Energy bills, government ‘help’ and the like

[Wombat]

You need significantly fancier kit to let you fail over to battery-only supply, as the house AC and the mains AC need to be exactly synchronised if ever they are connected together. I think our battery and inverter are "just another" circuit in the fusebox consumer unit, alongside the kitchen sockets and whatnot. A system that keeps going during a power cut would also need a chunky great off-switch relay on the mains side of the consumer unit, so that once the house has been separated from the mains there is no chance at all of the two coming back together until the appropriate gubbins has done its wizardry to bring them back in phase.

Or I suppose you could have two inverters, connecting mains->DC and DC->house, so you need never be synchronised at all.

I've already got the monster isolating switch, because the house was fitted with a generator input point before we moved in, as its a (very) rural area, and the supply is a bit flaky.  We do also have an Ecoflow Delta 2 portable battery, which in the last power cut (caused by "3rd party damage" to a pole (probably a farmer with a loader shovel) kept our internet alive, and also made coffee for us.

[chrisbainbridge]

I have an EcoFlow delta 2 as well. Bought to run outside audio at events it is now brilliant for off grid stuff in the van. Nothing like waking up at the bottom of a hill in a lay-by and being able to make a decent coffee and another after my run or ride.

[slope]

Now I know I'm twp, but why would daily electricity Standing Charges alter between the options one's supplier offers?

I still live in the same place and the cost of providing leccy down the cables is surelise, known and predicatable for periods of at least a few months - regardless of the wholesale cost of the actual domestic leccy?

Am with Scottish Power (here in rural North Wales ) and of course having been on Standard Variable since that became default a couple? of years back.

But now there's a couple of fixed rate 1 year options available. And the daily Standard Charge is 4.83 pence less with the new "Help Beat Cancer Flexi May 2025 TM1" (snappy title) - as opposed to staying on the Standard Variable (from 01/04/2024 when the cap changes) - which will become new daily Standing Charge of 67.03p

Is there any hope for the ordinary citizen to make sense of it all?

[geoff]

This has just reminded me to look up my Octopus bills, and indeed although my usage is visible in their app (suggesting they can read the meter) they don't appear to have billed me for electricity since November, which is when I asked them to put the gas on a fixed tariff...

Octopus did something similar to me a year ago when a fixed deal expired, resulting in a £2500 variable leccy charge for Dec 22 to Mar 23

You need to watch them like the proverbial hawk: I'm still arguing with them now.



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[geoff]

BTW...anyone know a good source for Octopus's historical tariff rates?  Their own website advertises such, but is resistant to searching/filtering, and I would prefer an independent source if possible

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[Mrs Pingu]

This has just reminded me to look up my Octopus bills, and indeed although my usage is visible in their app (suggesting they can read the meter) they don't appear to have billed me for electricity since November, which is when I asked them to put the gas on a fixed tariff...

Octopus did something similar to me a year ago when a fixed deal expired, resulting in a £2500 variable leccy charge for Dec 22 to Mar 23

You need to watch them like the proverbial hawk: I'm still arguing with them now.

They reason they hadn't billed was because they were missing some half hourly readings on several days and they needed to go in and charge them at the variable rate rather than the Flux rate, apparently. Surprised their software doesn't do this automatically.

[HTFB]

BTW...anyone know a good source for Octopus's historical tariff rates?  Their own website advertises such, but is resistant to searching/filtering, and I would prefer an independent source if possible

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The website offers an API, if you have the fu.

[Mrs Pingu]

Try here
https://energy-stats.uk/download-historical-pricing-data/

[geoff]

BTW...anyone know a good source for Octopus's historical tariff rates?  Their own website advertises such, but is resistant to searching/filtering, and I would prefer an independent source if possible

Sent from my Pixel 6a using Tapatalk

The website offers an API, if you have the fu.

Try here
https://energy-stats.uk/download-historical-pricing-data/

Thanks both...! much appreciated!

The energy.stats.uk site didn't include my tariff, but the API proved a mind of usefulness, from which I got some price info
https://developer.octopus.energy/docs/api/.

Another helpful link for the Octopus API is: https://www.guylipman.com/octopus/

(Think they owe me over a grand!)

[Cudzoziemiec]

Domestic energy prices could be capped based on the time of day that households use their appliances, the regulator Ofgem has said.

The watchdog said it has launched early discussions about a "dynamic" price cap that changes as consumers became more flexible.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68655725

Several people here have said this would be a long-term consequence/goal of smart meters. But where does it leave those of us without such meters (they came to fit one here and it was impossible)? As there doesn't seem to be any other way of knowing the time a unit of electricity was consumed.

[HTFB]

They would use data from a large sample of smart-metered homes to produce a profile of typical use through the day -- most likely different profiles for different deciles of consumption -- and your quarterly meter readings would be attributed to that profile.

