Welcome to the OVO Forum @KarenMcall50 !

If you could fill out your Profile for me, that would be great. It has a few sections in there which can help make it faster for us to offer the right advice. :)

This is a bit of a long one that might be a bit more of an answer than you expected, but I like to try and cover all bases.

I believe you’re talking about your In-Home Display here, as the smart meter itself won’t have a Budget feature. I’ve gone and grabbed the Kecleon Brothers for this, which are my two Chameleon IHD6 IHD’s that I’ve got paired up to my smart meter, just to make sure.

This is actually a feature that you can control yourself, rather than it being linked to your payments. While your monthly Direct Debit payments are split up into 12 equal payments, your usage definitely doesn’t stay the same every month!

The best way to use the Budget feature in your IHD is to think about much you’d be willing to spend on your energy each day/week/month/year on just the Standing Charges and Unit Rate portions alone (you can find these in Account on the IHD) - other charges such as VAT and any upgrades are applied later by OVO’s billing platform and the IHD won’t know about them. The clever trick though is that if you set a Daily budget in the IHD, it will automatically do some number crunching and set the Weekly, Monthly and Yearly budgets as well. They’re all interlocked so changing one updates the rest.

You’ll need to set it manually on the IHD though - it won’t set itself because it won’t know what the budget should be.

The budget is then based off your usage data that the IHD gets from your smart meter of course and it runs some number crunching to figure out how close to your budget you are. The calculations used are pretty similar to the ones used in MyOVO, albeit without the VAT and upgrades and done locally on your IHD rather than by a server that OVO is running.

You can also get alerts from the IHD if you go over your budget and see visual indicators as you get closer to it. If you find the alerts annoying though, you can silence them in the Settings under Alerts & Tones.

I hope this helps. If you’re unsure about anything, feel free to let me know.

Great question about the budget feature on your new Smart meter In-Home Display, @KarenMcall50.

As our community volunteer, @Blastoise186, has already expertly identified -

It might be worth using your Direct Debit amount as a guide to set a budget which aligns with your current monthly spend (bearing in mind that there will be a seasonal difference in your usage). There’s more advice in how to use this budget feature on our IHD guide.

Let us know how you get on using this feature - would be interesting to hear whether it has an impact on how mindfully you use energy - that’s the aim after all!