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

It could also be useful to check what tariff is displayed on the actual meter, if that is incorrect then the data hasn’t been downloaded so the IHD will remain incorrect until it does.  If the tariff on the meter is correct, well, that’s another story!

Hi @Norman - heads up that I’ve moved your thread over to this other one on IHD prices: I think the 5% VAT is another possible thing to check: are your IHD prices 5% out?

If not, have a look at this great advice from @Blastoise186 and @PeterR1947 - keen to hear from you on your actual renewal date! 

Hehehe, actually Peter, it’s much simpler than that. 

Aclara meters just so happen to auto-scroll through the Reads menu when in sleep mode, so you don’t even have to touch them at all if you want to check all the readings at once - unless you want to activate the backlight. Pretty useful feature in a way.

And even then, it’s a simple case of mashing the A button to step through all the readings. The B button on Aclara meters is only really for the technical menus if the meter is in Credit Mode, but might serve more useful purposes in Prepayment Mode.

As far I’m aware however, most IHDs don’t tend to show costs with VAT factored in, probably because it’d be a nightmare to reconfigure if the VAT Rate ever got changed and also allows for cases where a different VAT Rate is used for a particular account (or even zero VAT!). If you wanted to know the full cost of your energy with VAT and everything else included, looking at your bills or MyOVO is the most reliable option. :)

Hi @Norman ,

Thanks for getting back to us and I’m really sorry for the trouble here.

This forum is mainly volunteer led and the volunteers who help out here don’t have access to your account and we can’t make changes to your account directly. But we can help out with quite a lot of things and give a lot of advice than can help solve puzzles. You won’t find many other suppliers with a community forum like this one, which is one of the reasons why it’s open to everyone.

This should be an easy fix however. If you let the Support Team know about this thread, they should know what’s been said here so far. I suspect it could just be a simple case of them sending a few SMETS Commands to your meter that will update the tariff details. Chances are it will refresh with the correct rates eventually though.

As for the gas meter, it’s worth noting that your existing traditional gas meter will be up for recertification eventually (nearly all meters only usually last 10 years or so) and would have to be replaced with a smart meter eventually. While it is true that you can request not to have smart meters, suppliers can override such requests when the existing meters reach the end of the service life and need to be replaced anyway.

I have a Chameleon IHD-6 which came with the smarts meters when we were with another supplier (Bulb).

The display works and shows the current usage but the tariff is the old bulb one and not showing the correct pricing for OVO.

How do you re-pair the IHD to OVO to get the correct tariff information?

Hi @pauls999,

Welcome to OVO and to our online community. Glad to see that our resident expert @Blastoise186  has already given some great advice on why your unit rates may not have updated on your IHD yet - 

We’ve also moved your question to a similar topic, so check the advice above for more information. As you’ve just switched over it may be that we are still in the process of getting the tariff details updated for you but this won’t affect the unit rates you will actually be charged, if its been over 6 weeks from the switch or you’ve already received your opening statement I would reach out to the Support Team to get this sorted now. 

Let us know if you’ve got any more questions about your new OVO account, we’re always happy to help! 

Hi @Norman ,

Actually, this sounds more like either your Smart Meter and/or IHD didn’t process the SMETS Command properly. You may want to ask OVO to run the commands again just in case there was an issue on previous attempts.

Trustpilot is only one metric and shouldn’t be solely relied on as the be all and end all. It can indeed be used to help with research, but you should always cross reference it with other sources. In actual fact, I happen to know that this forum is rarely featured on there and if it was, then the scores would almost certain be a lot higher. I also know that just about every energy company in the UK will never hold a five star rating on Trustpilot for very long - they will all inevitably drop down eventually. Some faster than others - the average across all energy suppliers is more like 2.1 stars after all.

In this case, please ask for the SMETS Commands to be executed against your Smart Meters, NOT the IHD. IHDs get the tariff data from the Smart Meters they are paired with, so updating the details needs to happen on the meters themselves and the IHD will then pick up the changes next time it checks in. It’s possible that you’ve just been asking for the update to happen in the wrong part of your HAN.

