Smart meter reliability

Meters of ALL types can “fail” for a bazillion different reasons. Your question is too broad and I’m afraid it cannot be answered as written.

What exactly were you trying to ask?

It’s a meter’s job to measure. Only if it fails accurately to measure the quantity of energy flowing through it, it can be said to have failed. I suspect the number of meters that that applies to is vanishingly small - dozens, say, or possibly hundreds. That is a tiny proportion of the number of meters installed.

Smart meters have a number of other functions, like storing the quantities it measures so that suppliers and others can retrieve them, and transmitting some of the data it stores to an In-House Display close by. These functions can stop working, but that doesn’t mean the meter has failed. You wouldn’t say your car had failed because a headlight bulb blew, would you?

Some of the secondary smart meter functions are regarded as essential by the Smart Energy Code, so if a meter fails to meet the code’s requirements, the supplier is bound to replace it with one that does - even though the one being replaced continues to carry out its core duty of measuring the energy flow through it. 

I suspect that the alarming news reports you may have read about ‘failed’ smart meters refer largely to meters failing to carry out one or more of the secondary functions.  

You could always look at the official stats on the smart DCC website. Unfortunately, many add problems with their In Home Displays (IHD’s) to smart meter problems whereas often they are nothing to do with the meter itself. 

If memory serves, there has only really been maybe one case of a Smart Meter that has completely nuked itself from day 1 that we’ve ever seen on the Forum. That was in late 2022 when someone asked us about an L+G E470 which somehow got bricked and was unable to do basically anything. I was able to get (quite literally) direct advice from our Sekrit Smart Meter Friend at OVO’s Bristol HQ about it, his view was that it was a dead unit and it must have suffered some kind of firmware corruption if memory serves.

Worth noting that this is extremely rare - we’ve never seen it since then. Or at least, no-one has posted on the Forum about it anyway.

For fairly obvious reasons, this does NOT count the cases of things that are massively beyond OVO’s reasonable control, such as:

• Weather related damage - usually due to flooding or extreme rain
• Meter Tampering/Energy Theft
• House fires/property destruction - which would usually obliterate just about everything (trust me, I should know by now given my volunteer roles)
• Smashing up the meter with a hammer and/or ripping the meter off of the wall - because yes, I hate to admit it, but we’ve seen that mentioned on the Forum a couple of times...