Rank 2

Unexplained half-hourly usage pattern

Forum|Forum|3 months ago
April 29, 2026
63 replies
586 views

My 88 year old Mother, lives alone and spends most of the night awake watching TV, drinking tea, etc.

However, EVERY single day her half hour readings show 0 ZERO usage from exactly midnight to exactly 7:00am.

Ovo are saying their meter readings are right.

My argument is that if you drove your car a distance that you know for sure is 10 miles, but your odometer said it was 50 miles… then you are saying that the odometer must be right as that is what the odometer says !!!

My 88yo Mum does not race around the house and turn off absolutely everything at midnight, then 7 hours later race around and turn everything on.

It would be funny if Ovo weren’t predicting she will use over 13000 KWH for the year !!

Anyone with any insights ?

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rogerp64Author

Rank 2

** the zero usage between Midnight and 7:00 still remains a mystery to us all. Ovo telling me that the meter readings are ‘accurate’ is the major gripe I have. How can they be accurate if there is zero use for 7 hours a day?for those hours every night suggesting that my Mum has flicked the main circuit breaker exactly at midnight and waits until 7:00am each morning to turn it back on? (1. The circuit board is out of reach, even for me, 2. Mum hasn’t been awake at 07:00 for years)!!!

When we had our smart meter installed, the daily readings to Ovo were fine, but our usage graphs were all over the place - it turned out we had the meter set to send daily readings, and so the app was essentially ‘inventing’ our hourly usage to match expected patterns. Could that be the case here?

In the app, top right is a little black circle with a person in it, if you tap that it takes you to your account details. There’s a section near the bottom marked ‘settings’, and one of the options there is ‘How often meter reads send’. Tap on that and check what it is currently. If it’s set to daily or monthly, change it so that it is set to ‘every half hour’ for both billing and settlement data.

Based on your mums current reads of 30kWh per day (in March, so relatively mild), 13,000 kWh per year does not seem unreasonable.

Thank you @woodstok2000 readings are set to

every 30 minutes and have been since the install.

Peter E

Super User

@rogerp64 Thanks for the photos and the other details.

I agree with @Peter E. It would be really interesting to see the meter readings from before April 2025 and - ideally - to date. You remarked earlier that All readings are “Smart”, but we don’t know whether that applies to the period before the new meter was installed in ‘early March 2026’.

If for some reason half-hourly usage data aren’t being retrieved from the meter, the website will simulate the missing data using (to me!) completely impenetrable logic. So even though meter readings are getting through, the graphs on the Usage pages may be complete fabrications.

Your remarks about the replies you’ve had from Support make distressing reading. My own experience of the special staff who respond when someone on the Priority Services Register contacts Support has been limited, but in every case, the respondent has been courteous, knowledgeable and helpful. I assumed - since you have access to mother’s account - that OVO know you’re acting for a vulnerable relative, so I wonder why you’ve been getting apparently unhelpful responses.

On her account’s Profile page, you should see details like name, address, email address and phone number. I’m not certain how your details would appear on this page, but I think they ought to be there. Perhaps @Ben_OVO could tell us. What is vital, though, is that any contact with support starts from a recorded email address or phone number - that’s how enquiries get routed to the right people. I prefer to use the chat options, so that I get a written record of the conversation.

And incidentally, on the same profile page, you should see an option called Set how often meter readings send. You might want to check the settings there.

Thanks @Firedog Smart reader wa installed March 11 this year. All readings prior would have been manual.

I will see what I can find on previous usage for Mum. I know that I inadvertently cancelled her plan, when I noticed a huge jump in the monthly costs. I received a £3000 refund, I contacted Ovo to say that I hadn’t expected a refund and I have since repaid the money.

Now I am wondering if the refund was based on overpayment in 2022, 2023, etc. I will get my forensic kit on and start to dig.

** the zero usage between Midnight and 7:00 still remains a mystery to us all. Ovo telling me that the meter readings are ‘accurate’ is the major gripe I have. How can they be accurate if there is zero use for 7 hours a day?for those hours every night suggesting that my Mum has flicked the main circuit breaker exactly at midnight and waits until 7:00am each morning to turn it back on? (1. The circuit board is out of reach, even for me, 2. Mum hasn’t been awake at 07:00 for years)!!!

At the risk of becoming a pain the graphs are not what defines the usage. It's the smart readings and only the smart readings. I have queried/complained before that the graphs are grossly misleading at times but I'm no longer a customer so it's not relevant to me any more. You may wish to consider a complaint based on that and that is up to you.

