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

Ah I see @Sandy42, apologies. Was just checking as you mentioned getting back in touch on Thursday in a previous post 😊. This would be our Support team that I’m referring to.

Perhaps they will try to resolve the situation with DCC.
    

If you get a smart meter in time, it rather depends on which alternative to your current tariff that you choose - there will be several choices: single-rate, Economy 7, Economy 9 and Economy 10, for example. It will depend on your heating arrangements and other electrical equipment which of these will best suit. You shouldn’t be any worse off financially. 

If you don’t, nothing will change as far as your rates are concerned.
  

The BBC announced publicly in 2022 that their long-wave radio transmitters would soon be closing down. It was widely reported that this was in part because the ancient equipment used valves that were no longer available. Arqiva had enough spares for a couple of years, but no more. This was long after OVO took over SSE’s retail arm. 

OVO is pretty powerless, since communication is DCC’s responsibility. You can be certain they’re doing whatever they can to get their customers connected.

Arqiva claim to have coverage for (I think) 99.7% of households in the CSP North region, a better result than they were obliged to attain. It still means, though, that 0.3% are outwith the SMWAN, and it’s not certain anyone will go to the expense of reaching them all.
       

This is interesting. Is it a guess on your part, or do you have evidence that there are 20 households near you who are out of range of the SMWAN? If this is in fact the situation, there may be other solutions. It may be worth conducting a community exercise to establish the facts.

Is your television aerial - and those of your neighbours - pointed towards the Angus transmission tower just north of Dundee? If so, that may be where the LRR equipment is located. I found a TV coverage map (green=good); I’ve no idea what significance it has with regard to the LRR network, but it doesn’t immediately indicate a major problem. That’s why I suspected local obstruction. 

[OT I have many memories of soggy weekends - and admittedly a few sunny ones - spent at Cultybraggan, and of mountain rescue exercises on crags not so far away from you 🙂]

  

… they will resolve the situation with DCC.
 

Perhaps they will try to resolve the situation with DCC.
    

… I’ll be paying higher rates after RTS switch off. 
 

If you get a smart meter in time, it rather depends on which alternative to your current tariff that you choose - there will be several choices: single-rate, Economy 7, Economy 9 and Economy 10, for example. It will depend on your heating arrangements and other electrical equipment which of these will best suit. You shouldn’t be any worse off financially. 

If you don’t, nothing will change as far as your rates are concerned.
  

… It’s not as if OVO/SSE haven’t known about this issue for years.
Their problem, they’d better get it fixed.
  

The BBC announced publicly in 2022 that their long-wave radio transmitters would soon be closing down. It was widely reported that this was in part because the ancient equipment used valves that were no longer available. Arqiva had enough spares for a couple of years, but no more. This was long after OVO took over SSE’s retail arm. 

OVO is pretty powerless, since communication is DCC’s responsibility. You can be certain they’re doing whatever they can to get their customers connected.

Arqiva claim to have coverage for (I think) 99.7% of households in the CSP North region, a better result than they were obliged to attain. It still means, though, that 0.3% are outwith the SMWAN, and it’s not certain anyone will go to the expense of reaching them all.
       

There must be 20+ others close to me who will this problem. (We’re within 2 miles of Auchterarder ...).
  

This is interesting. Is it a guess on your part, or do you have evidence that there are 20 households near you who are out of range of the SMWAN? If this is in fact the situation, there may be other solutions. It may be worth conducting a community exercise to establish the facts.

Is your television aerial - and those of your neighbours - pointed towards the Angus transmission tower just north of Dundee? If so, that may be where the LRR equipment is located. I found a TV coverage map (green=good); I’ve no idea what significance it has with regard to the LRR network, but it doesn’t immediately indicate a major problem. That’s why I suspected local obstruction. 

 

[OT I have many memories of soggy weekends - and admittedly a few sunny ones - spent at Cultybraggan, and of mountain rescue exercises on crags not so far away from you 🙂]

I’m in Crieff and due to get my THTC set up changed to Economy 10 this Monday.  Praying it goes smoothly.

We’re next to a well know golf course on one side and open country (admittedly with trees) on the other. So, no obvious obstructions other than our house itself.

There are 3 blocks of flats in our development. At least 6 flats per block and probably more. All with no option other than storage heaters so I assume THTC. Also, there are houses in the development. Some houses (not ours) dug up their garden to fit gas tanks. Hence my 20+ figure. I’ll do some asking around though.

I’m starting to wonder if there was a fault with the smart meter that was temporarily fitted. Wondering won’t do me much good though!

No problems with TV reception. Not sure if that’s relevant.

