Rank 2

Moving to OVO Economy 10 (with or without storage heaters)

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
October 7, 2024
111 replies
5097 views

Has anyone successfully moved to Economy 10 with OVO and was your experience?

A few weeks ago I received an email from OVO about the removal of the RTS signal and suggesting I book an appointment to replace my meter. I was a THTC customer so I chose Economy 10 and booked the appointment.

Six days ago the new meter was installed with an In House Display (IHD). The IHD is operating in accordance with the Economy 10 tariff but the meter is supplying power according to Economy 7 times, i.e. power comes to my storage heaters between 01.00 and 07.00 but I am being charged the lower rate at Economy 10 time periods. That means I am being paying the higher rate to charge my storage heaters overnight (and it is getting cold in highland Scotland)

OVO customer support first of all offered to re-program the meter in 6 weeks; they delay because they needed to wait until communication with the meter was established (?). I managed to negotiate them down to making an appointment for a site visit in 2 weeks time.

Tens of thousands of these THTC meters need to be replaced before next June. This is a huge undertaking and my experience indicates the need for a separate help line for follow up support. It has taken me a week and a lot of investigation to get to this stage. My contacts with OVO support via on-line chat have been like wading through treacle. I think OVO need to get on top of this asap because there are very many vulnerable people using the THTC tariff with storage heaters.

An additional complication is that storage heater users have been encouraged to replace old heaters with Dimplex Quantum heaters. The preferred installation uses two power sources - one a 24 hour supply for the heating controls and the other so supply the bricks from off peak. There is a different internal cable setup for a single supply. THTC provides these supplies through two meters. In my ignorance I thought moving to one meter would mean one supply. Apparently the wrongly installed Economy 7 meter provides two supplies.

Does anyone know if Economy 10 is one supply being billed at the different rates depending on time od day. The IHD would tend to support the later as it is happily billing me as per the Economy 10 tariff.

I hope this lengthy post wiil help me and the wider community with your responses.

Pinned Reply By Firedog

You’re not alone. Please see my lengthy reply here:

Since this major operation (replacing hundreds of thousands of old RTS meters with smart ones) has only been underway a few weeks, we don’t have much experience of how it’s going. We really only hear in this forum about the ones that go wrong, and not all of those who come here for advice come back to tell us when it all comes right.

Anyway, your situation seems to be very similar to that of the customer I responded to yesterday. In the absence of any information to the contrary, I’m afraid I can’t make any other suggestion. As always, photos would help.

I shouldn’t worry about the power supply to the night storage heaters (NSH). There are indeed two separate supplies, one that is always live (constant) and the other that is only live in offpeak periods (switched). The engineer should have made sure that each NSH is connected to the right circuits. You say your NSH are charging overnight; are their controls active during the day, so you can select ‘comfort’ times and so on?

Photos, please!