I’ve gone ahead and played one of my Joker Cards to see if Tim can find out more about these Frankenstein Meters. There’s someone in OVO’s internal teams who knows a lot about this stuff and even sent Tim a 100 page user manual for Raichu (my S2 Aclara SGM1411-B smart meter) the other day.

Hang in there for a bit and hopefully our friendly expert can give us more info. I’ll update my guide once I know more. :)

It’s great when you happen to know the Ancient Philosopher @Tim_OVO Sonius (13th Century BC)!

HI @bgreenwood2000 and @Brilldan 

As of yesterday I did get some new advice about these L&G meters:

 

Yes they look like some of the models of S2 L&G meters, but they’re not. They are S1, which can be identified by their separate communications hub (Trilliant in this case). 

S2 L&G smart meters will always have a form of comms hub attached to the top of the actual electricity smart meter. See this topic for the latest on when L&G S1 smart meters are scheduled to be upgraded:

Sorry for any confusion caused here, @Blastoise186 or myself will be updating this topic guide today with the latest. 

Thanks L&G for this E470 confusion fun.. :) 

Yup,

I’ve just had a chat with Tim about this, and it was a bit of a shocker! I’ve gone ahead and made some edits that should help to fix things up. My edits just now might not be perfect, but at least they’re (hopefully) a bit more accurate.

Good news is that me and Tim have now gone through and fixed the guide properly, so everything should now be accurate and a little bit more tidy.

If you spot any other mistakes, please feel free to let me, Tim or Jess know. We’ll get them fixed up if needed!

My landlord has granted consent for me to grab a photo of one of the other meters downstairs and add it to this guide. The image quality isn’t perfect as I agreed to blur it ever so slightly and to edit out private data. But it should be good enough. The weird attachment bolted to the hub was manufactured by Kaifa.

I’ve given my landlord a copy of this guide and they will be given the opportunity to view it soon. But as always, if you have more edge cases, we’d love to know about them!

I can’t believe I’ve just realised this. But it’s yet another example of how annoying Landis+Gyr are!

I’m going to ask @Tim_OVO and @Jess_OVO to chat with a certain friend of ours to verify first. But after realising that there’s another way to identify these Frankenstein S1 E470 meters, I want to look at making a slight tweak to the guide. This thing really does evolve as we go!

Anyway, my observations have made me suddenly realise that the proper S2 E470 seems to have both the A and B Buttons on the right hand side of the meter with the green A Button being stacked above the grey B Button. Meanwhile, the S1 Frankenstein E470 has the green A Button top right, with the white B Button bottom left. This is somewhat similar to the “proper” S1 E470 button layout where the green A Button is to the right of the display and the clear B Button is below the display.

I am so tempted to ask Landis+Gyr why they designed these things like this, because it really doesn’t make life any easier. Oh well…

Please don’t rely on this comment being accurate just yet. Since this would be a major change to the guide, I want to get it verified first before updating my guide. If you later see something similar to this comment up there, you can be confident that my theory is correct.

A good theory there, @Blastoise186 but looks like L and G haven’t made things so easy!

Our smart friends have given us the above example showing a SMETS 2 E470, with the button layout that we’ve seen on S1 meters in other setups. 

So the meters themselves really don’t give us any clues! The key difference seems to be the comms hub. Attached to the top of the meter and it’s a SMETS 2, anywhere else on the meter board and it’s a SMETS 1. Let’s hope we don’t find any examples which break this rule! 

Oh no! Not another weird curveball! 

What also doesn’t help much is the outdated product image on the L+G website. I’m pretty sure the one with the black display border isn’t really sold in the UK anymore… Right?

In that case, I’ve left my guide as-is for now without making that change. I’m glad I asked first!

Hello, me again - with the L&G ‘frankenstein’ meter which now turns out to be not so bad after all, but still S1.

We’ve been in our house 2 months now, and as yet no sign of the meter being adopted or whatever it’s called.  I asked Octopus Energy about it a few weeks ago - they said they had already started onboarding L&G meters, but couldn’t tell me when mine might be done.

What is exercising me is this: I’m on a time of use tariff (which I was on at the previous address) which relies on half hourly meter readings, which they are not getting - so at the moment they are not billing me.  I have read that smart meters store 13 months of data - does that apply to all of them? Will Octopus be able to bill me correctly so long as my meter is adopted within 13 months of the move?

Howdy!

Ah yes, I’ve heard of this scenario a few times. You should be extremely careful with certain types of Time-of-Use Tariff. Those that actively respond with different rates for every single half-hour period are a serious gamble and you risk being left significantly out of pocket if you get unlucky.

As far as I’m aware, yes. Both the S1 and S2 spec include data retention clauses for up to 13 months by default. But that doesn’t always mean the meter will retain full usage history for that entire period. As long as the data is still in memory, it is possible to retrieve it in-bulk using SMETS Commands. Apparently though, there’s been a lot of complaints about Octopus taking forever to backfill missing usage data and fix the back-billing by rebuilding basically all the billing data. You’ll probably end up with a huge bill all in one go. And this very much assumes Octopus ever manages to actually retrieve all the missing data and rebuild it sufficiently so that they can generate accurate bills. If this continues to be a problem, you may need to consider coming off ToU and switching to an alternative tariff type that’s not so dependent on working Smart Meters.

I also don’t have a crystal ball, so I’m afraid I can’t predict when specific meters will commence Enrolment & Adoption to DCC. L&G meters are especially annoying, because there were multiple networks being used for them - whereas pretty much all other meter brands only had one single network per brand. This makes predicting when any L&G meter might start to migrate basically… Impossible…

So yeah. In theory there is a solution but it’s more likely that an unobtainable crystal ball would be the only fix. Sadly, they don’t exist so there’s not much else you can do for now.

