to be a dual rate meter, and may need an auxiliary switch for the off-peak circuit.

 I assume you are already on E7 with OVO so that should happen automatically. But you may want to confirm with support that that is what the engineer will be fitting.

Yes we are an economy 7 tariff and haven’t been told when arranging the appointment that anything would change in that regard.

We have a bit of a development in the story though - another neighbour, also supplied by OVO, has exactly the same issue as us. Their meter box is also the same as ours. I had thought they wouldn’t be old enough to be affected by the RTS switch off though - they’re digital and don’t have any black transmitter box nearby

Hey ​@ConfusedJim 

I’m glad to see a couple of our community members have already stopped by with some helpful advice on this.

As they’ve already mentioned, everything should remain the same in terms of the tariff and the meter should work as intended and switch to the peak/off-peak times correctly. If any changes to contract had been required as a result of the meter change, the Support Team would have had to discuss this at the time of booking.

If the meter’s in a communal cupboard and you have concerns about whether there’ll be enough space or concerned about access, then it might be worth speaking with facilities management to make sure that they’re aware of the job if there’s anything that might prevent the job being completed. If it’s in a communal area, they may also know if others in the block have had smart meters fitted.

The following topic may also be helpful here:

I’ve lived in flats in various locations across Scotland over 10 years now, all with pretty poor mobile signal and I have to say I’ve had smart meters in all, and never had an issue so it’s not commonly an issue, or as a direct result of it just being in a block of flats.

I would be hopeful from what you’ve said here that everything should go ahead smoothly, and the E7 will begin to work again.🤞🏻

Do keep us updated with how you get on.

Will do - went to see the gent upstairs who’s had the identical problem, he’s been on to OVO today, he was a bit less relaxed with them about it than me! And they are sending someone to have a look at his meter today. So I will have the benefit of knowing whether it’s been successful for him or not

Please do let us know how the other gent's experience goes.

(And maybe point him to this forum if he has any questions about his own situation).

Well the neighbour upstairs had a smart meter put in yesterday, the engineer was sure it would fix the issue and said he’d checked everything - but the economy 7 still isn’t working, water heater and storage heaters still not getting any power. Not quite sure what we do next now. Nobody seems to have a handle on what the issue is

This isn’t an uncommon experience, and the solution is often quite simple if the meter is communicating properly as the engineer’s checks should have confirmed. It involves asking the supplier to send a command (called ECAUL) to the meter to configure the meter’s internal switch for the offpeak supply. The engineer can’t check this unless he happens to be on site in the middle of the night, and he can’t do the configuration himself. 

I’ve passed that on to him, Firedog, Thankyou - he is going to try calling them again to ask about what you suggested, I know he has already been on to them to complain again this morning

He has just been on the phone to OVO and the person he spoke to had never heard of an ECAUL… his complaint handler will be calling him back tomorrow 

Sadly, I’m not surprised. It’s not the sort of thing front-line support staff normally come across. Neighbour will have to be quite firm and ask his complaints handler to ask the Smart team to send the ECAUL request to configure his ALCS calendar to match the timings he’s expecting (something like offpeak every day 00:00 - 07:00, or whatever they’re supposed to be according to his tariff and region. The times probably haven’t made it on to the online account yet, but he probably knows what they should be.

This isn’t the engineer’s fault, because he can neither check that the switch has been properly configured (unless he specifically asks the mothership’s back office) nor do it himself. Sometimes, meters like this are pre-configured for Economy 7, but again the timings may not be right for the specific case. There’s no reason to suppose that the same will happen to you, but if it does you know what to do.

We’d be grateful for feedback on how he got on ... 

Hey ​@ConfusedJim 

Thanks for keeping us updated on that, I’m glad to see a couple of our members have already stopped by with the advice about ECAUL and you’ve already passed that on. Hopefully they have better luck getting that requested with their complaints handler.

Today’s update from upstairs - the neighbour told the complaints handler everything you’d suggested, so she put him on hold for about 15 mins while she got on to the emergency smart meter team. They told her that the engineer had put in the original ECAUL when setting it up, but they could see that it hadn’t worked. They are now “checking whether a new activation code can be sent directly to the meter, or if another emergency visit is required”. 
 

He said that when the engineer had arrived he informed him that it was indeed down to the RTS frequency no longer working, and my neighbour pointed out my meter (identical to his) and the engineer said that he could see (I’m not entirely sure what he saw to know this) that it wasn’t working either. But there are about a dozen more of the same meters still in the utility room, and yet the engineer said all the other ones are working - ours are the only two that aren’t. 
 

So there we have it - they’ve promised to get back to him with a course of action by the end of the day but as that is about an hour away it seems that’s about as far as we’ll get this week.

Hi ​@ConfusedJim

I think it might help if you could post some photos of your meter and anything around it.

I realise this may not be possible if it's in a meter cupboard or meter room.

That tells us a lot. There has been so much publicity about the RTS switch-off over the past two or three years I’m surprised there are some customers who haven’t heard about it. Depending on the type of electricity meter, it’s often possible to see whether the RTS signal is getting through or not. The positively last final cut-off has been set for 27 June 2026.

