How far apart can my meters be to allow a smart meter upgrade?

Of course it would be ideal if every meter exchange could be carried out first time, but there can never be a guarantee that this would happen. If you’ve followed the sagas of some of the other customers who have come to this forum for guidance, or even in despair, you will see that there are all sorts of obstacles that the poor meter engineer couldn’t have foreseen.

For example, there is a customer whose incoming supply cable carries all three phases; two of the phases are used to supply the neighbouring properties on either side. The incomer is the responsibility of the electricity distribution company, and the three neighbours might each have a different electricity supplier. The meter engineer can’t do his stuff without interrupting the supply to the neighbours, and of course he can’t do that without giving adequate notice. 

Another’s meter is housed in a meter room in a block of flats. When it was originally set up, the electricity supply was in the hands of the electricity board, so all the meters were identical and neatly laid out with trunking to conceal the plethora of cables. Now this customer’s meter is due for replacement, but the modern smart meter he was expecting to get is too big to fit between the trunking. A creative solution is needed, but it can’t be deployed there and then. If the trunking has to be modified, that has to be the landlord’s headache. It might be possible to mount the two parts of the meter (one on top of the other) separately, but that requires an extender which just isn’t available at the moment. 

A meter engineer is not (necessarily) an electrician. He is trained to remove and install meters. He can also spot potential dangers with the electrical installation and take whatever action is necessary to have them mitigated by an appropriate party. He can’t usually fix things himself, so the meter exchange will in many cases like this have to be aborted. He isn’t normally a radio technician, either. If once a smart meter has been mounted, it fails to connect to the smart meter network, there’s not much an ordinary meter engineer can do. 

There are now something over 35 million smart meters in Britain. I’m sure that most of them have been installed without drama of any kind, and the proportion of difficult installations must be really tiny. No-one can give the guarantee you’re asking for, but that shouldn’t stop you going ahead. A glass half-full is always more appetizing that one half-empty. 

With over 30 million meters in the UK, it’s also physically and logically impossible to train engineers on literally every possibility - let alone equip them with a lorry full of parts.

There’s only so much capacity, so they’re often trained for the 99% of setups, with a few covering the remaining 1%.

I the fitters are trained to do 99%  of cases, why do 20% require repeat visits? re you trying to say that it would take a lorry load of parts to complete 

Of course there will be few extreme example but most of the issues are foreseeable - I have researched this well and I see the same things cropping up time and again. There is no learning.

Hence 20% of installations need 2 or more visits. And somewhere between 10 and 20% of installed smart meters do not function or not function properly (depending on how you define function), with some customers waiting up to 6 months for a fix (if they get one at all)

and if the fitter is not an electrician, I have to question whether they should be tampering with elec meters never mind gas ones

As we said, with 30 million+ installs, it’s inevitable that some won’t work - getting perfection in anything just isn’t possible. I think you need to manage your expectations a bit and try to be a bit more reasonable with your demands, otherwise you may struggle to make any progress.

my expectations are based on data - 20% need 2 or more visits. 20%of meters do not work or do not work properly. That is the problem which you actually seem to want to deny. 20% is not some its 20%, a lot!!!!

And to repeat, they have been at this for 14 years. Things have not improved, no learning and as far as I see can see no desire to learn or improve

Many of those second visit cases are down to reasons that could not have been foreseen - such as the customer not disclosing certain stuff or bad records from the past e.g. legacy suppliers not documenting things properly.

A Smart Meter is generally considered “working” if it’s fulfilling the primary function - taking meter readings and providing a way to read the meter locally. Everything beyond that is secondary. The % of meters that fail to do the primary function is barely any.

Most, perhaps, but not all. I don’t think the examples I gave are ‘extreme’ - perhaps just unusual, and indeed not foreseeable.
  

I’d like to see your documentation for this statistic - I’ve not heard it before. Would you mind sharing the source?
  
 

Dentists are not doctors, but we trust them to carry out medical and surgical interventions in their specialist area. Do you think an ordinary neighbourhood electrician would know how to install a smart electricity meter? Or a gas-safe plumber to install a smart gas meter? No, right? Installing and configuring a smart meter is no more tampering than triple bypass surgery is tampering with your heart. It’s a speciality like so many others in this complicated age we live in.

yea, all those customers and consumer organisations and surveys are wrong. Real world my friend, not assumptions and unverifiable excuses. But you have the last word, I’m out. This forum is as big a waste of time as suppliers when it comes to real help