Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Octopus Flux

I have an Octopus supply to my shed. They wanted to fit a Smart meter so I said yes. They sub out the fitting of the meter and the admin of the fitting. I ended up dealing with a call centre. They did not answer email and would not answer the phone. I just left it for four to six weeks and in the end they contacted me. The better news is that the meter installation was very good. Just a pity that it's in a shadow spot for the phone signal so the Smart side of things does not work. The new meter is a lot easier to read though.
As the man that came to try and fix the phone signal to the meter said, "may be it will work when they get to SMETS 10".

On the subject of smart meters, we're on the second pair. The first time around the gas meter never connected. The second time around the gas meter never connected. Eventually they said because they had two gas meters on the system and once it was put right the gas meter would connect. It didn't.

So they ask me for monthly readings. I suspect its because the meters are in boxes on the drive facing the house next door. My satnav and digital speedo don't connect from there so why would a smart meter?

I thought they connected using GSM Dave. Our electricity meter does with a SIM card within. What's your mobile phone coverage like?

Exactly. No guarantee of a decent phone signal of course

We had a meter installed last year with Octopus. The installer said if the phone signal wasn’t quite strong enough, he would add an extra aerial, but it seemed ok without. Our phone signal is no good downstairs in the house, so we use Wi-Fi Calling indoors.

My gas smart meter was massively over-reading from the day of installation. Unfortunately the matter was complicated by the onset of Covid

Long story short, I ended up in a six-month long battle with the energy supplier and the Ombudsman (who were completely clueless) which, only thanks to my persistence, finally resulted in me getting a very large refund.

In our last house the provider came to fit a smart meter. He had to abandon it as the phone signal was very poor. I asked him about a signal booster. He just gave me a confused blank look. At the time I was looking for one but they were apparently only legal for business/company use. The frequencies were not available to non business. I am sure one would have worked as the signal upstairs was better so the receiver aerial placed up high should have been ok, no joy though. The fitter did replace the old meter with a newer one though.
At the moment we don’t have a smart meter as we are currently ( no pun intended) on the best tariff with Octopus for our usage profile. It’s no big deal to do the monthly meter reading and send it online .
Curiously, a few years ago we were with SSE and they sent a leaflet about going to a meter. Their estimate for our cost was higher on a smart meter than old type.
Since the energy price increases we have managed a 20% drop in kWh use, so reducing the effect of price hikes. I use a spreadsheet to log and monitor utilities usage/cost.
Will I switch to smart? Yes when a money saving tariff is available.
Water meter......no problems and usage better than average. Only downside is it’s on a neighbour’s property right beside his. No access problems but their system ( if there is one !) for maintenance is outsourced and coordination rubbish. When they replaced our meters for newer last year the contractors doing it were poor. Hole digger /plumber did ok. Then another party came to relay the block paving. Crap job! It took weeks to get them back. Apparently if the date to do the job was missed they deleted the whole job so it had to be set up again from scratch. All fixed now but a real PIA.

Good phone signal Richard, but the meters have never worked.

I had to climb a 30ft scaffold tower and change a blade-spring on my wind-turbine yesterday .... a little butt-clenching but, on balance, I'd prefer that simple straightforward task every few years to negotiating the current mainstream domestic power minefield 😄

K

Reminds me of my mum battling to prove a dodgy gas meter way back in the late 60's, we'd watched it jump as the next needle rotated (remember those ?) the gas board wasn't having any of it, so a relative set up a cine camera on a tripod for proof