Hi @wetandwindy ,

You can also do it via Live Chat at https://ovoenergy.com/help or in the app.

Thanks for the quick reply.

Perhaps then it would be good to amend the outdated or incorrect automated email which points to a non existent link so others like me don’t hit the same issue.

Thanks again

That link works fine for me. It may be that your browser’s privacy or security settings are getting in the way. 

If you have the OVO Energy app on your smart phone, the same options are available there.

I’m really curious to know why you’d want to opt out of half-hourly readings - your meter will still record them and save them for a year. Which option will you go for, and - if you’re willing to say so - why?

Works for me as well.

I worry if you opt out of half hourly readings it simply makes all ovo customer bills a bit more expensive as it limits OVOs ability to buy the right amount of electricity every half an hour.

Longer term it also makes it more difficult to balance the electricity grid which isn't great for anyone if we end up burning more fossil fuels or importing more electricity.

Also it won't be long before all the good value tariff are "time of use" and will need half hourly readings.

Of courses it is up to you if you don't mind about these sort of things.

Should it be normalized that an “Individuals” home’s usage is recorded for every half an hour ?  I think by now the electricity companies with decades of  data sets / trends and understanding network grid load ,  leveraged against millions of customers can work out when people put the kettle on.

 

Works for me as well.

I worry if you opt out of half hourly readings it simply makes all ovo customer bills a bit more expensive as it limits OVOs ability to buy the right amount of electricity every half an hour.

Longer term it also makes it more difficult to balance the electricity grid which isn't great for anyone if we end up burning more fossil fuels or importing more electricity.

Also it won't be long before all the good value tariff are "time of use" and will need half hourly readings.

Of courses it is up to you if you don't mind about these sort of things.

Yes i have tried again on a different setup and it does work i had to disable all of the ad tracker blocking software and run the browser with everything switched off.

You can read the other point above Jeffus. But to answer your ‘good value tariff’ does that mean “how long you use it for” or “when you used it” or both ? How can one, choose a good tariff ? Every person has a different requirement. And could we see people being penalized for using ‘too much’ at the wrong time ? The carbon footprint idea is not as simple as how much electricity you can use. How would a single person ever be able to match that of a large family. They could literally buy a V8 sports car and do donuts in it all day and not match that in an entire lifetime .. but i get the concept, it’s a worthy goal i guess

Which comes to the final point. Is there such a thing as a carbon footprint for the actual network Grid ? As someone who has worked in telecomms sector i can assure you there is more electricity being used if you are ‘polling’ millions of devices every half an hour vs 1 day. The raw data the servers are processing, the network relays, the antenna stations etc..

And so my question is why not poll every 5 seconds ? besides the potential health ramifications as that would be like having a mobile phone constantly broadcasting continuously in close proximity for hours on end everyday. Considering people get bad headaches on mobiles after just short usage. Presumably the 30minuets is deemed a low enough amount for the correct usage metrics.

But it’s great you still have the option.

Thanks for your time.

The meter transmits a heartbeat every 10 seconds anyway regardless of those settings, so you’re not actually reducing the radio emissions by doing that - it makes no difference to electricity consumption either. While the readings are taken every 30 minutes, they are only sent back to the Supplier once a day.

The market trades on a half-hourly basis, so it makes sense the data matches this too.

As for health effects? They have never been proven. Every study has basically come back negative despite throwing everything but the kitchen sink at it.

In fact, I sleep less than 1m from a Ubiquiti UniFi nanoHD every night and have done so for about two years now - I’ve not suffered at all. Even with ALL of this kit running 24/7/365 in my flat!

And all of my Access Points are running at almost the maximum Transmission Power legally permitted in the UK by Ofcom - 30dBm - and is double the power of basically any ISP router ever dished out. Yet I’m still totally fine despite all the Wi-Fi being blasted at me from close proximity as I’m never more than 5m from an AP. If my Ubiquiti UniFi kit can’t kill me, then neither can Smart Meters nor mobile phones.

Good to hear.

If you read the FAQ that page refers to, you’ll see that knowing how much electricity customers consume each half-hour will help suppliers work out how much to buy in advance, ultimately saving everyone cash. As regards an individual’s usage, read how his privacy is protected on this page: Protecting data on Britain's smart meter network.

I wondered if this might not figure in your reasoning. Suppliers don’t poll meters every half-hour (Hh). It’s usually twice a day, in the early morning. One request is for the midnight meter register reading(s), which you would be able to see on your readings page. The other is for the previous day’s 48 packets of Hh usage data. It’s a tiny amount of data, compressed and encrypted and sent in a single burst. It would amount to a few MB of data for all  32 million smart meters, if they were all set to send Hh data. 

You can see all sorts of statistics about the smart meter network on the DCC’s site. 

The meter transmits a heartbeat every 10 seconds anyway regardless of those settings, so you’re not actually reducing the radio emissions by doing that - it makes no difference to electricity consumption either. While the readings are taken every 30 minutes, they are only sent back to the Supplier once a day.

The market trades on a half-hourly basis, so it makes sense the data matches this too.

As for health effects? They have never been proven. Every study has basically come back negative despite throwing everything but the kitchen sink at it.

In fact, I sleep less than 1m from a Ubiquiti UniFi nanoHD every night and have done so for about two years now - I’ve not suffered at all. Even with ALL of this kit running 24/7/365 in my flat!

 

And all of my Access Points are running at almost the maximum Transmission Power legally permitted in the UK by Ofcom - 30dBm - and is double the power of basically any ISP router ever dished out. Yet I’m still totally fine despite all the Wi-Fi being blasted at me from close proximity as I’m never more than 5m from an AP. If my Ubiquiti UniFi kit can’t kill me, then neither can Smart Meters nor mobile phones.

Well, there is a different between being killed and being slowly cooked over a number of decades, you might look like a lobster in 20 years . However, That was not my main concern. Many people do however report headaches from using mobile phones, but as Jeffers has said in the reply, the amount of data the smart meter transmits is positively tiny in comparison Still it is interesting to know how often it polls as a matter of interest, so thanks for explaining that and the other ways in which this works.

I think its important to know more about the technology and your comment is very helpful in this regard.

Excellent, thanks for the information. Yes i had assumed there was more traffic flow with these devices and that they would poll very often. The more you learn

Thanks Guys

*edit i forgot to add. When you take into consideration the things you both mention. the option might actually cause more confusion than it helps.

You will have realized that this set of options conflates two distinct processes. Sadly, they’ve been cobbled together in many places and lumped under a generic term ‘readings’. 

There are three choices for a ‘reading’ schedule: half-hourly, daily or monthly. This is what I think they involve:
 

The first is the most useful for everyone concerned. The second makes live billing really helpful, with a new accurate balance each day so there’s no doubt how the account is doing. You only have to subtract yesterday’s reading from today’s to get the daily usage, which will be very close to the sum of the 48 Hh figures*. The third is the minimum required for a monthly billing schedule, which is the only one available to OVO customers.

Ofgem have laid down the law about this, so that Hh data is the default for new customers/meters. 

*   My own records have never seen a difference of more than ±0.001kWh for any single day or over a longer recent period (recent because I only looked back a couple of months).