THTC and RTS shutdown

Thankyou for your reply. They live in the south east (SL6).

They currently have 3 working storage heaters (one broken one at the bottom of the stairs) and for 90% of the winter this is sufficient. I have a little portable oil filled radiator that I put on in their bedroom on really cold evenings as they have no heater in their bedroom (at some point we will overhaul the electrics and buy more modern storage heaters inc for their bedroom, but that will come later…..)

Thank you. I suppose Royal Berkshire is south east if you’re looking from Liverpool … 

SL6 is I think in the Southern Electricity Board area, area ID 20 and GSP group _H, now served by SSEN. If the night storage heaters (NSH) aren’t the oldest, it’s possible that they would work well enough with an Economy 10 (E10) plan which gives five hours of charge overnight and three in the afternoon - most NSH are designed to achieve full charge after seven hours. There are also two extra offpeak hours in the late evening, but they may not be of much use for the NSH. They are useful, though, for warming up the bedroom and perhaps the living room if the NSH are beginning to fade by then.

E10’s five hours overnight would normally manage to heat up enough water for two people, unless they both take deep hot baths every day. If showers fed from the hot water tank are involved, the five hours should be plenty. Electric showers are very expensive to run at peak rate. This table shows the various tariffs I could find; it’s not certain that Economy 9 is available in the Southern region, but I doubt the tariff would be published if it weren’t:
  

The costs depend very largely on the usage pattern. If there’s a chance of running greedy appliances other than heaters (e.g. aforesaid electric shower, tumble dryer, cooker, iron ...) only during offpeak periods, costs would be minimized. It’s not unusual for an electrically-heated household to use 75% of the total energy consumed during offpeak hours. This table shows some comparative figures to illustrate the effect of changing the proportion of offpeak usage:
  

I hope this helps you arrive at a sensible conclusion. If it just confuses you, please come back and say so and we’ll see if anyone else has better ideas. 

Thank you so much for this. It is great to have a breakdown of the hours with the different E7/9/10 options. I am going to study them more later and see which I think matches their pattern more closely. 

We are really more like Greater London, but on all official forms we are SE (just!). 

I suppose my main worry was if this set-up would work with a new smart meter. I will ring them on Thurs when I’m next free and book an engineer. Fingers crossed there won’t be any issues with it.

I appreciate your help :)

Brilliant advice here from ​@Firedog 😊

Keep us posted ​@miaowlicious!

Hi again.

The OVO engineer came yesterday morning. He said it was a simple switch over to a smart meter. However when he took the plate off to see the wires, there was dust in there. I explained that we are a middle terrace and the 2 other house are still council owned. They re-did the cavity insulation 18 months ago and when they blew all the old cavity foam through it came into our porch. They cleaned it as best they could, but there is obvs still dust on the inner bits. I couldn’t prove it wasn’t asbestos, so the engineer left, saying they will re-book a full face engineer to do it.

Today I phoned ovo, and they have said because it is flagged up as possible asbestos (it isn’t-all the other houses have had their meters switched long ago) I need to contact SSEN (who were the original fitters apparently) and have an asbestos certificate before OVO will send another engineer out.

I am currently 2 hours into waiting for a call out for SSEN. This is obvs quite stressful because my parents are clinically very vulnerable. I waited to switch because they were still using the heating up till 2 weeks ago, and I couldn’t risk anything going wrong and then being without heat. Now I am worried that we won’t get this fixed before end of June when the RTS switch off is.

Can an independent electrician fit a smart meter? Can I request the current meter to be switched to daytime only and switch the tariff from Economy 7? I’m just trying to figure out an action plan if we can’t get this fixed before RTS switch off as I’m worried they won’t have electricity :(

Hi ​@miaowlicious ,

Nice username by the way!

I’m afraid it can’t be done by a private electrician - only the supplier can touch the meter. As for going daytime only… That’s not supported on a THTC Meter unfortunately…

You’ve got more time yet - the deadline is September 2025 and the failsafe may still trigger to run things locally on a temporary basis without the control signal.