It’s the Go tariff I’m on - 5p/kWh from 00:30 to 04:30 and another rate for the rest of the time. That’s currently 14.5p for me, but with the way prices are rising, I’d me reluctant to let go of this tariff (fixed till March).  Prices are rising massively - a new customer would be paying 25p for the day rate.

Is there anywhere a lay person such as myself can see how far the industry as a whole is through the SMETS 1 enrolment process? Might give me some sort of a clue.  Or anything I can ask Octopus to get useful information?

As regards getting a big bill - I’m on a monthly direct debit but am keeping track of how much electricity I’m using and what that would cost if it was all charged at the higher rate - a worst case scenario, if you like.  I’m still in credit.

Gotcha, fair enough.

While picking up on specific meters is practically impossible, I believe it is indeed possible to get a rough idea of overall progress. That’s not too hard to get hold of!

SmartMe has a Technical page which is regularly updated with some useful stats for example, and there’s also the Network Data Dashboard on DCC which gets at least monthly updates for pretty much all the stats it reports on. I don’t think I can easily find the total count of S1 Meters that are currently active across all suppliers myself, but I can probably ask @Tim_OVO for help with that. He might be able to find someone who can pull the figures out of some kind of magic dashboard. 

Welcome back - @bgreenwood2000 and great question to ask about when your L+G meter is likely to be enrolled allowing it to communicate to all suppliers.

We’ve got the anticipated time frame for each meter type outlined here - in terms of L+G meters these may complete the process any time between now and March 2022. As suppliers we’re not able to specify when exactly your meter would complete the process as this is being managed by the Data and Communications Company (DCC) - although your supplier should let you know when your meter has been updated.

I’m surprised to hear that you’re not currently being billed for your usage and we wouldn’t be able to comment on how your half-hourly usage would be billed once the meters complete the enrolment process - I’d recommend checking in with your current supplier to confirm this. It might also be worth checking whether you’re able to submit meter readings manually in the meantime (as we’d recommend doing this for OVO members with non-communicating smart meters).

Hope this helps - and do keep us updated when you hear your meter is being enrolled, it’s really helpful to others who might also have a bit of a frankenstein L+G meter! 

Hi - late to this discussion, but I have a question about my model of L&G E470 meter.

I am pretty confident it is SMETS 2 / Series 3, but not 100%. It is described as Type 5533 - which there is very limited reference to on the internet as far as Google has found so far.

My question is whether this meter is able to deal with more than one tariff? - I can see the Type 5424 and Type 5394 both with YouTube videos showing they can. 

I have an Air Source Heat Pump, and I am keen to activate a tariff that gives me cheaper electricity at night for heating, e.g. Economy 7 or Economy 10 if those are still out there. There isn’t a separate circuit (like old night storage heaters might have), and I am happy to rely on programming them to come on at night. Can this meter deal with that?

Many thanks

Hey @Edgunn !

I'm on my phone, so this reply will be a lot shorter than usual. Hope that's OK with you!

You do indeed have SMETS2 there. I can tell because the communications hub is a SMETS2 WNC SKU1 Cellular unit. 

Your meter should be capable of economy seven. But you won't be able to have it automatically control circuits. It's just the bog standard type. You would be able to get the cheaper night rates however, as long as you're on the right kind of tariff.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any further questions. 

That's good news and as I'd hoped/understood - now just need to convince my supplier to think the same...! (And thanks for the rapid response!)

No worries. :)

We'll be here if you need us!

Just curious, but who is your supplier? You can name them here if you want to, we don't mind!

There's a clue on the photo... 🧐

Oh right. That one.

In that case, good luck convincing them. Let’s just say… I’m in the know...

@Blastoise186  As I suspect you may have guessed, I’ve just been on the phone again to Eon and they are adamant I will need to revert to an old-school dual tariff credit meter, before then re-upgrading to a smart dual tariff meter… I don’t know if this is simply a compatability between their billing systems and my current L&G meter that is preventing them from doing this, whilst other suppliers would be more compatible?

Would I have better luck with Ovo? (i.e. would they be able apply a dual tariff with my existing meter? Also - do you know if they offer Economy 10 or other evening/weekend type tariffs besides Economy 7 in this way at the moment - the added flex to heat the house for more than 7 hours overnight whilst still avoiding peak morning/early evening times would be be very helpful!

OVO can’t quite set you up for Economy 7 just yet, but that capability is confirmed to be on the way. Keep an eye on this forum for updates in that regard. If you already have E7 when you join OVO though, that is fully supported right now.

As for E.On Next, it’s basically because their systems are completely incapable of handling it properly. There’s no easy workaround without leaving them completely and jumping ship.

Hello there.

Can anyone please tell me how to read my gas/electric on my smart meter. I'm sorry if this question has been answered before but I am 79 years old and struggling.

I have attempted to add a photo EDMI meter.

Thank you

Hi @Brewer .. Taken from the Guide

Your Landis Gyr E470 smart meter should show your reading automatically on its display screen. If you can't see it very well, press the A button a few times until you see the words Total Act Import on the screen. Beneath that, you should see your reading. The screen will light up, for better visibility.

Are your meters not sending the readings themselves or do you just want to check ?

Also remember that there will be a separate meter for the gas 

From the photo, the HAN Signal to the meter seems to be working fine.

This looks like a normal electric meter. on a board. It is not a smart meter. Smart meter plugs into electric socket and stands alone, if mine is standard??? You have to apply to your gas/electric supplier for a smart meter. It does not cost you anything.