How can I change the reading frequency of my smart meters? I have half hourly for gas and daily for electricity...

Hi,  I’ve recently moved to ovo and I have smart  meters. 

However you are only taking the smart meter readings at the end of the month  (which means you are using estimates for my bills).  Can anything be done so you read the smart meters more frequently?  

Cheers  Terry

Hello @oldterry2 

A lot of Smart meter questions recently which I believe I need to take a course on. Maybe something OVO can assist me on.

For the meantime. My good friend @Transparent Is a legend when it comes to Smart meters. He may be able to help you

Hi @oldterry2 and welcome to the Forum.

So I’m puzzled by this. What is the reason you think that OVO are only sending a SMETS-Read command once per month?

Is this because you’re not seeing daily usage data when you log in to your MyOVO page?

Do you know whether you have SMETS1 meters (manufactured by Secure) or SMETS2 (made by either Aclara or EDMI)?

@oldterry2 @ITGeek123 @Transparent - I’ve moved your messages over to this topic, it’ll be easier to find your great responses!

@oldterry2 - It sounds like the meters are set to only take 1 reading per month (at the end of the month) but we can change that to daily or even half-hourly. This would eliminate the possibility of estimated bills.

If you’re interested, drop us a message on Facebook, Twitter and our Help centre has online chat!

Well I didn’t think the new Billing System allowed a Smart Meter to be read less often than daily. The current default is a SMETS_read command being sent shortly after midnight, with the retrieval of all data in half-hour chunks.

If the previous day’s SMETS_read command had been unsuccessful, then that data will also be retrieved at the same time.

Thanks.

 Well, the meter reading page history only shows reading on the last day of the month, plus estimates that are used to produce the bills.

 (sorry for the delay in replying -PC problems).

 Hmmm, I had alreay sent an email to hello about this, and they said the smart meter team would fix it.  However nothing has happened and I’ve had another estimated bill this month.  I just wondered if there was anything I could do.

Thanks (sorry for the delay in replying)

That’s fine @oldterry2 - the email will be in the “ToDo Queue” awaiting attention by the SMETS Team.

However, they’ve not currently got access to their lab at OVO’s HQ due to the pandemic crisis, so they’re “working from home”.

You’ve done exactly the right thing by posting here. I too would now like to learn what happens if a Smart Meter is only read once per month. I wonder whether they retrieve only the cumulative total since the last successful read. Or possibly they might get 1440 half-hourly readings which have been awaiting collection.

An update. 

As well as posting here, I also replied to the e-mail from hello asking if there was any progress. 

On the afternoon of the 16th, I got an email saying my readings were now being sent every half hour, and that would appear online after a few day.

I can now report that the electricity is being read every half hour (according to the usage page), while the gas is being read daily (rather than every half hour),  but that is frequent enough for my billing.

Thanks to everyone who helped.  Terry

Good to hear this, @oldterry2. There is an option to read the meter daily rather than half hourly, so there’s a possibility that it’s been changed to this. It might be worth sending the team an email to double check.

Cheers!

  I reported this to hello, they said that the gas had been set to half hour readings on the 15th.   So presumably either the note is wrong, or the mechanism for setting the reading rate  is erratic.

Cheers  Terry

Keep a watch on this over the next few days @oldterry2 and see if anything changes.

Just so this is clear… even if the granularity of meter readings is half-hourly, they are still only picked up once per day, just after midnight. We don’t want someone else reading this Topic to be asking OVO for their meter to be read every 30 minutes. It doesn’t work like that (yet)!

Will do. 

 Well just to keep you informed.  There has been no further change - the gas is still on daily readings, and the records show it was changed (supposedly) to half hour ones.   

Thanks for the update @oldterry2 

I reported my own lack of Usage Data last Friday (24apr) and provided the link to the screenshot I posted over here.

Today I received an email reply from Customer Services stating that they’d looked at the Forum Topic and didn’t understand the problem.

