got message yesterday says ***helpdesk **help line no..”refer retailer guide”***suplier”0000*** can you help please richard

Same here! For both gas and electricity - 2 days in a row now.

Thus is a Secure brand SMETS1 meter.

I now see from my online billing that my latest gas and electric readings have been ESTIMATED!

Bearing in mind the absolute farce of getting the previous “smart” meter problem sorted out (3 engineer visits, countless phone calls and no-one remembers to bring a replacement meter) I sincerely hope that this isn’t the start of a similar exercise.

Quite apart from having to isolate and shield in a Tier 3 area, i don’t believe the technology is fit for purpose, and if necessary I shall be investigating the “exceptional circumstances” which would mean that I could have an old-style meter reinstalled.
 

I look forward to a satisfactory reply and will start doing my own readings again.

30 Nov 2020

We estimated 

0009983

31 Oct 2020

Smart read

0009417

Same here - have you checked your latest bill? Mine’s been estimated, with the previous one “smart”,

Good thought, but nope. Got a full daily history of smart readings, including today’s already.

Hi @FlexibleHead and @Halifaxer 

That’s really strange and I’m pretty sure a Pipit IHD isn’t meant to be doing that! If you don’t get any more like that, you can probably safely dismiss the message and ignore it. But if you get that happening again, definitely let us know here on the forums. :)

It could just have been a one-off thing, it’s still a bit unusual. Any thoughts @Tim_OVO ?

I’m going to flag these up with @Tim_OVO for thoughts, as it definitely shouldn’t be happening. We’ll keep you posted.

@Blastoise186 Cool, cheers for that. I’ll keep an eye on it, and reply again here if it happens again.

No worries :)

Hopefully it won’t, but we’ll be around to help out if you see another one.

Give us a shout if you need anything else. We’re always around if you need something

Good evening @Halifaxer ,

I’ll be happy to try and help you figure out what’s gone wrong with your smart meters, but it’s easier to do that in a different thread to this one. Please could you create a new thread for this and mention me. I’ll keep an eye out for you and will respond as soon as I can.

Thanks

My immediate concern is that something is maybe not sending readings to OVO and I'm being billed incorrectly due to estimated readings. I’ll keep an eye on this.

Hi @Halifaxer ,

As far as I’m aware, a faulty IHD will not cause issues with your billing as the readings are sent back to the supplier via a different method. I’ll have a chat with Tim about your issue as soon as I catch him, but he’s likely to spot these threads in the morning anyway.

Tim doesn’t give up easily and he’s a legend when it comes to getting things sorted out. Hang in there with us and we’ll see what can be done.

Thanks

I’ve received the same message on my IHD.  Once on 1st Dec and twice again today.  There is also a red light showing along with the green light on the top of the display.  Any advice would be welcome. Thanks

Thanks for letting us know @JoRobins1 ,

I’ve got this one flagged up with Tim to try and find out what’s happening. I don’t have any updates just yet, but I will definitely let you all know as soon as I hear anything.

Hi all, 

This is so interesting and clearly effecting multiple Pipet 500 owners. 

@richard1966 @Halifaxer @FlexibleHead @JoRobins1 have you flagged this to our Support team via web chat? If not do this here. 

If you help us to keep this topic updated with the latest, it will be much appreciated! I’ll see what I can dig up from my end as well… 

@richard1966 @Halifaxer @FlexibleHead @JoRobins1  - do you all have ‘Secure Liberty’ smart meters? 

From what I hear it seems like a text message notification rather than an internal device error message. 

Hi Tim. Yes, I do. 

No further messages since the original two on Tuesday.

Yes .. and I've also had no further messages. 

yes i secure liberty smart meters and hjad no more messages

@Tim_OVOwrote:

From what I hear it seems like a text message notification rather than an internal device error message. 

Yes, this appears to be the SMETS message system which has kicked into use.

As far I know, OVO have yet to implement anything that makes use of SMETS_messaging. It’s a bi-directional system, and would be used, for example, by your Communications Hub to alert them if anyone tried to tamper with it.

Since you all have SMETS1 meters which are being upgraded to SMETS2 functionality, I think these are ghost messages which have been generated at the point when OVO migrate your site onto the National Smart Meter Network.

Perhaps @Tim_OVO could please alert the S2-Team that this is occurring. If they can suppress it, then it will reduce the number of customers who will contact Customer Services to enquire about it.

I have noticed the two messages on my PIPIT500 display.

Additionally I have noticed that the Gas Account readings on the PIPIT500 display are not updating, so no hourly data, day data not updated since 29 Nov, Week data not updated since 30 Nov, month data not updated since Oct.

Electricity readings seem to be updating.

Looked at my online account data and that seems ok.

Think that something in the OVO account structure is not operating as it should!

Thanks for confirming this @mikeh51 

Here on the Forum we’ve been discussing “missing data” errors on both IHDs and the new Billing System since Feb’20.

Those of us with Ninja status(!) now have a list of “known issues” which OVO’s in-house programmers are looking at in order to define what are the problems which produce such symptoms. There are undoubtedly several causes, each with similar results.

Some of us are noticing that the online Usage graphs are sometimes present for the half-hourly “Day” display, despite the Month histogram showing no usage entry for that day.

Have you found this to be the case?

Please ask if you need help to check for this. It’s not obvious how to find the Day graph when there’s no corresponding bar on the Month graph!

Not really something that I have taken an interest in before. So I have just checked my online account and the graphs there seem to be functioning (at least up until this point of this month).

So if you are looking at weird messages I did have an strange email a couple of months ago along the lines “sorry you are leaving us” against the gas account when I had just renewed the contract. Was acknowledged by OVO who advised to disregard it.

The other thing that gets my goat is the way the erratic way the recommended direct debit level operates.

So on my latest bill (this week sometime) it said please pay another £2 a month. I look on my on line account this morning and its says reduce your payment by £6 a month. So which is correct? (my hunch is none of them) This all driven by the date the direct debit gets taken - which in my case is the same date as the bill is produced so no wonder the billing application thinks the worse. This has been going on for several months. All Direct Debit schemes are slow to react to changes (up to 2 months) so a robust method of determining future debits are necessary. This is a fairly serious shortcoming which the programmers cannot fix themselves, it needs a requirement change from the bean counters.

On the In house display there are displays for “Estimated Electricity Bill” and “Estimated Gas Bill” - I have no idea as to what period that these refer to as they just seem to be continually updated and never reset ( I would have hoped it would be for the current contract period - it plainly is not so) So no use whatsoever.

@mikeh51wrote:

on my latest bill (this week sometime) it said please pay another £2 a month. I look on my on line account this morning and its says reduce your payment by £6 a month.

I believe this anomaly is because the Billing System now operates on a daily basis. It takes that calculation and projects it forward to the end of your contract. It’s the “delta” of that with your Monthly payment figure which automatically re-calculates if you’re paying enough or too much.

The algorithm is too “harsh” and needs some more digital filtering to get the estimate better.

Although it’s a different topic, you might want to look at the graph I posted here to answer another question. It shows the monthly payment cycles against the actual energy usage.

I realise that the later moderator comment states that my graph isn’t quite correct, but until someone from the Billing Team would like to explain why, it’s the best I can do in order to reflect what seems to actually be happening!

I got the same two messages on Friday 04.12.20, one for gas and one for electricity. I too have noticed that the gas history data is no longer updating. No half hourly readings for gas, and no historical readings since about when the two messages came in. Electricity is working just fine.