I’m so sorry to hear of your smart meter experience, both the communication issues you faced and the difficulty in requesting a traditional meter replacement.

In terms of your initial question, we do carry out some checks on the signal in your area and won’t allow an appointment to be booked in places where the Distribution Network Operator (DNO) has let us know there’s not currently Wide-Area-Network (WAN) coverage. Despite these initial checks,  we’re not able to guarantee the meters will always be able to communicate with us when they’re installed. 

The way your smart meter will communicate with us depends on where you live. If the signal is patchy we can sometimes install an aerial to boost this and ensure that we receive the readings from your meter. Check the way your meter will communicate and the compatibility of an aerial on this table -

If it’s been over 6 weeks since you’ve had a smart meter fitted and are experiencing signal issue, we’d recommend carrying out a smart meter health check for your meter type below and contacting our Support Team with the results:

Secure S1 smart meter health check

Aclara S2 smart meter health check

We can sometimes carry out remote processes or schedule in another engineer’s visit to resolve the communication issues. In the meantime it’s worth noting that communication issues won’t affect the meters ability to track your usage and you can still take a reading from the meters  - find out how on this relevant topic. Once you’ve taken a reading you can submit this easily on your online account or OVO app (Download for Android or iOS). 

We wouldn’t usually advise removing the smart meter completely as the signal in your area may improve, at which point it will re-gain the smart functionality. You can read more about the improvements to the network on this great Smart installation guide. There’s also future plans to use a ‘mesh’ network - which will allow smart meters to bounce the signal between themselves.

However if you’re really not happy reading the smart meter manually until we’re able to get back in communication, this is worth raising as a formal complaint with our Support Team. We take all complaints seriously no matter how they are raised and will do our best to reach a fair resolution - you can find out more about our Complaints procedure here.

I hope this information is helpful to others who may be experiencing similar issues with their smart meters - despite a few teething issues, there are some great benefits to going smart.