My hot water and storage heaters work on Economy 7 so the meter should switch the electric supply on around midnight and switch them off around 7am. It worked perfectly until I had a new smart meter fitted in March this year. Ovo tell me it the new smart meter is programmed correctly on Economy 7. However when I look at the hourly graphs I can see that it switches on at 4,30am for 3 hours, 2.30 pm for 3 hours and then 8.30pm for 3 hours. None of this is overnight when my off-peak rates apply.
Is this even possible?
Best answer by Firedog
Updated on 23/06/26 by Ben_OVO
Hopefully these pictures are what you need - thanks
Thank you so much for going to all that trouble - it makes it so much easier to see what’s going on.
The meter you’ve had fitted is the same as my own (if anyone asks you, tell them it’s an Aclara SGM 1416B). The EDMI box on top of the meter is the Communications Hub, hoping to connect to the Smart Meter Wide Area Network (SMWAN or just WAN for short) vis Long-Range Radio (LRR).
The display screen tells us a lot:
I should have asked you to note the exact time when you took the picture, because:
The Active Tariff Price, 17.690 p/kWh, is the Offpeak unit rate 16.48 p/kWh shown on your Plan page + 5% VAT, so usage at the moment the photo was taken was being recorded on the offpeak register;
The little labels in the bottom right-hand corner tell us that both Load Control switches (LC1 LC2) inside the meter were closed at the time. This means the switched circuit (called OFFPEAK by whoever labelled the Consumer Unit shown in your second picture) was live and heaters may have been on.
That is exactly as it should be for the duration of your offpeak periods. Now you’ll have to watch the meter for a few minutes at the start of what appears to be one of your offpeak periods. I can’t tell whether it’s supposed to be Economy 9 or Economy 10 or indeed something else, so your observations will have to pin it down. The offpeak periods (GMT) might be:
… but I can’t be sure from the info I’ve found. The timings will be an hour later during summertime. Sadly, none of the start or end times coincide!
You said you were looking for the Economy 7 hours so perhaps that’s the tariff you were supposed to be on. As far as I can tell, they’re the same in the whole Northern Powergrid area, 00:00 - 07:00 GMT and an hour later in BST. It should be a simple matter to tell whether either of your timetables match them. At 08:00 precisely, the meter display should be just as in the picture above if Economy 7 is in force, and it should change within the next 15-20 minutes. If it’s not as above, then you’re not on Economy 7.
Last - for now - we haven’t mentioned the IHD. Did the meter engineer leave one with you and explain how it works (he should have done!)? If you got one and it’s working, it could save a lot of meter-watching; it will show traffic-light red when a heater fires up, it should show the active tariff price at any time, and it may even show a countdown to the next tariff change.
Great news - we’ve got everything sorted with your meter. The issue was that, following the installation, the meter has been rate switching at the Economy 7 times but load switching (storage heaters and immersion) at Economy 10 times.
… the meter has been rate switching at the Economy 7 times but load switching (storage heaters and immersion) at Economy 10 times. This has now been sorted, …
@Ben_OVO This is a bit ambiguous! I hope it means that the ALCS calendar has been updated to E7 timings, but I’m sure @slmoran will come back and tell us what happened.
There’s a possibility that E10 would have suited better, but sadly we’re not likely to find out now.
I’m glad to see you had lots of help and support here and hopefully the timings have now been corrected. If you’re still experiencing any issues, please do let us know.
