Howdy ​@AxIan !

The simple answer is that this particular meter has partial support for Economy 7. It can switch between the Peak and Off-Peak rate for the purposes of Billing and Meter Readings, but cannot physically switch the circuits on/off for you. For the parts the Meter can do, it can be reconfigured remotely.

The simplest solution if you need that would be to use your own timers on whatever you want to run only during Off-Peak, as that’d require the least wiring/re-wiring.

Thank you for your reply. I wouldn’t be happy putting a 3.5KW heater through a timer switch.

The system originally had a proper economy 7 meter with two readings and it did switch the supply to the storage heaters on and off. So all the wiring is there. But somewhere along the line a tenant - withOUT my (the landlord’s) permission had this smart meter was installed. That can’t have been ideal for the tenant but now that the tenant ha gone I need to contact OVO to have them come out and put in a proper ‘switching’ meter.

Which brings me to another question - what kind of OVO engineer would install this meter on a house that had electric storage heating? Basically ignoring (or tying together?) the storage heater circuit?

I need more photos of what’s around the meter to advise on that

Sorry. At the moment that’s the only picture I have.

Inside the house all the storage heaters are powered, ie are charging, 24 hours a day so I assumed that would mean that the engineer simply tied the storage heater circuit and the normal circuits together all from the standard meter.

IIRC the meter swap would have been like-for-like - I really don’t think OVO would leave a meter tail dangling…

​@Lukepeniket_OVO got a free moment to dig this one?

By the way, if the tenant had control of the supply i.e. was paying OVO (or another supplier) directly, legally speaking they do not require landlord consent to upgrade to Smart Meters.  But we - as the Forum Volunteers - still recommend letting the landlord know as a courtesy*. Once it’s in, it’s in and there is no downgrade path. Your only meter swap option would be a Five-Terminal Smart Meter.

*My landlord approved the request on the basis they consider it to be essential meter maintenance and commented they didn’t need to be notified again. It’s on their “automatically approved” list meaning I can just do the upgrade and not require prior approval. They did say thanks for the heads up though.

I don’t think there’s any ‘tail dangling’.

It’s just that I’ve owned this house for 30 years and originally there was a meter with two displays. Inside the house there’s two fuse boxes. One for the storage heaters and one for the rest of the house, lights, sockets etc.

10 years ago I rented it out. Now the tenant has moved out and I see that a pay as you go smart meter has been installed. I topped up £10 and all the storage heaters started charging middle of the day.

Inside the house the fuse boxes are still there but both circuits are life 24/7

Ok, Luke is a meter engineer himself and can advise further. But if you can get those photos, it’ll help a ton.

You should be able to request to move back to Pay Monthly at least - this won’t require a meter swap as the meter can just be remotely reconfigured for Pay Monthly.

Yeah ok a lot here, The engineer should not have disconnected the e7 if it was still in use which leads me to believe the tenant has asked for it. 

If you want I can absolutely support an appointment being made so you can have E7 Load switching again?

I’ve got your account up ready. Cheers

Just how many Magic Dashboards do you have access to exactly? XD

I don’t mind that a smart meter has been installed. I just don’t understand why THIS meter was installed that is not capable of switching the storage heater circuit on/off at the correct times of day.

I just spoke to OVO. There’d be no cost to have a proper economy 7 meter installed. Just wonder why they installed the wrong one when the right one wouldn’t have cost any extra

Gotcha. Luke can help you get that fix started. Just give the word and watch the magic he can pull off. :)

​@AxIan really happy youve got this sorted. Yeah very unusual bud but I can only think it must have been a tenant request. Nowadays we are more stingent with it all, ‘if theres off peak when you arrive there will be off peak when you leave’.

Apologies for the run around but glad its sorted.

​@Blastoise186 you wouldnt believe what im capable of nowadays...

You’ve got my account up? Oh. Did you get that from the serial number?

