Good evening @Mclacr ,

Thanks for bringing this up. We just need one more thing to help us answer this one, if you’re up for it. Please post photos of your setup so we can see exactly what you’ve got. If you’d rather not, let us know and we’ll work with what we’ve got here.

Thanks!

Thanks, I hope this helps. I’ll have a go at a wiring diagram if needed. 

The pictures are very helpful, thanks.

We’ve seen this sort of meter before, but with a Landis + Gyr contactor for the offpeak circuits bolted on to the meter itself, like this:
  

You have a separate one which ought to behave in the same way. The meter sends a signal at the appropriate time (down the thin blue cable) to the contactor to switch the power on and off to your heating equipment. 

It sounds a bit unlikely that the switching time varies from day to day; the times should be set in stone inside the meter itself. If you can document the times the circuit switches on and off (the two daytime slots would probably do), you’d have some evidence for the smart team to examine. 

The switching times should coincide with the tariff changes to avoid not intentionally powering up heaters outside of offpeak hours. There may be a built-in delay to make sure you’re on the cheap rate before the heating switches on; with six switching times, this could add up to perhaps half an hour. If the times are very different, something’s not right. Get your facts together - along with the photos - and then get in touch with Support.

You can always run other equipment at the cheaper rate - washer, dryer, hoover, for example - from the start of an offpeak period regardless of when the heating is turned on.

Thanks @Firedog it has been hard to catch the times but I can try harder. I’ve got alarms set for the published times and I can set up a lamp where I am in the house so I can log when off peak switches. At the moment I know I’m an hour short each day on off peak. 
thanks for the tech help. It’s helpful to have how I thought it should work confirmed. I’ll do some logging and get on to support and report back.

Hey @Mclacr 

I’m really glad to see a couple of our volunteers have already stopped by with some really helpful advice already.

Firedog has given you a nice little timeline to follow of getting your information together along with photos, so if you do a closer check and take all your info to the Support Team they’ll be able to help out better, they’d ask you to do all of this anyway so it’s a good thing Firedog has already let you know to do this.

Let us know how you get on with everything

Thanks @Abby-OVO

Just to update  @Abby_OVO @Blastoise186  @Blastoise186  I’ve just emailed support.

Interesting, @Mclacr , thanks for getting up so early to check!

My guess - without having any evidence or experience to back it up - is that the 8 minute delay in switch-off time is the one built-in to the meter, the so-called randomized offset. This is part of SMETS2, designed to prevent unacceptable surges in demand when large numbers of power-hungry appliances are switched simultaneously. It should apply equally to tariff- and load-switching times.

The half-hour delay in switch-on times might be introduced either by the ALCS or by the heaters themselves to prevent them using electricity at peak rates before the tariff changes. 30 minutes is the maximum randomized offset, so switching on half an hour after the advertised time should avoid that particular problem. 

If the 30 minute delay is thanks to the ALCS, I don’t know whether it’s possible to tweak it to times like, say, 00:10-05:10, 13:10-16:10 and 20:10-22:10. The smart team will know. That way, you’d get almost the full whack of offpeak hours if that’s important.

One last question: you haven’t mentioned where you are in the world - which DNO region. I would have guessed from your username N Scotland (Scottish Hydro, the region known as 17 or P). We’re told that the E10 switching times are quite different from the ones you’re seeing, so perhaps you’re in the Southern England region (SEB, 20, H). The times you see match what they’re supposed to be down there. 

The region number is the first two digits of the bottom line of your MPAN (not the MSN you see on the meter - that starts with the year of manufacture).  

@Firedog  Thanks, I’m in the South of England. I was given the timings by OVO on the phone, they are the same as I can find by research. Also I’m not getting the duration of off peak power that I was told I would. The heaters are dumb, just a thermostat. 
I was told that the off peak period was for everything. I would have chosen a different tariff if that wasn’t the case. I understand load shifting. 
I got an awful reply from support. I’ll post it below.

cheers, Rob
 

I'm writing this email following your recent query.

As you have had the Smart Meter installed on the 28th of October it can take a few weeks for the selected times to be correlated with the system however please be assured that this will resolve itself and you will have the selected times on the meter as requested.

