There used to be a block related to the live chat as it was incompatible with the old billing system. I can ask for that to be removed since the purpose for said restriction no longer exists. Leave that with me and I’ll ask a forum moderator to forward on a request to make that change.

In the meantime, try using Incognito Mode.

Thank you so much.  Could you tell me more about incognito mode please?  I can’t get beyond a page telling me the website is not available util the end of the year

What web browser do you use? I can give you the instructions you need.

Thanks.  I use Firefox but have a VPN via AVG uf that makes a difference.  Easily switched off if it does

Ok, firstly I’d recommend completely nuking and uninstalling the VPN - they serve no useful purpose and just move your problems somewhere else rather than solving anything. And cause a bazillion other issues with many sites...

This guide from Mozilla should do the trick by the way. They’re better at explaining that me.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/private-browsing-use-firefox-without-history

By the way, just a heads up. AVG is owned by Avast which is ultimately owned by Norton these days. You might want to consider switching AV to something else like Bitdefender Total Security at some point, preferably before you get forced onto terrible Norton products.

You could use the official ovo Twitter or Facebook pages if you use either of them

Both are official ovo support channels and the staff their can access accounts or forward on messages. 

Send a direct message rather than a public post

https://www.facebook.com/ovoenergy

Include your name, address, account number and date of birth in the direct message to pass security. 

I have the same problem has others have. How do I send my meter reading?
Also I need to check and probably reduce the monthly direct debit amount the I increased during the winter.

I will add another point, a more cynical one.

I have decades of experience in sofware development and 6 months migrations sounds really too long, especially for a company that just won Best Place to Work 2023.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ovogroup_its-official-according-to-the-sunday-activity-7065985714194149376-0yFt

Let’s say I’m a developer and I have a difficult migration to do, the migration will require a lot of man-hours and cost a lot of money. Plus that migration just impacts only a few customers.

As a company, would I be temped to lose these customer instead? I don’t think I will dare to close their contract unilaterally, maybe I could think to put enought friction in the service so they eventually will leave.

Maybe … 

Maybe it is not just a maybe...

You know, migrating to new systems isn’t always as simple as it might seem. In this case, it’s definitely NOT as simple as extracting the database, running a few scripts and then importing it again.

There’s roughly 30,000 or so customers who are still being migrated over from the old system. All of them have some kind of quirk about their account which requires manual action. Every other account that could migrate automatically, already has.

If you need to send meter readings in the meantime, Phone and Live Chat remain available. 0330 303 5063 or https://help.ovoenergy.com - make sure to tell the bot you are NOT a customer and it’ll put you through to a human.

Smart Meters will continue to send readings as normal during the migration.

It is what it is now.

I am pretty sure OVO aren't going to give access to the old system (Apollo) again, so customers choices are manage without it until migration or switch to another supplier if you are on the default variable tariff.

The new Faster Switching service for energy is much better and there are other good suppliers out there as well as OVO. 

Ok, but let me do the math.

Let’s assume you have 5 weeks holidays, so in year you have 47 weeks. Half a year means 23.5 weeks = 117.5 days = 940 hours.

This means 32 customers per hours (30,000 / 940 hours), in my experience software can do better, much better.

Here a suggestion, I’m trying to be helpful  
You can cluster the 30,000 customer in “kind of quirk” with a pre-analysis of the data or by doing manually and document the process. Once the main patterns are clear, automate the manual step. It will make the full process faster.

Good luck! 

But then you have to factor in curveballs like Economy 7, THTC, Economy 10… And a bazillion others… And all the industry integrations…

And you can start to see why it’s not a simple job. :)

Has anyone differentiated between “migrating” accounts and “starting new” accounts?

If I left Ovo and then came back to Ovo 1 week later (just a silly scenario), my understanding is that I could have a new Ovo account up and running “in the new system” within a day or so, with access to my “new account / meter readings etc”. That surely has to be automated by now within Ovo???? 

So why in theory can’t Ovo provide me with a “new account” today (or in a couple of days) albeit without my historical usage data? 

Yes it would of course be nice to get my historical data migrated but I can wait for that. But preventing me from having a simple way to check my CURRENT billing and meter readings until 2024 is just silly and an incredibly poor customer management exercise. 

As I’ve said elsewhere in this chat, you can still get your current electric and gas usage from the DCC using the BRIGHT app (available on Apple & Google) and also, from their main website Glowmarkt.com, you can even download your own consumption data. And then you can be independent of Ovo’s old systems.

I used to be on the Apollo system at my own address and was moved to the new system some years ago. It just happened automatically. 

At that time I also had a rental property which, when i was between tenants, I moved to OVO: that was also on the old Apollo system. Don’t know why… However, tenants moved in, had smart meters installed, then moved out, so I opened a new account with OVO. Lo and behold still on the old Apollo system ! So I think it’s not related to the newness of the account, it’s possibly to do with the address of the property.