I’ve also double checked the resources I have. The SMETS Command that needs to be used is Send Tariff Configuration which should take care of the process. It can be run by almost anyone in the Support Team without needing an escalation. If that doesn’t work however, an escalation can be raised to investigate the issue further. I’ve currently got one active for my own meter and a potential root cause has already been identified - the S2 Team are working on fixing it for me. I’ve let them know that it might be a more widespread issue and asked for the fix to be considered for a wider rollout if it works in my case.

Hopefully that will help you out as well, but it’s important to raise a request yourself so that it can be logged and the teams made aware of who’s being affected. I only have the ability to instruct OVO to do things on my own account, so I can’t touch anyone else’s.

Thanks @Jess_OVO !

I do have some good news at least. The fix that the S2 Team has attempted on my meter has worked perfectly and the tariff data has been updated across my entire HAN. Both Raichu and the Kecleon Brothers now have new tariff data. It’s not quite right because it seems that someone might have accidentally sent the wrong rates, but at least the new config is much closer to my actual tariff than it was before. I’ve let the team know and asked for the tariff config to be updated again.

To be fair, even if it’s not quite the right data, it does at least confirm that the commands are now working again for me. I’m told it can take 24 hours, but sometimes you might get lucky and it might go through much faster.

I understand, sorry for the trouble. This isn’t anywhere near the level of service I’ve been getting myself, but I’m not out of options. I’m only a forum volunteer so I’m independent of OVO, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know a whole range of solutions.

I can try to ask @Tim_OVO and @Jess_OVO to step in as they might be able to chase this up on your behalf. In my case, the root cause was a double tab issue in one of the systems which was caused by me previously having an S1 Smart Meter which was replaced with an S2 Smart Meter a few months ago. The S2 Team were able to remove that double tab issue this morning by forcing the system to forget about the old meter and that unblocked the system so that the commands could be attempted again. This is what resolved it for me.

Tim and Jess don’t generally intervene in the first instance, but I can ask for their help in this case as they might be able to see if they can do anything. Bear with me and I’ll see if they’re around.

Howdy @WB01 !

It sounds like there’s two possible issues here. The first one being that you’re trying to check some of the details on the IHD too soon after powering up - it can take up to five minutes for it to download everything when it first connects and after a restart.

The other issue is pretty easy to fix - it sounds like the Support Team simply need to send the tariff configs to your meters which doesn’t actually take very long. If you get on the Live Chat or Phone to the Support Team, please ask them to run the SMETS Command Update Tariff Configuration with the correct rates for your tariff. This should fix the rates in the blink of an eye. But OVO prefers that I also mention it can take up to 24 hours for the command to go through. Once it’s downloaded to the meters, your IHD should pick it up automatically from there.

Good luck! 

Nice one for flagging this, @WB01 - as Blastoise mentioned and as you’ve already arranged, the Support Team may need to take some actions to get your smart meter and IHD tariff aligned with your online account.

I’ve moved your comment onto a similar thread, and I’ve copied the ‘best answer' below which has other possible things to look out for with your new smart meter: 

Sorry to hear your IHD usage costs don’t seem to be consistent in adding your daily standing charges, @boxticker.

As far as I’m aware both fuels should see the daily standing charge cost applied around midnight each day, so I’m wondering if there might be a dip in connection or another technical bug which might explain this. Any ideas, @Blastoise186?

Hello, @Blastoise186   Just for the record, I have an IHD6 display, an Aclara electricity meter with blue and orange buttons on the right, and a Uniflo gas meter with 3 red buttons marked A, B and C.

I feel strongly that I would prefer the gas cost on the IHD to remain exclusive of standing charges, as indicated in my initial posting. I would prefer the electricity costs to be on a similar basis, but I don’t want to make a big play of that.

I have not added photos as the gas meter is in a fairly inaccessible spot for snapping.