Hello folks, I'm a retired MIET looking for some help about smart meter communication. I'm not wanting to stir up the whole hornets' nest about smart meter suitability, but have some specific questions which I'm hoping some may be able to help with.
Having avoided these meters for years and years I've bought a house which had a dead gas meter. The supplier had been billing the previous (also dead) owner with high estimated bills for months and months even though the house was empty while his family worked through the estate process. The gas meter's battery had gone flat after about 7 years. I got the supplier to replace the gas meter with some initial reluctance, and their contractor changed the electricity meter at the same time. Both previous meters were SMETS1, the new ones marked SMETS2. The replacement didn't seem to take long.
As you might expect when I'm asking about this, 6 months later the gas meter still isn't communicating with the supplier though the new electricity meter reports "smart readings" accurately. Citizens' Advice's onlne smart-meter checker shows that the gas meter is installed but not commissioned. All attempts to get the supplier to fix this have failed, and an investigation by the Energy Ombudsman shows that they haven't done anything at all in 6 months, either internally or with DCC. They're offering a small payment for inconvenience but no guarantee that they will get DCC involved or that anyone will be able to fix this. I'd really like to get this meter to work correctly or even get another new one fitted correctly. I'm aged 75 and find it a real chore to get down to read the dim-light display outside, perhaps in the rain, or get my wife with mobility issues to hold the vertical meter cupboard door open while I try to photograph the display. I've not signed a contract with the supplier until the problem is fixed, so am on a "deemed" contract with monthly bills though the gas ones are estimated (higher) until I send them corrected values.
I'm not an expert in this area but the distance between meters is only about 5 metres, in a small detached bungalow with the two meters on the same level, electric in the front porch, gas in a plastic box on an outside wall. This is in a sizeable town in south-west Scotland with good mobile phone coverage from several companies and no big hills or nearby tall buildings. My new broadband supplier also mentioned radar as a possible issue when discussing initially-low wifi speeds, but their follow-up with BT got speeds on both ethernet and wifi up to very high levels, once the fibre configuration had been corrected. The nearest airport is about 5 miles away.
Curiously, my new next-door neighbour also found that his old gas meter was dead and had it replaced by the same supplier, perhaps surprisingly his new gas meter doesn't send smart readings for his usage either.
I hear from the Consumers' Association's recent survey of 10,000 members around the UK, that about 16% of users had various problems with their smart meters in the last year. Some questions for this group, is this kind of problem localised by geography, eg are there any working smart gas meters in south-west Scotland at all? Are there some suppliers with particular difficulties in operating their smart gas meters? What does it take to get DCC to look into this, our present supplier has failed to contact them at all so far, is there a cost for them to do this? I can understand a reluctance to send engineers out to every location on cost grounds but I'd have hoped that my inclusion on the supplier's Priority Service Register might count for something with some customers.
Could someone perhaps explain the "commissioning" process in more detail? I've read on other uncertain forums that the gas meter may only be polled via the electricity meter ever hour or so, so that engineers are reluctant to wait around for successful registration to take place.
The Energy Ombudsman's decision though upholding my complaint, refers to there perhaps being "potential issues... part of a wider issue with smart meters within the energy industry". Is there any public documentation of such a "wider issue" apart from the obvious cases of meters widely separated within blocks of flats, or with signal paths blocked by metalwork, tall buildings, radar etc, none of which apply to my location.
So, quite a lot of questions, but I hope someone can shed some light on some of these. Thanks in advance, Alan S MIET (retd)
