Updated on 09/12/25 by Ben_OVO
You’re not the first to face this difficulty with a new meter. Happily, the remedy is often quite simple.
For a multi-rate system to work properly, three quite separate aspects of it have to be set:
- The correct tariff has to be applied to your account. You can with any luck see it on your Plan page, and it will usually show the offpeak timings.
- The tariff switching times have to be sent to the meter. It will normally start recording offpeak usage on register 2 at the start of each offpeak period and revert to register 1 at the end of it.
- The calendar for the Auxiliary Load Control Switch (ALCS) has to be sent to the meter. This is what decides when to switch power on to the circuit feeding the heating equipment, and in most cases the times will be the same as those in the tariff switching table.
You should be able to see whether the tariff switching table has been properly set up, because the IHD may have been set up to tell you when the tariff changes. It may not be so easy to spot when the ALCS operates unless you have a neon indicating when power is switched to, say, the immersion heater. It is usually possible to spot it on the meter display itself if you know what to look for. We’d need to see a clear photo of the meter to be able to help with that. ‘Clear’ means a close-up so all the markings are legible, and it usually helps to tough a button before taking the picture to light up the display screen. A wider view showing everything on the meter backboard would help, too, so we can see all the cables to and from the meter.
If you find out that the tariff is changing at the right times, but the ALCS isn’t playing its part, Support should be able to arrange for the ECAUL request to be sent to update the ALCS. Let’s make sure that this is the right approach first.
If you need to speak our Support Team to arrange an ECAUL request to be sent, our contact details can be found here:
You can find useful pages about smart meters and IHDs in our Forum Library section here.
