We’re currently looking for OVO customers who’d be interested in taking part in a Trust Centre Swap Out (TCSO) trial. The trial will hopefully allow us to swap your standard smart meter comms hubs with a new one without needing to exchange/replace the entire smart metering system within your home.
In the future this capability will help us to exchange and replace existing comms hubs with newer dual band and 4g variants to overcome in-home challenges associated with poor or low signal.
By taking part in this trial, you'd help us on our journey to make energy better for people and the planet, by reducing the waste and the time required on site to resolve problems with our smart metering equipment.
What is a smart meter comms hub?
A comms hub connects smart gas and electric meters to a secure network and creates a HAN (Home Area Network). This allows your smart meters and In-Home Display to connect to each other.
Dual Band comms hubs use multiple frequencies to increase the coverage of smart meters. It can help push the signal further in buildings that may be difficult to reach. This allows us to be able to communicate with your meters better.
To be able to take part in this pilot you need:
A SMETS2 Electricity meter that is sending remote readings that are being used for billing
What happens on the day:
An engineer will arrive at your home and conduct a network signal check.
If the signal check is passed, they’ll exchange the comms hub and wait for the HAN to reconnect. There will be no interruption to your power and we should not be on site for longer than 90 minutes.
If the new comms hub fails to reconnect our Engineer will remove and replace the entire smart metering system to ensure that you are left with communicating meters.
This will mean your supply will be interrupted , if you're reliant on any medical equipment, please speak to your engineer before shutting off your power.
As this is a trial we do have to let you know that there is a chance that this could happen, but we hope it’s unlikely. This won't impact your energy supply and will be done on the same day.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to comment below.