Yeah. it’s weird. I have no idea why the tenant would have requested that the storage heaters come on/charge all day at peak rate.

Having said that the cost per unit of the e7 ‘day’ is higher than a non-e7 rate. Could it actually be cheaper over the year to just pay the standard non-e7 rate 24/7 on the basis that heating is switched of most of year anyway?

Or get a tariff that doesn’t cost anything to leave. And have the ‘normal’ tariff for most of the year then when it starts getting cold out cancel that tariff and switch to e7 then in spring switch back again?

anyone do that?

Yep, Luke has powers that I don’t possess myself. Getting your account details from the Meter Serial Number is one of them - it only works because he’s OVO Staff (well, an OVO Smart Meter Engineer to be exact) whereas Forum Volunteers like me can’t do that because we’re customers. Luke is effectively one of our secret weapons here on the Forum. His full powers are… Classified...

We promise you we use that power for good and not evil though! Mind you, it does also prove useful in the cases where someone thinks they can get away with meter tampering… A simple MSN lookup and BLAM! Caught! :)

Urrf… As much as I want to suggest that… It gets messy. The industry doesn’t handle that kind of tarrif flipping very well so I can’t recommend it.

I don’t live in that house - looking at the serial of ‘that’ meter you can probably use ‘your powers’ to see into my OVO account and see were I actually do live :)

But the idea of ‘tariff flipping’ occurred to me while I was trying to understand why a tenant would specifically ask for that kind of meter to be installed. On the other hand (I hope he doesn’t read this) but the tenant wasn’t the sharpest knife in drawer so I don’t think that Tariff Flipping would have occurred to him.
 

When I first bought the house I seem to remember that peak rate E7 was around 16p per unit and night time rate was around 8p (or even lower) so e7 was certainly the way to go for a street with no gas.
 

But looking at current rates and although there is a difference between e7 peak and e7 off peak it’s not that cheap anymore.

I’d need to do some maths but I wonder is it really worth having E7 any more?

If you have storage/immersion heaters, it is likely that you will want E7/E10. They can be horribly expensive to run without it.

​@Firedog ​@BPLightlog and ​@Nukecad are better at the number crunching than me. I’ll ask them to stop by.

​@Lukepeniket_OVO might be able to pop back today to advise  

Monies wise youve got to use approximately 2/3 of your daily energy usage overnight for the off peak tariff to be viable which is definitely easily achieved with the use of storage heaters…

But you are correct if you keep them off most of the year it would probably be cheaper to go onto a single rate bearing in mind the immersion usage aswell!!!!

Our engineers would not be able to make your off peak fuseboards 24/7 but we would fit a way that the electrician could connect it all up

​@Blastoise186 Field Operations Team Manager South Wales thank you very much ;-)

Customer Services say that we’d need a new, multi-rate meter in order to switch to a dual-rate tariff, but they’re no longer being produced?  New smart meters are being rolled out, and they’re single rate. Seems odd to me…  Would other suppliers have a different answer?

Hi ​@jgmdavies, a warm welcome to the OVO Forum!

Thanks for your post. Without having heard the conversation it’s hard to work out whether you’ve been mis-advised or not. To confirm, we are installing economy 7 smart meters, however at the moment we don’t have the capability to remotely switch a single rate smart meter to be dual rate. If you don’t mind, could I ask why it is you want economy 7? This will normally end up a more expensive option, unless you are using a lot of electricity at night. Generally, economy 7 is set up because a property has night time storage heaters - do you have storage heaters?

You should also find some useful information in this post:

Thanks Ben.  No, we don’t have storage heaters.  A plumber recommended a dual-rate tariff because of our immersion heater, but commented that we should do the maths - so I was trying to get a tariff quote just to do that.

I can certainly see that Economy 7 may not be worth it if the peak-time charge is higher than with single-rate - we have no gas here, so the electricity cost is dominated by ‘awake time’ heating (electric boiler).

Cheers,

Jim