OVO SMETS2 (S2) Smart Meter installation - Member Guide

Your OVO Electricity Tariff card states your Economy 7 Peak and Off-peak unit rate times. Your Remote Display shows the current Economy 7 Tariff unit rate OVO is charging you - ours changes to Off-peak at 00:00 GMT and back to Peak unit rate at 07:00 GMT daily. How can consumers check that the correct ECAUL times have been programmed by OVO into their Aclara SMETS2 meter?

Accessing those settings is only possible via SMETS Commands. There’s no way to access them locally for security and anti-tamper reasons. This applies regardless of supplier and regardless of what meter you have

Considering how much data the Aclara SMETS2 meters can display, it seems strange that perhaps the most important information - Economy 7 Off-peak unit times OVO has programmed into your “smart” meter - can not even be viewed by the consumer. Has anybody else figured out which key(s) to press yet?

Trust me. I stand by what I said. I got my information directly from Aclara and have the entire technical user manual for the meter you’ve got.

You can press any combination of keys you want, but it won’t reveal configurations that are purely managed via SMETS Commands like the ECAUL settings.

Also, just so you’re aware… You won’t get any additional SEO to your blog by posting links to it here. Your links get automatically tagged with nofollow, norefer and ugc attributes which tell search engines to ignore them.

Somewhere in 2020 OVO replaced my SMETS1 smart meter (not from OVO) with a new SMETS2 Meter.

24 Hours later the remote display was still showing nothing useful.  I phoned OVO to tell them it wasn’t working and they said I needed to wait 24 hours… 

I waited a week and called back.  This the person on the phone said they ran a test and it was indeed not working correctly….  It was the pandemic… there was no follow up.  It’s still not working.

At Christmas 2022, OVO suddenly found my back dated daily electricity readings. I guess they had rummage down the back of the sofa and found some data.  I hadn’t submitted anything manually for a while so I got a lovely bill at Christmas for an extra £500.  Great timing OVO. Thanks!

Gas readings are coming through daily (at least since Christmas) but electricity meter readings are still not coming through. Despite the fact you clearly know something is wrong because you back dated a correction.

This doesn’t look like a technical fault with the meter

Now I know the way these work is that the gas meter actually connects to the servers through the electricity meter.  So BOTH must have connectivity if the gas meter readings are coming through.

It is possible the electricity meter is sending nothing, but then where on earth did you find the back dated data if it wasn’t.

OVO: This is called a “smart meter”.  You can read it.

When you can’t read it there’s a problem!  Why wait for me to chaise a third time to tell you?

I’ve tried telling you but…

I’ve never once managed to get through on the phone.  Every time I try on the chat line it takes so long that my phone self locks and I’m silently kicked out of the queue.

This is really terrible service OVO.  I shouldn’t have to wait hours staring at a text screen on on a phone call to tell you something you already know!

Hi @Couling and thanks for sharing this negative experience. I’m sorry to hear of the long time these smart meter communications issues have been going on for, and for the difficulties you’ve had in getting through to our Support team. I’d recommend a web chat the next time you need to get Support team help. 

Before that, you should be able to complete a ‘smart meter health check’ form yourself, if the results indicate an issue the results get sent to the right team at OVO:

Thanks @Tim_OVO 

Just a few actionable points for OVO to consider:

• Suggest to your tech team: Identifying anomalous readings should be relatively trivial.  When I worked with metering data we would run scripts monthly to check for weird behaviour.  This saves you money in the long run by taking the pressure of your call staff.  Either of these checks would have identified my meter readings as anomalous with minimal false positives:
  • Smart meter with no data / zero data and customer submission
  • Smart meter with sizeable gas meter readings but missing / zero electricity meter readings.
• The web chat by mobile needs fixing.  Locking the phone should not silently kick you out of the queue, instead it should raise a notification while the phone is locked that it’s your turn (iPhone).
• Do everything you can to never drop a case. If someone reports a fault, that should be on your system and not closed until it is actually fixed.  Benefit of the doubt here that it was the pandemic, but still unacceptable.

• The web chat by mobile needs fixing.  Locking the phone should not silently kick you out of the queue, instead it should raise a notification while the phone is locked that it’s your turn (iPhone).

That sounds like an iOS behaviour. If it is, then I’m afraid OVO wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

I am surprised to hear of this locked-screen out of the queue behaviour… let me try and replicate

I think it may depend on how long the device is locked for. A few seconds and not much would happen. But more than that and the device probably goes to sleep and cuts the connection.