Peter

Reducing my yearly fossil fuel usage with an EV (-900 litres petrol), A2AHP (-8,700 kWh gas) and Timed Immersion heater (-1,500 kWh gas)

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rogerp64Author

Rank 2

@Abby_OVO @Ben_OVO would you be able to direct me

to the best place to book an Ovo Technician to

come and do a full assessment of Mums house.

juliamc

Rank 20

I think I’d try setting the readings to daily for a week or so, and see what the usage graph comes out like. Then switch it back to half hourly. Clutching at straws a bit but you never know!

The fan heaters and electric shower are all going to eat up the electricity, so that daily 30+ kWh in March is understandable, and over the winter it must have been racking it up. If it’s affordable then I wouldn’t make any alterations to her setup. I can imagine what my mother would have said if I’d suggested she changed her heating system !

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rogerp64Author

Rank 2

I think I’d try setting the readings to daily for a week or so, and see what the usage graph comes out like. Then switch it back to half hourly. Clutching at straws a bit but you never know!

The fan heaters and electric shower are all going to eat up the electricity, so that daily 30+ kWh in March is understandable, and over the winter it must have been racking it up. If it’s affordable then I wouldn’t make any alterations to her setup. I can imagine what my mother would have said if I’d suggested she changed her heating system !

thank you @juliamc - I just switched to daily readings…

I’ll also spend some time getting history into a spreadsheet and see if I can spy any anomalies.

juliamc

Rank 20

Just had another thought… the OVO usage graph is just displaying the data from the smart meter (incorrectly it seems). There are other ways of displaying that data using Glow or is it BRIGHT ? I don’t use that now but someone else here can explain how to set it up 😬 then you can see if it’s still blank over those seven nighttime hours. My guess is that it’ll show exactly what your mother usage pattern is.

Firedog

Super User

There are other ways of displaying that data using Glow or is it BRIGHT ? … someone else here can explain how to set it up

Yes, I was coming round to that approach. Bright is the name of Glowmarkt’s free smart meter data access platform, available as an app for both smart phones and PCs. Roger should be able to see mother’s meter’s half-hourly data going back to when the smart meter was installed, but not before that. At least it would shed light on the ‘no usage overnight’ conundrum.

I’m not quite sure what authentication methods Bright uses nowadays. I have always used the MAC address of my IHD, but that might be difficult for Roger*. It could be that there’s another way of doing it that doesn’t involve the IHD.

Once a Bright account has been set up, it’s easy to download all the available usage data from the meter as CSV by visiting glowmarkt.com and signing in with the Bright username and password - a good start for the spreadsheet exercise.

* The MAC address (sometimes labelled ‘GUID’) is usually printed or given on a sticker on the back or bottom of the IHD. Perhaps the helpful carer could capture that, too.

Noel | I have no official status; I'm just a volunteer who comes here to help other customers. My gear: Aclara SGM 1416-B Electricity-only E7 meter; Chameleon IHD3-PPMID-AAA | It may look as if I know what I’m talking about, but don’t let that fool you. |

Abby_OVO

Community Manager

Hi there!

Sorry to see you’ve still not got to the bottom of things.

It’s worth noting that the Support Team usually can't book a site visit without a very specific job brief for the engineer. Meter engineers primarily fix known faults with the meter itself, rather than diagnosing general usage patterns or internal wiring.

Before jumping to a meter check, it might be a good idea to have a private, qualified electrician take a look at the appliances, wiring and anything else beyond the meter. Checking things like the appliances is something outside of an OVO engineer's remit, but an electrician can check for faults beyond the meter, issues like faulty heating elements or inefficient appliances that wouldn't be obvious to us.

If they confirm everything in the home is working as it should, you may be in a stronger position to ask Support for a formal accuracy test. Though I would say, they’ll probably also want to swap the meter to half hourly readings, this would mean we’d have a much more accurate view of the meter readings and usage each day as, if the readings had previously been daily only, this might actually explain why the usage graph looks like the usage is through the day as we don’t have more accurate readings, we would only know what the usage was for any given 24 hour period between readings.

It would also be worth remembering that if both meters are recording the same usage amount pre and post smart meter exchange, then the usage would seemingly be accurate. Unless you can have mum run the Kettle Test I mentioned before, just to be sure the meter on the account, even while it may match numerically on the Meter Serial Number, seems worth still having a check and testing that if you still think the usage is high.

Do let us know how you get on.

Currently Playing: She's Electric

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rogerp64Author

Rank 2

Ok. It seems a lot of your suspicions have been confirmed and the suggestion to get BRIGHT was an excellent one

it is only one day, but the usage is much more on Bright is

in alignment to what I know is accurate for

my Mum. Heavy usage reflects those heaters being on all night. Mum sleeps during the day and the heaters go back on in the evening.

Yes I will arrange a qualified electrician to visit as I’m generally worried about the wiring.

if anyone has some recommendations for more energy efficient heaters (Available on Amazon) I’d be very gratefull