I’ve set myself a reminder to contact OVO again in 4 weeks for an update. When that’s done I’ll set myself another reminder etc etc etc

Funnily enough I personally just can’t find any sympathy for OVO et al. They may be powerless etc but I’m the one paying them ££££.

It’s not certain that the signal your TV picks up is in fact coming from the Angus tower; there may be a repeater station a bit closer to give you your good signal. A quick look at the antenna (on the roof?) - could it be pointing in a different direction from the line from where you are to 10km north of Dundee? 

And of course the house itself (or the one next door) may be interfering, if the meter isn’t on the side closest to the tower the signal is coming from. Could this be the case?  

That’s not very likely - they’re pretty reliable. It is possible, though, that there was a problem with its communications hub, although the engineer is likely to have tested that by trying a different one - he would most probably have several to choose from in the back of his van.

Of course, we can speculate until the cows come home why the engineer gave up. There are lots of possible explanations and there may even be a few solutions. We’ve seen situations where the signal just isn’t good enough, so the engineer installed the meter and got it working locally, but without it being able to send data back to the mothership. The customer then had to submit meter readings manually, but everything else worked.

That’s when some customers applied Heath Robinson solutions to boost the signal at the meter, with often surprisingly good results. The supplier had given up, meaning that smart-meter-only tariffs weren’t available. That was very expensive for EV owners, for example. By investing a few pounds in a home-made repeater, they could put all their woes behind them. So even some of those in the 0.3% managed to partake of the blessings of smart meters.

I don’t know how suppliers other than OVO are getting on with replacing RTS meters, but I suspect they’re struggling. OVO have worked very hard for the past few years to develop a smart metering solution to replace THTC.

Your scheduled check for updates every few weeks sounds very reasonable. Please keep us informed 🙂.

I’m afraid that if you have no WAN coverage then there will be absolutely nothing SSE can do. DCC aren’t going to invest in improvements to the northern region radio network now that they have met their contractual coverage. 

What is happening though is a slow move towards rollout of meters (or more accurately comms hubs) for the northern region that can communicate either via the bespoke Arqiva radio network or 4G cellular networks. They are also investigating sending data over home WiFi.

I am in this situation too but luckily for me I don’t have electric heating. Unfortunately for you and many others if either of those solutions are not rolled out before the RTS switch off then you could be stuck.

I’ve not yet seen any explanation of why the new meters can’t be pre-programmed before installation with an appropriate tariff switching schedule for RTS customers. This would mean they could be installed without the need for a WAN connection but still serve their primary purpose of metering/switching, and if in the future they can be connected then all the better. This whole business of having to be configured over WAN after commissioning seems backwards.

I’m glad someone else thinks that too.  Surely it would make sense when the customer books a smart meter fitting and states what tariff they want to just fit a preprogrammed meter instead of all this malarkey.  It might mean an engineer’s visit if they ever wanted to change tariff I suppose but not something that you would do regularly anyway.

I agree that this would be ideal for those who are fairly sure that comms will be difficult. I honestly don’t know how much ‘pre-programming’ it’s possible to do: I imagine that an engineer is dispatched with a number of meters and comms hubs in his van. The meters will have some basic standard configuration, whether that’s from the factory or an OVO workshop or a combination of both. I don’t think they are necessarily earmarked for specific customers.

I have read that where the meters are intended for THTC customers, they are configured with the appropriate Economy 7 Time of Use (ToU) settings for the region, to be changed if necessary ‘over the air’ (OTA) to the ones the customer has signed up for on installation. 

Configuring the timings of the auxiliary load control switch that turns power to the dedicated offpeak circuit on and off is a separate process. I just don’t know whether it’s possible to do this off site.

We saw somewhere that the engineer installing a meter in these circumstances did indeed manage to do some configuration off site. I’m imagining a situation where two customers in the same village are to have their new meters installed on the same day. They’re at opposite ends of the village; the first has a strong LRR connection while the second doesn’t. So long as they have both opted for, say, Economy 10, might it be possible to set up both meters at the first site, so the second can indeed get a ‘pre-programmed’ meter?   

Let’s see if we can get an answer to these questions from someone who should know: @Lukepeniket_OVO

Hi @Mo59,

I can see Firedog has already given a good response here.

I’m also currently asking about this internally and will let you know once I get a response.

Just a minor update on my situation:

The engineer managed to get “Stages 1 and 2” completed successfully. “Stage 3” wasn’t successful (waited around an hour but didn’t complete). Don’t know if Stages 1 and 2 need a signal or if it suggests the signal just wasn’t strong enough for Stage 3. No idea what the set-up Stages are. If I remember correctly, the engineer said that Stage 3 was where most of the data was downloaded.

Also, the engineer only tried with one meter. Any others that might have been in his van stayed in his van.