TL;DR don’t think your idea will work.

That’s correct. It’s tied to the property. Whichever billing system manages a particular property is the one that ALL accounts at that property will be linked to, regardless of age and no matter how many times you cycle through new accounts.

When the property is migrated from legacy Apollo to the new billing platform Orion, whatever account is attached to the property at that time also gets migrated to Orion at the same time. Future accounts created at the same property after that point will also be onboarded to Orion rather than Apollo. Likewise, the Apollo system will no longer “see” anything at that property once Orion takes over. Until that property is migrated however, it remains under Apollo management along with all accounts created for that property.

Once the migration is fully complete, Orion will be the only billing system being used by OVO. Apollo will be fully terminated once the last customer is migrated away from it.

My sources for this information are a combination of forum resources, discussions with other forum volunteers and information provided to me directly by forum moderators. And tons upon tons of reading of old forum threads here going back years.

We don’t usually mention the Orion name here, but I felt it made this explanation easier.

@Beprecise so sounds like you would have to stay away until OVO have confirmed they have closed Apollo, hopefully before the end of this year.

Are you going to do that? 

The point I was highlighting / questioning was the value / need of historical data versus the value of a connected (smart) account. To take my example a little further, if someone moved to a new house today (not a few years ago) for which Ovo (and its affiliations) had no previous accounts, would that new account be started in Orion or Apollo? My assumption is Orion. Or are you saying perhaps for some geographical reason a particular area may still start a completely fresh new Apollo account today even though Ovo intend to shut it down by the end of the year and switch it to Orion? 

The point being, if it is such an enormous painful manual task switching the last 30,000 customers out of Apollo, why not ditch the historical data and just start from a clean slate? The question makes me think that Ovo believes there is value in the historical data for themselves, let alone for the customer. Which I also find amusing given the number of inaccurate projections they make for my own account, suggesting that the historical data is not actually that valuable.

Personally I’m waiting to see what happens in July, when the new price cap kicks in properly. Today Ovo do have a new fixed price scheme that would save some money compared to the current Simpler Energy. Having Solar Panels it galls me that Ovo pay a pittance for energy I give back to the grid. Now I have the Bright app I can still easily see my consumption  (and download it) regardless of the Provider. What is annoying is having to phone up Ovo to give them monthly meter readings to ensure they bill correctly, even though they have all the data they need at their finger tips to get it correct themselves, but they can’t manage it. 

I hate to say it… But your theories are 500 miles off target.

The real reason is that the remaining accounts require functionality that Orion doesn’t yet have and is currently being built. I already hinted at that in my many responses on this thread.

It’s nothing to do with historical usage data or where you are in the country. It’s to do with primarily being able to support unusual and exotic setups that don’t apply to the 99% of accounts that are already on Orion. Apollo still has that capability, which is the only reason it’s still being used at all at this time.

And that is why new accounts are/were still being created on Apollo for certain new customers. It’s almost certainly because their property has a need for a feature that isn’t ready on Orion yet so onboarding has to go via Apollo at this time.

And yes, the fact that Apollo is terrible at projections is a known issue - it’s the very reason OVO are building Orion and terminating Apollo (and exactly why OVO gave up on Apollo in the first place).

@Blastoise186 Thanks for your interesting comments and insights. Your description of my “Economy 7” account being “unusual and exotic” seems incongruous given that it’s a standard product they sell. But you may be right as when I switched to Economy 7 2.5 years ago (when I got my solar panels), Ovo did make a big mess of the account change. Given that the future of electricity supply is probably going to include far more varying daily rate bands,  (such that Economy 7 will seem trivial) I do hope for Ovo’s sake that their Orion billing system is being designed well. 

In conclusion, removing a customers account interface via the web is a big mistake.

I’m still pondering this Apollo thing… is it geographical ?? Both of the addresses I’m referring to are in Surrey, my own property had a split tariff economy 7 style set up. Two hours low, two hours high, five hours low - gmt hours so all different when the clocks changed. Quite annoying!!

Not from what I know of. Orion is still learning how to handle Economy 7 properly and that functionality is being expanded. It’s now capable of partial E7 support in that it can take - for example - a Day and Night Reading from a single meter and figure out the charges from that. But Multi-MPAN setups were still choking it for quite a long time… And Multi-MPAN was extremely common with Economy 7 due to having two meters quite often.

Yep from what I know, blastoise is on the money with this. It’s the functionality of our new billing platform with some multi-rate / multi-meter set ups. I’m hopeful that this functionality is just around the corner!

Might be useful to have that. :)

@Tim_OVO “Would this be the subject you’d want for the next meet up? I could find someone to outline the roadmap and challenges etc?”

Is this a public meeting or something else? If public, how is it made available?