Why is the tariff rate on my smart meter and Chameleon In Home Display (IHD) wrong?

Hi @MickG

Have you tried restarting the smart meter display by turning it off and on again to see if this will help re-sync.

Thanks
Matt

@MickG

Ah dude, I am sorry that didn't work. In my profession that normally works when I ask customers to do that haha. Ok, the best thing to do would be to speak with OVO amazing customer service. I would advice you give them a call on 0330 303 5063

Hi, just a quick update for other members future reference. After following the link in the previous post I sent a DM to the ovo Facebook site which was picked up within an hour by Emma and my problem has now been resolved.
Great, only problem is that because I contacted ovo to resolve the issue I think that I have now lost my duel fuel discount for this quarter according to the new rules regarding the payment of the discount.
I think this very unfair unless the powers that be agree that I was reporting a fault in which case my discount remains on my account.

I had smart meters installed 6-8 weeks ago. From day 1 my IHD has shown an incorrect gas cost for previous days. I thought it may have corrected itself over the course of the first few weeks but it hasn't - is there a way to get this data to show correctly?

Gas usage for 'today' shows correctly and shows the kWh usage and correct cost data. Navigating through the historical data to show what I used yesterday / last week / last month and the kWh usage seems right, but the cost is wildly out. It's basically showing a cost of £1 per kWh, so if I used 200 kWh last week, it shows a cost of £200.

The data for electricity looks like it's showing correctly.

my IHD seems to be using a different rate than I am being charged, particularly for gas. My combined usage per day (according to IHD) has doubled to £9/10 day - much higher than same time last year when my tariff is still fixed. Conversely, my actual bills seem to be ok. How do I change the rate used by the IHD?

Thanks for the comment @Transparent. Like you I am not surprised it's not displaying correctly to start with, but eight weeks on I'd have thought it would have sorted itself by now.

I know that my actual charges will be based on meter readings submitted to OVO so I'm not concerned about the charges per se but one of the reasons I opted to switch to smart meters was the ability to accurately track usage and cost day to day, week to week. Right now, I can't do that with my IHD as the historical info is wildly inaccurate. (I can't even track my usage through MyOVO - see post here.)

I don't know if the tariff issue I have is because of a problem with my meters or whether this is just part of the normal transition period, and as you say is still waiting for the update to the tariff info in the meter. However, the guidance in after your smart meter installation suggests it should work 'right away' so I'm thinking it might not be normal and something's gone wrong somewhere:

[h5]My smart meter has been installed. Now what? [/h5]

Your smart meter should start working right away, so you don’t need to do anything. It’ll start clocking your energy and sending us meter readings regularly.
You can simply enjoy using your In-Home Display (IHD) to keep an eye on your daily, weekly or monthly energy use. And the cost, kilowatt hours and carbon emissions.

If it is normal to have to wait this long after installation, the question is how much longer will I have to wait for my tariff info to display correctly? And it is is the norm, the guidance above should be updated by OVO to correct the 'it should work right away' to something like 'you will likely have to wait 8+ weeks for it to work'.


I've got to admit, two months in to my smart meter experience and I'm not very impressed so far. I was looking forward to being able to track usage and cost more accurately but given I can't do this yet, it's not been a great user experience.

Hi @Bourney,

The difference in price you've mentioned is VAT, which is 5% for energy. Your contract should state that those prices aren't inclusive of VAT. The charges on your IHD do include this.

If you could post a photo of where you can see 'total charge', we'll be able to let you know whether this is the bill period or since installation.

Cheers

Hi there @steveaduk ,

It sounds like your IHD has somehow gotten out of sync with what it should be saying. If you have a chat with the support team, they should be able to try forcing it to pull down the correct details again.

It sounds like this topic was also related as well.

Hi @Tim_OVO - the meter was fitted ages ago (maybe April?), but stopped sending any data for ages (either meter readings, or data to the IHD). I reported it, and seems like its working again now,, apart from the gas tariff being only 10% of what it should be.

Either way, having the support team force a resync should get your IHD to pull down the right details. If you give the support team a call right this way, they can probably trigger a SMETS Command while you’re on the phone.

Do let us know how you get on too. :)

Ooh, nice one @TomThumb ! That’s going to come in especially useful if anyone else needs to put in a similar request.

Meanwhile, I’ve just had an email from OVO literally 20 seconds ago, telling me my smart meter is about to go live again. (Yay!) :)

That’s understandable. But you do get the honour of me saying that you’re basically a brilliant platform destroyer! An account with a setup like yours is a perfect example of an edge case that hardly anyone thinks of, so it’s not surprising if that causes most billing systems to implode. You never think it’s possible until you discover (to your horror!) that someone comes along and completely smashes your system to pieces.

However, I believe the one OVO currently uses is custom built in-house by Kaluza, so I don’t believe there’s any kind of middleman that has to be convinced to fix bugs like these.

I guess it will probably also help to include supporting other unique edge cases too. One other combination that’d likely break it might be a single account with:

• One non-smart electricity meter
• One smart electricity meter running in  “normal single-rate mode”
• One three-phase/Time of Use/Economy 7 electricity meter
• One non-smart gas meter
• One smart gas meter

In a way, it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea if the platform was enhanced to cater for that kind of completely extreme edge case! You never know if there’s someone who actually has that...

Hey there @Norman ,

Welcome to the forums. Could you fill out your profile for us? It helps me to to make sure I can give the right advice. :)

It sounds like there’s a few possibilities here. Don’t worry about being billed incorrectly though. Regardless of what the IHD says, the correct tariffs will always be loaded into MyOVO and you can double check everything there.

It sounds to me as if one of these two cases are most likely:

1. You’ve only just renewed and the new contract hasn’t started yet. If you still had a few days left on the existing contract when you renewed, OVO will generally allow that one to run down first and then automatically switch over to the renewed contract on the agreed start date.
2. If you’ve only recently renewed and started the renewed contract, it can take a while for the updated tariff info to be downloaded. On average, it can take a couple of weeks or so due to how smart meters and IHDs work. As long as your IHD remains in range of your meters, it will show the new tariff rates once they’ve been downloaded.

If the IHD fails to download the tariffs at all after a few weeks, it should be possible for OVO’s Support Team to force it to pull down the details by using SMETS Commands to update the details from their end. It shouldn’t need a Comms Hub Reset for this, as there are dedicated SMETS Commands for downloading tariff rates without a reset. Sorry for any trouble there!