I’ve replied to that email, included a number of screenshots and clarified that there is a wider issue of customers having Smart Meter data missing.

I have specifically asked

• that my email is forwarded to the programming team (in London)
• that they don’t just fix my little problem and think they’ve solved it!

@Tim_OVO is aware of the extent of what us customers are reporting, and I have no doubt he’ll be adding his weight behind the scenes.

May I just clarify, in your case Terry,

I assume you’re seeing a daily histogram like this…?

What happens when you click on one of those blue vertical bars?

• Anything at all?
• Error message?
• Blank screen?

Thanks.

Transparent wrote:

 

@Tim_OVOis aware of the extent of what us customers are reporting, and I have no doubt he’ll be adding his weight behind the scenes.

 

May I just clarify, in your case Terry,

I assume you’re seeing a daily histogram like this…?

What happens when you click on one of those blue vertical bars?

• Anything at all?
• Error message?
• Blank screen?

 

 On the  daily usage bars  if I click a bar I get the date plus the use (Kwh ) and cost.

 On the electricity half hour bars I get the time plus use (kWh).

 does that help?

Erm… @oldterry2 - so you can click on the electricity half-hour bars. Correct?

Are you saying that you get that histogram on electricity, but not on gas?

But OVO send a single overnight command, and pick up all the readings from gas and electricity in one go.

So the issue isn’t that the half-hour readings aren’t being collected, but rather that the online Usage Histogram doesn’t allow you to see them. Is that right?

Going back to your electricity graphs for a moment….

When you hover the pointer over the bar, you should see the time and the kWh.

But I was asking what happens if you click on the bar. That should change from a histogram to show a line graph. Is this what you see?

If you are indeed seeing the two different types of graph (as above) for electricity, what do you see for gas?

Well I can’t see them in the histogram - but I don’t know whether the readings being collected are for half hours or just the day’s total.

Going back to your electricity graphs for a moment….

When you hover the pointer over the bar, you should see the time and the kWh.

  That is correct.

But I was asking what happens if you click on the bar. That should change from a histogram to show a line graph

 sorry, I misunderstood..

  If I click on a bar in the  electricity histogram showing days then I do not get a line graph - what I then get is the  histogram of the half hour readings for that day. 

If you are indeed seeing the two different types of graph (as above) for electricity, what do you see for gas?

for gas if I click on a bar in the  histogram giving daily usage - there is no change  (there is a fleeting message saying ‘loading’ ) but the histogram does not change.

Hi @oldterry2 - Sorry I missed your reply. I didn’t get an email alert that you’d posted one

Your explanation (above) of what you see is perfectly clear to me.

• the electricity graphing is different to mine. Your most detailed graph is a histogram whilst mine is a line graph.
• You don’t get the most detailed graph for gas usage

I recommend you email then and provide them with the URL to this discussion. Customer Services will then be able to forward the email straight to the programming team in London for further investigation.

 Well in the meantime,  at the end of last month, I had been onto ‘hello’ again and they said “ I have raised a case with our metering team to check if the meter has correctly been installed on your account as this may be the cause of your My OVO not displaying half hour readings.”  So I shall let that progress first, before following your suggestion. 

Thanks for that update @oldterry2 

Yes, the new OVO Billing software effectively acts as the interface to send commands and receive readings from your Smart Meters. So the response you’ve received suggests they first want to check that the correct protocols have been enabled on your Account.

That still doesn’t explain why we see different types of graph for electricity, but we can return to that issue once you actually have the full set of 48 readings/day being delivered for both meters.

My gas meter was changed to send half hourly readings on 14th April (according to OVO).  A month later I still don’t have access to half hourly gas readings.  I have no problem with half hourly electric, which I had asked for at the same time.

I’ve had several email exchanges with OVO and last Thursday they said it was sorted, and since then they have not responded to two further emails  What can be done to sort this out?