Unexplained half hourly usage pattern

Thank you ​@woodstok2000   readings are set to

every 30 minutes and have been since the install. 

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

​@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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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

Well that is a result !! 

Unfortunately heaters are heaters and they are all about the same. It's actually the easiest thing to do to turn electric power into heat but it's inefficient. What to do?

Economy 7 and storage heaters used to be a way of heating for less but unless you have E7 now you won't get anyone (as far as I know) to install you a meter. The night and day rates have been converging anyway so there is precious little saving these days anyway. ​@Firedog may be able to pad that out with words wiser than mine but we had a discussion recently about the official/unofficial phasing out of E7.

People usually heat with gas but I'm assuming that is not installed / not possible so not an option. That is how most people keep their heating bills low.

Assuming that you are electric only the other form of cost efficient heat is a heat pump. ​@juliamc is good with the ASHP type and I have an air to air heat pump (A2AHP) or just A2A which is both cheap and effective but not a complete solution. Having tagged Julia I hope she will offer words of wisdom on that.

As a comparison ASHP is quite an installation process but gives very good efficiency although I'm now thinking you don't have any water radiators. A2A is an easier installation and a multi split unit will distribute warm air around the house. The heat pumps cost about a third of the cost of simple heaters to run.

Peter 

Err, not sure how wise my words would be !!
If there were already radiators and the associated pipework all ready to go then maybe a heat pump installation to run them wouldn’t be massively disruptive. However if your mother doesn’t have gas I doubt there’s ‘wet’ central heating? Maybe she had storage heaters in the past… in which case economy 7 might be a possible available tariff?

Efficiency wise I’d be tempted to look into the Air to Air units that ​@Peter E has. I think you can get a grant for A2A heat pumps now  - but it won’t be a BUS grant as that’s the Boiler Upgrade Scheme. 

Another thought (which could be a bit of a gamble) is changing your mother’s tariff to something like Octopus Agile which is invariably much cheaper at night - though can be prohibitive during the early evening so probably a daft idea. 
 

Thanks so much for going to the trouble to get Bright up and running. The data you see there are taken direct from mother’s meter, so they’re not mangled by OVO’s slightly dodgy billing system. As you remarked, they give an accurate representation of mother’s slightly eccentric usage pattern.

The ⠇menu to the top right of the app screen gives the option to show usage in kWh instead of cost in £. This should be helpful when trying to compare equipment and tariffs, for example. You can use screenshots like the one you shared here to persuade OVO’s support staff to mend mother’s account.

You asked for “recommendations for more energy efficient heaters.” As ​@Peter E pointed out, all electric heaters are 100% efficient - all of the electricity they consume is turned into usable heat. For comparison, a modern gas boiler only manages to turn 90% of the energy it consumes into usable heat - the rest goes up the chimney 

A heat pump isn’t an ‘electric heater’ in the normal understanding of the term. It works just like a fridge, using electricity to cool one body of air in order to warm up another. This gives an apparent efficiency of greater than 100%, but that isn’t in fact the case. Nevertheless, each kWh of electricity can pump three or four kWh of heat from outside to inside the home. You might want to investigate this possibility, but please seek advice from trusted sources. There are lots of snake-oil merchants out there eager to sell ‘more efficient heaters’ - don’t be taken in. This forum may be a good starting place.