Channel 5 - 13 things they don’t want us to know about Smart meters

On this evening

Hum

Anyone care to precis what they say to save me an hour of my life?

I watched it +1 (didn't see this thread before then)
It was journalism at its most dull. Stretching out things that everyone (should) already know.

Some "home expert" said you can save money by turning your room stat down. Like no one knew that.

And the Alexis Conran was cutting a large cake to show what percentage (Roughly) of your energy bill goes where.

Oh, and 2 million "smart meters" don't work

There was some bloke saying how much he loved his smart meter.

It was just dull drivel.

What gets me is the fact that most people don’t have a clue about their power consumption …..

That programme hardly scratched the surface of the SMETS and SMETS2 standards and the control potential the energy providers could excercise given half a chance

But the question is.....
Do you realise that when smart meters fail.. Sometimes they can actually fail in your favour.. Not the suppliers?

We've had smart meters since July 2008.. and I can't see any reason to suggest that traditional manual meters would have benefited us any better during that time..?

The Electric meter had to be replaced in 2019...
But its the smart Gas smart-meter that has saved us "loads-a-money" (as Harry Enfield used to say)...

Our Gas meter stopped working on 24 July 2023...
Whereby it stopped counting the volume of gas we were consuming..
But was still transmitting the last known value each month back to our supplier..
(we have gas central heating, cook on a five ring gas hob, and our hot water is heated via the gas boiler)

So in the suppliers opinion the gas meter is working, communicating a reading back to their billing computer..
but we have just used Zero volume of Gas since the last reading!

After the end of August bill came through I spotted this anomaly and phoned the customer services in September to report the fault..

To cut a long story-short.. It appears that the customer services and/or known smart-meter faults flow diagram didn't have much guidance on how to resolve this problem.. ??
(e.g. meter is transmitting correctly the current reading.. But has lost the ability to count the actual consumption!!)

I phoned again during, October, November, January, March, April.. doing all I could to get the problem resolved..!

Finally 17 May 2024, we actually get a new working gas smart-meter fitted..

So basically just under 10months worth of gas consumption, including the winter of 2023 was Zero..
24 July 23 to 17 May 24. as the transmitted reading was always the same figure!!

We are now all back up and working correctly..
and have not had any attempt to recoup the lost consumption payments...
As they wouldn't have a leg to stand on as I was repeatedly contacting them to try and resolve the fault ASAP!

Nine and a bit months of free Gas, all because of a faulty smart meter is good in my opinion!

One of my mate's had a smart gas meter fail and it switched his gas off, something to do with the internal battery failing

The suppliers have targets to install them BUT not to keep them working.

They have tried 3 times to install a smart meter at my parents house. Each time I send them an email saying there is no room in the meter cupboard to install a smart meter.

I have sent pictures as well. It's a 1950s property with the meter in the corner of the living room, over the years the cupboard has been redesigned and made smaller but the original board the meter was on is still there.

But new consumer unit fitted leaves no room for these massive meters they have to put in.

So three times they have tried, 3times they have failed. It can't be the only property with this issue. Why don't they develop a meter that's the same size as the old digital ones ?

Mobile phones are small so surely someone can bring to market a similar sized meter ?

I have wondered what happens when there isn't space. So far I've got away with just ignoring the requests to book an installation appointment but no doubt the pressure will increase eventually. My cupboard has a reasonably large board which I think is supposed to be just for the supply company but now has a large consumer unit plus the isolation switch and meter for my solar system and a large alarm panel. The latter is actually redundant and I could remove it if necessary, but can I be pressured into somehow making space for the smart meter?

UNG said:

One of my mate's had a smart gas meter fail and it switched his gas off, something to do with the internal battery failing

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that happened to us, the battery failed and shut off the gas supply in the middle of the Christmas holidays. I thought at first it was our gas boiler that had failed and tried in vain to get a plumber to attend. we eventually found we had no gas supply and phoned our supplier (Octopus) which managed to get a new meter installed within hours

Happened to me too. Not surprising as gas obviously does not run on electricity, Thus its a system designed to fail as soon as the internal battery dies. Assuming there are for arguments sake 10 million installations and the average battery life is say 5 years that means an average failure rate of 2 million per year! That means 2 million households will get either cut off or free gas, unless the supplier changes 2 million batteries per year, which I think unlikely. Some designer did not really think it through. Even assuming the battery life is ten years its still a huge problem. Now if they incorporated a miniature fuel cell.....

It would have made sense to have the battery customer replaceable

Murdoch said:

It would have made sense to have the battery customer replaceable

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It would also make sense for the meter to tell the supplier (and maybe also the customer) when the battery is near the end of its life. Not very smart if it doesn't do that. And if it does do that, the supplier is not being very smart if they don't act on the information.

Tony Woolf said:

It would also make sense for the meter to tell the supplier (and maybe also the customer) when the battery is near the end of its life. Not very smart if it doesn't do that. And if it does do that, the supplier is not being very smart if they don't act on the information.

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The engineer that fitted our new gas meter said that the existing gas meter should have sent a message to the supplier that the battery is running low, but obviously it didn't.

Will46 said:

The engineer that fitted our new gas meter said that the existing gas meter should have sent a message to the supplier that the battery is running low, but obviously it didn't.

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Or it did send the message and it was ignored

ProDave said:

Anyone care to precis what they say to save me an hour of my life?

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First class sayings

Will46 said:

The engineer that fitted our new gas meter said that the existing gas meter should have sent a message to the supplier that the battery is running low, but obviously it didn't.

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it probably did but its easier for them to just wait until it does fail rather than send people out to replace batteries that might last a few month longer

It's recently taken me 7 months to get a gas meter changed where the battery had failed. At least it did not cut off the supply but my tenant has had to put up with estimated bills since moving in. The new meter will still not communicate with the leccy meter so it is effectively a dumb meter and my tenant cannot use any smart gas tariff. Octopus don't give a stuff it seems.