Is it possible to re-enroll a SMETS2 smart meter that was made 'dumb' by an engineer on site?

Hi there @mrrodge ,

I’m Blastoise186, one of the forum volunteers here. :)

Bit of a tricky one this one… Who is your current supplier by the way?

Depending on how the smart functionality was disabled, it may be possible to restore it but I can’t say for sure. Could you show us some photos of the meters please and we’ll see if we can figure out your options.

Thanks!

Hmm… As I suspected…

It looks like the supplier might have decommissioned the Comms Hub (and possibly the entire Site) with SMETS Commands. Either that, or there’s a WAN failure which I find unlikely given you’re on the Arqiva WAN.

@Lukepeniket_OVO just curious, but is it possible for your sekrit engineer-only DCC app thingy to re-commission devices that have been decommissioned with the Decommission Device command? I’m not asking if you’re able to do it right now of course, just whether it can be done!

Thanks for the info, much appreciated. I've everything crossed at the minute…

Struggling to get my head around how it's possible to brick nearly new meters to the point they need replacing… it seems so wasteful. Time, money, fuel, materials etc.

Forgot to mention, we're with Octopus.

Fingers crossed for Luke then, thanks.

Long story with the wi-fi. I actually run my own ZigBee network for iot so manually configure the channels on that and my wi-fi to keep them separate. As I understand it I think the ZigBee on the meter roams to maintain separation automatically (not standard ZigBee), so my theory is it tried to avoid the channel my ZigBee network is on and crashed into the wi-fi frequency.

My access point was on the wall directly behind the meter cupboard so I think that could have been the culprit as well.

Hindsight tells me I shouldn't have complained now as I reckon the engineer just came and 'dumbed' it as I wasn't that bothered about the smart features at the time and wanted to preserve my iot (it was my security system).

Now obviously we have the EV and a huge cost increase coming the smart meter takes priority. If the wi-fi goes again, I'll fix it some other way!

Oh and I’m afraid Luke isn’t allowed to attempt to commission your site again, partially because you’re not with OVO and also because technically he’s not supposed to remote commission anything that’s not directly in front of him.

He can offer advice that might help though!

Well, there’s your problem. BT hubs are terrible. I’m not even going to use the words I want to use because while I can bypass the automated filters, the human moderators would yell at me… :)

But at the same time… If I wasn’t allowed to bypass the AutoMod, then half my comments would end up being swallowed by the spam filter and I’d have to wait for a human moderator to release them. XD

Let me show you how I’ve got some of my UniFi config set up, as it might help you avoid problems again. This config worked great at a charity I used to be at, so if you replicate it I’m hoping it’ll work for you too. Feel free to set the 5GHz band to 160MHz if you want to though!

Something like this for all your Wi-Fi networks should make it ZigBee HAN friendly for the most part. All your ZigBee stuff should play nice with the ZigBee HAN as well, but please expect some temporary weirdness as it all settles down again.

Thanks - much appreciated.

I just need to know it can be done - at the moment Octopus just want to replace the meters and won't come out because they say they don't have any meters to install. It's been like this for months now and we're getting desperate, so I'm trying to argue that they can send someone to press the buttons again because there's nothing actually wrong with the meters, so no need to wait for stock.

Their argument is that it's not possible to make them smart again when they've been made dumb, which I'm struggling to believe.

They did originally work and our neighbours all have them, so no WAN issue.

I suspect that this might constitute fraud and would at least be an infringement of Ofgem rules and the suppliers’ legally-binding standard licence conditions. You have a contract with your supplier to provide electricity at specific rates and (in your case) at specific times. They cannot legally vary these without giving reasonable notice, so you have time to find an alternative arrangement. 

One of the beauties of the smart meter network is the ability to apply changes remotely, e.g. tariff changes, software updates and configuration changes. These powers are strictly regulated, but of course mistakes are sometimes made. A visiting engineer can also get something wrong, but every supplier has a duty to ensure that everything is working properly.  

Your fears are groundless.

The fear I was referring to was “they can also, should they want to fleece the customer, charge them day rate tariff for night rate electricity usage in the future again (basically, whenever they want, resetting it when they want ...” This is what won’t ever happen, although, as I mentioned, mistakes can happen. 

I’m not taking anyone’s side. If there was a billing error on your account (“the provider was charging me day rate tariff …”, presumably for night-time usage), the supplier should have rectified it as soon as you drew attention to it and re-billed the account accordingly. Is this not what happened?

the supplier should have rectified it as soon as you drew attention to it and re-billed the account accordingly. Is this not what happened?

Not yet.  I guess it eventually will happen.  But how they would apportion the day time reads versus night time reads is also quite subjective.  I thought they’d use the long usage history of my dual rate tariff whilst the meter used to work properly with my previous provider - using my closing meter reads with the previous provider (since the error crept in ever since I switched to the new provider), but they want to record the usage for just a week after their engineer has visited the property and checked the meter.  I do not know why they are waiting for the engineer’s visit anyway since they now pretty much know very well it was misconfiguration at their end and which they have corrected by sending an update remotely to the smart meter.  So, no, not rectified as soon as it was brought to their attention and unclear whether I’m going to get a fair refund anyway.  No apologies, no owing up to their mistake, nothing.  Great reluctance to even acknowledge they updated the configuration remotely to fix this.  Initially, reluctant to even acknowledge that the mistake was at their end and presumption that I should be charged even more for night reads not advancing.

 there is NO downgrade path.

Oh welll, shoving something down customers’ throats without the customer having any semblance of control over it. Every update sent to the smart meter must clearly say what it’s changing, what the old and new values are in the update in case any configuration values are changing and how the update affects the function of the meter; I would personally say it should require customer approval as well.  It hasn’t been thought through to safeguard customer interests - the recourse at law is a big roadblock for the customers because a legal redressal is never easy to obtain - too much time and effort needed (and still no guarantee/assurance that it would succeed anyway).

It is what it is.  Resigned to this fate.  I fail to see how the smart meters add value (for the humble customer) so far, other than helping the provider with a very detailed view of how electricity is used in various customer’s premises hour-by-hour (actually, half-hourly updates - a requirement of the new tariff), which, in propaganda, is supposed to help the providers greatly optimise the infrastructure at their end in the future but actually would invariably be used to arrive at novel tariffs which would be more beneficial to the provider than the customer (once they ascertain what the ‘indispensable’ usage times are, they’d start charging more for those periods - this is how free-market economy works so it’s bound to happen sooner or later).  It is already known what the times for peak demands in usage are at a grid/macro level, general usage patterns are known very well at the macro level.

But it feels like I have effectively managed to hijack the thread’s original intent, so I’ll not post about it anymore.  The intent behind my original post was to merely point out there can be downsides of the so-called ‘smart’ meter, it’s not all hunky-dory and therefore maybe the OP should re-consider enabling the ‘smarts’ in their smart meter.