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

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.

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.