Please accept my apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Kind Regards

S xxx, in the meantime will be over paying for some power and not getting the full time on my heating.  OVO have had a long time to prepare for the change in metering. I’m not happy with your answer. Time will not sort this out. It needs attending to as soon as possible. 

Please consider this as a complaint now.

I have spent a long time working out what is going on with this system.

Please supply me with a job/ticket number for this fault and register my complaint.

Sorry for jumping to conclusions!
    

I don’t think that’s the case. The meter should be set up to change tariff at the times in your plan, shifted by the 8-minute randomized offset (if my guess is correct). That means that anything you use in the offpeak periods will be charged at offpeak rates, so you just have to be careful in those first eight minutes. The heater switching times times are separately controlled, so the fact that they’re coming on late only means that you’re getting less charging time than you bargained for. If it’s proving to be too little (they’re blowing cold before the next charge period starts), then a tweak like I suggested should help, it it proves to be possible.

I agree that the support agent wasn’t a great deal of help. However, I hadn’t realized that this meter was brand new, so it is possible that some things haven’t settled down yet.
  

I was a little bit surprised by the meter exchange label visible in your third screenshot. The Installed meter serial no. looks suspiciously like the Removed meter’s one, and completely different from the number on the meter itself. OVO’s engineers are usually more careful than that; was this perhaps a contractor rather than a home-grown OVO installer - one of these?
  

Thanks, I’ll check the meter numbers. 
The heaters are off peak and should be powered for all of the off peak time as far as I’m aware. As I said I should be getting 10 hours off peak. For everything. As I was told on the phone.  All my off peak before went to the heater circuit. 

There is no ‘heating circuit’ post RTS. Your heaters are on a dedicated circuit, but the difference is that the circuit is only live when the ALCS in the meter says so. Ideally, it should be on for the whole of the offpeak periods, but the ALCS may have been configured to start 30 minutes late to avoid, as I pointed out, charging before the tariff change has taken effect. If you have an immersion heater for hot water, it may have been wired on the same circuit. Check its controls to make sure it’s not running for all of the offpeak hours; that would probably be a waste of energy. 

You are. You’ll have to check the meter itself* to see precisely when the tariff changes from peak to offpeak and vice versa; I expect you’ll find that it changes like clockwork at ~8 minutes after the advertised times, for the reason I’ve given. When you know what the exact times are, you can adjust all your heavy consumption to suit. I’m not familiar with that sort of meter, so I can’t give the easiest way of seeing just when the tariff changes. You’ll have to experiment.
  

*   Your IHD may also show the tariff change at the same time as the meter, but I can’t be sure, so I’ve asked the experts. What sort of IHD did you get with your new meter?

Thanks, the IHD does not have a peak/off peak indicator. It tells me the price per hour at the current consumption rate if I made a chart I could use that but I shouldn’t have to. 
This is the IHD. I can’t read the tiny writing under it. 

The lack of a peak/off peak indicator is why I had to plug a lamp into  what was the old off peak circuit to see when it was supplied. 

The rate doesn’t change 8 minutes after the published time. It gives about 1.5 hours less off peak. At least it switches the old off peak circuit like that. 

On the IHD, touch OK, then OK again to access Account information. Touch the right arrow twice; the current tariff should be displayed and, I suspect, change with the tariff on the meter. Your observations suggest that this happens about 8 minutes after the advertised times. When the lower tariff is active, all usage is charged at the lower rate. There will be 10 hours offpeak each day, probably to the second and certainly to a minute.  

This is quite independent of the times your heaters are switched on and off - please try not to confuse the two sets of timings. Of course, the heaters (and anything else wired to the switched circuit) shouldn’t be switching on before the rate has changed to the lower one, and they should be switching off before the higher rate takes effect. 

In your photo, the traffic light at the foot of the screen is green. I would expect this to turn amber - or possibly red - when the heaters turn on, to show a higher than usual power draw. The same will happen when you turn on the electric kettle. If you touch the Now button, you’ll see just what that unusually high power draw is:
 

Thanks, I understand what you are saying, I’ll check the IHD. The fact remains that I was told twice that during off peak hours EVERYTHING gets fed.