Gas supply into meter but house is off supply - question mark on display screen of my SMETS2 UniFlo Flonidan smart meter?

Thanks, hopefully attaching some meter photos now

Thanks. That worked perfectly.

Uh oh... Looks like the meter has a fault. You see that question mark in the top left corner? That's not meant to happen, ever.

I recommend calling OVO first thing in the morning and requesting an Emergency Meter Exchange (EMEX for short). If you let the Support Team know that you have asked for help on the forum and had advice from me, that will speed things up. I'm well known to the team and my name is familiar to many agents. The photos you have shown me will definitely help as well.

Once reported, someone should arrive same day to investigate and fix this. Sorry for the trouble!

Thanks, I’ll call in the morning once they open. 

Do you think it could just be the known fault that it can’t connect to the smart electric meter that is inside, or would it be most likely to be something else?

I don't think it's comms related. These meters are designed to be able to run standalone if they have to.

Some other fault has probably either forced the valve closed or caused the meter to have to close the valve for unknown reasons. This is pretty rare to happen for such a new meter.

I do have some good news though. OVO has deployed a new phone system last week. You no longer need to press any buttons to reach the Support Team. Simply wait 20 seconds and the system will put you through. :)

To be honest, as far as I know it’s extremely rare for a Flonidan UniFlo or Flonidan SciFlo to fail so soon after the installation - they’re really well built by Flonidan over in Denmark after all! It’s the Landis+Gyr junk that you have to really watch out for. Those things have been known to fail a LOT more often than others - I think it’s always been an issue with L+G gas meters, even before Smart Meters existed. That one in the video was a four year old S1 L+G G370 Ultrasonic which was installed by British Gas by the way, in case you wanted to look it up.

So yeah, I’m not concerned if the engineer says that they’ve had to replace loads of L+G G370 gas meters due to failures (we already know they’re really terrible!) - me and Transparent are more interested in the failure rate of the Flonidan UniFlo and Flonidan SciFlo than anything else.

On the plus side, Flonidan has launched a new hardware revision of the UniFlo with support for Dual-Band Comms Hubs. This is really good news, since it will help to solve the range issues. You might get lucky! And it seems they’ve also made it so that if there’s no WAN connection at the time of install, the meter will keep trying to connect and commission every 55 minutes for up to three months. Clearly the result of feedback I suspect - and a really nice feature too.

You’d need a Dual-Band Comms Hub to fully benefit from these two upgrades (and existing ones might not be replaced), but at the very least, it should provide more options going forward for new installs - and also for future installs where S1 meters are replaced with S2.

Thenks @Blastoise186 and @Transparent . The installation engineer has just been. He didn’t have any of the smart meters that could be fitted but installed a regular one and I’m back up and running again. He said it happens a lot that smart meters fail but wasn’t more specific about this model.