Yes, this is a common scenario. As I said, I don’t think the attending engineer has the permissions required to alter the ‘ALCS Calendar’ in the meter. He can call up the smart team’s back office and ask them to do it - or you can ask Support to ask them to. It can only be done remotely, and it sometimes takes a couple of attempts to get the new settings to stick. Let’s hope for the best.

OVO sent an emergency engineer out to my neighbour yesterday, he said the guy was very good and helpful, but unable to solve the problem. He tells me the engineer said the new smart meter box was working fine, but both he and his supervisors said it sounded like OVO “have not set up the tariff correctly on the new meter”. So it’s back on to the complaints line tomorrow for him!

Firedog, I’d vaguely heard about the switch off but from what I’d read I thought our meter wouldn’t be affected - what I’d read said to look out for a black transmitter box near your meter, which ours doesn’t have, and showed photos of the really old analogue meters, so I’d thought our meter, being digital, was too new to be affected by it. Seems that’s not the case! Thankyou for all your help though, really appreciate it and our neighbour does too, it’s really helped him knowing what to tell the complaints handler they need to do!
 

There’s no ‘transmitter’ box, because the RTS unit only receives (or rather ‘received’ in your case).  It used to get a signal from your electricity distributor (not the supplier OVO, but the company responsible for the network bringing electricity to your building, SSEN perhaps?) to say when power to the heating equipment was to be turned on and off. This function will now be taken over by a smart meter.
  

It’s good to know that the new meter is working ‘fine’ - I hope that means also being in contact with the smart meter network. If it does, OVO’s smart team should be able to make sure that both the ‘tariff switching table’ (that specifies when to start and stop recording usage on the offpeak register) and the ‘ALCS Calendar’ (which dictates when to switch power to the heating equipment on and off, ideally at the times in the tariff switching table) are set up as they should be. 

It’s sad that OVO’s support staff seem to think that every fault with a meter demands an engineer visit. There are many things that a visiting engineer just can’t do, so it’s often a wasted journey. Of course, it’s nice to know that the meter is working fine; there was in fact no reason to think it wasn’t. 

The engineers that have been so far have both been from SSE, yes. I assume the meter is in contact with the smart meter network alright, because they told my neighbour that they were able to see that the economy 7 wasn’t functioning. But why they haven’t been able to get it working remotely I’m not quite sure. 
 

Hoping they will be able to find a solution this week, my smart meter fitting isn’t until next Monday so it would be nice to know before then that the issue can be fixed and how they did it before mine goes in. Otherwise I’ve got the same rigmarole to come with no definitive confirmation as yet that it’ll get my hot water back on!

Thanks. I’m just wondering about this:  

SSE no longer exists as an electricity supplier (their domestic retail business was taken over by OVO some years ago), but SSEN soldiers on as a Distribution Network Operator. I wonder, then, whether the meter engineers you met were in fact from SSE. It’s possible that they still have some business customers, so they will have meter engineers to deal with these customers. SSEN won’t get involved in individual metering points: their involvement stops at the service head coming into the building. Could they have been from SMS, a major meter contractor used by many suppliers? Not that it matters much, but an OVO engineer might have had personal contacts he could draw on to help.

Let’s face it, you won’t be any worse off if your new meter doesn’t work perfectly from day one. The chances are, though, that it will, as they do for by far the majority of customers in the same situation.

The engineers have been from a company called SMS which would appear to be a subsidiary of SSE, same logo etc. 

He has tried again today, been passed around three people on the phone, told he is on a priority call back list from the smart meter team - that was more than five hours ago and no one has got back to him. He is now looking at changing providers.

We now wonder if, as the original sparky thought, the signals aren’t getting through and they are unable to communicate with it remotely. 
 

He tells me the engineers that have told him many of the other new meters in the plant room are not set up for economy 7, and that they both commented that the electrical set up was “very odd” with regard to the number of wires leading to the meter, and it used the neutral to switch to live on the economy 7 setting (that is all Greek to me)

I’m not sure what link there is between SMS and SSE, if any. The logos aren’t dissimilar, so probably easily confused with a quick glance:
  

If the meter is still not functioning as it should be, the very last thing to be doing is switch supplier! That would almost certainly prolong the agony. He should wait until everything is working properly before even considering changing supplier.
  

I suspect that the ‘original sparky’ was referring to the RTS signal, which might well have been turned off for your building. The RTS has absolutely nothing to do with the smart meter network, which works in a completely different way - as different as, say, ordinary TV v. satellite TV v. cable TV.
    

An RTS system could have a bewildering nest of wires to and from the meter. A smart meter (at least the ones provided by OVO) usually has four wires (actually 1/2” thick cables commonly called ‘tails’) or, in the case of a meter controlling a separate heating circuit, five. How the neutrals (wires that used to be red but are now blue) are connected depends on how the equipment they’re serving are earthed. Electricians should know all about that sort of thing; meter engineers should know enough about it to make sure their work is safe, but it’s just as much a mystery to me as it sounds to be for you. 

Don’t worry about your new meter yet - it’s most likely that everything will work as it should straight away. Copious quantities of tea and biscuits often help to make sure.