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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.

Blastoise186 writes: If the meter comms are working, it should be an easy fix. The SMETS Command to reconfigure ECAUL/ALCS should do the trick.

No joy, Support are still saying it takes up to six weeks to ‘sync up’ the meter after installation. I think the comms are working; the WAN light is flashing and the IHD is showing an MPAN and OVO as the supplier, for at least a week now.

I am giving up. I will wait another 4 weeks.

Support basically hung up on me. My beef was always that OVO did not warn me that I would need to wait up to 6 weeks and that they provided conflicting information about how the meter would be initialised. 

Thanks for your help.

This is the current situation:

  • My RTS meter was replaced 3 weeks ago and everything looks ready for the Economy 10 supply.
  • The meter and the IHD are showing the Economy 10 tariff.
    • The meter is fully populated with two TOU rates,
    • the active tariff changes according to Economy 10 times 
    • meter balance, Total Active Input and Total Active Output (from solar) are all showing and increasing as I would expect
  • Two meter readings are being recorded daily in my Account
  • But Off peak power is only available overnight at Economy 7 times
  • the last time I talked to support I was told that I would know that the Economy 10 service had started when the meter was displaying all the correct information
  • I was also told to wait for 6 weeks following the meter installation for the Economy 10 service to begin.

From what I have deduced from advice given from this forum and my other research, only the ECAUL request is need to switch to Economy 10 supply times. 

Am I missing something or is it reasonable to expect that part of the process to take another 3 weeks? 

I am asking because I don’t want to get to the middle of November and find I still have a problem. At the moment, if I switch on my heating, I will incur the 24 hour tariff because the off peak supply is only available over night, i.e. mostly during Economy 10 peak tariff times.

 

Hey @Keast 

 

I understand your frustration, however, I would advise if the timeframe that has been given is 6 weeks it’s best to flag this again to support if these issues haven’t been resolved by the time that timeframe has elapsed. 

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