[Flite]

Faulty smart meters rise to nearly four million

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz9zqn77ezno   

CEO of Octopus on radio this morning.
Companies more interested in installing meters to meet govt targets and no incentive to make sure they work.
How unexpected.
Our smart meter was installed by Octopus about 3 years ago and after teething problems it did work on and off for a while.
Stopped 2-3 months ago. We keep reminding them we are on 3-phase.
We stayed in for the fitter a couple of weeks ago, but he wasn't certificated to fix 3-phase meters.
He said Octopus only have three 3-phase certificated  in N. England.
He said it costs £250 to upgrade the engineers to 3-phase.
Still waiting.....

[Polar Bear]

We remain on a dumb meter.  We have cheap rate overnight and it's really quite easy to monitor our electricity consumption.  We have been doing so for 20 years.

Some people might be shocked to learn that dumb meters give readings too.

[grams]

That BBC article also says the proportion of working smart meters is increasing.

Also the horror stories appear to be from shitty tinpot suppliers who can’t do basic admin and very little to do with smart meters.

We remain on a dumb meter.  We have cheap rate overnight

Economy 7 is being phased out.

[rogerzilla]

The people who complain about being overcharged because of non-working smart meters obviously don't have the nous to press a button and give a customer reading.

My mother's house was newly built last year.  Only one of the smart meters works.  I have to give my own readings for gas.

[Polar Bear]

That BBC article also says the proportion of working smart meters is increasing.

Also the horror stories appear to be from shitty tinpot suppliers who can’t do basic admin and very little to do with smart meters.

We remain on a dumb meter.  We have cheap rate overnight

Economy 7 is being phased out.

The RTS element of economy 7 is being phased out. Our meter is a relatively modern multi rate meter that does not rely upon RTS.

[Flite]

Also the horror stories appear to be from shitty tinpot suppliers who can’t do basic admin and very little to do with smart meters.

I would not put Octopus in that category. We are happy with other aspects of the company

The people who complain about being overcharged because of non-working smart meters obviously don't have the nous to press a button and give a customer reading.

We make sure we are not overcharged!

We have cheap rate overnight

A flat cheap overnight like Economy7 doesn't suit our usage.
But we are on a tarriff that gives cheap rate at some times of day, medium rate for most of the day, and a high rate at one peak period.
We wanted the smart meter so we could monitor how well (or not) that works for us, as we can cancel at any time.

[Kim]

The people who complain about being overcharged because of non-working smart meters obviously don't have the nous to press a button and give a customer reading.

It's not that simple.  After our smart meters were first installed, I stopped submitting readings because I was under the mistaken impression that the monthly readings shown on my bills were obtained via the Shiny! New! smart meters, and not some random number generator.  (The meters were working fine, but something was amiss in the centralised database thing that sends readings to the supplier.)

I'm now more cynical, but "your supplier will pretend they're getting meter readings when they aren't" is the sort of thing you learn the hard way.

Octopus at least make it clear that they're getting consumption data.

[mrcharly-YHT]

We have the situation where the smart meter doesn't 'know' the rate that we are being charged. So it has a 'you have spent £xxx this week on electricity' display, but that is wrong.

Repeated calls to the energy supplier have failed:
They can't update the smart meter charging amounts.
They can't tell us over the phone, or email or post a document showing how much we are being charged.

We have to wait for a bill.

[barakta]

I have a disabled friend whose meter is up high in a cupboard in her flat. She can't physically access the meter to read it, has to arrange for someone else to come and stand on a ladder to reach in and press the button and read it (most of her friends are too disabled, so she ends up having to add it to the list of jobs for her paid support but official carers won't do ladder things or anything technical). For someone like her, being told smart meters will read accurately, then don't, is a real problem.

[Kim]

We have the situation where the smart meter doesn't 'know' the rate that we are being charged. So it has a 'you have spent £xxx this week on electricity' display, but that is wrong.

And I'm betting that if you set it to show kWh, it'll revert to cost after 30 seconds or something daft...

[Lightning Phil]

The people who complain about being overcharged because of non-working smart meters obviously don't have the nous to press a button and give a customer reading.

Broken can include being non responsive to button presses.  It’s a computer with code written by someone. It can fail in the myriad ways computers do.

[Socks]

Our 'smart' gas meter stopped working because the small battery that powers it was knackered.  So not only could it not send information to OVO, the display was blank so I couldn't even send my own readings.  Took four long and involved interactions (email, chat assistant) and a complaint to the ombudsman to eventually get this sorted 12 months after the issue was first reported.

These companies don't build and maintain the distribution network.  They  don't generate the energy.  They just act as the middlemen.  And they can't even do that!

[Feanor]

I have Scottish Gas as my supplier of both Gas and Electricity at the flat in Edin.
Ever since they 'upgraded' their system, the meters have become un-smart.
They broke something in the chain of readings-reporting, and can't fix it.
They say they are working to fix the issue, but it's been about a year, so I'm not hopeful.

Looking to change supplier anyway.

Would someone like Octopus be able to 'fix' the problem with the smart meter reporting?
(in the manner of AAISP)
Or would they have to replace the meters?

[Kim]

Octopus were able to make our 'Secure'-branded SMETS1 meters be smart, after the supplier mentioned above had failed to do so.  It took them a several of weeks to get the gas meter to work.

They're probably the closest thing to AAISP in the energy supplier business, in that they have an interest in developing the systems they use, but are obviously not in the same league.