Evening all

Having been inundated over the years about he wonders of smart meters by the gov/press/suppliers, I was amazed to learn that British gas only store readings on a monthly basis to suit the billing date or when the name on account changes.
I’m a landlord and a tenant moved out , but gave incorrect dates to british gas who then charged me for the wrong period, in preparing the bill they had collected a reading based on the date the leaving tenant gave, but then had to estimate useage for the new energy costs on January the 1st, quite why they can’t collect a meter reading on what is a known date is beyond me. Applied to both gas and electric.

Similarly , the water company sent me a bill titled “your metred assessed bill” for a property with no meter.

How much do these companies make from people who trust them and pay the bills without checking? ( on the assumption that such practices wouldn’t exist if it meant they lost money)

WIA, thanks for that, i spent over 2 hours on the phone with a call centre and two handlers yesterday ,
( one was utterly hopeless, then second was a complete star, even put me on hold whilst they rang the tenant to ask for confirmation of date they moved out ( first handler had claimed they couldn’t dial out or send emails) then sent me an email to which i could reply with screenshots of the tenants messages that confirmed when they’d moved out and that they’d cancelled the utilities on that date, a prime example of a tenant comfortable on a benefits lifestyle and having no interest in putting effort into anything)
neither thought to mention that and having now had a read of the paperwork that arrived for the occupier asking for a new account to be set up , whilst it may be in the small print i’ve not found it yet.

I recently started looking at CAD, ( Consumer Access Devices ), as a means of recording data from my smart meter, independent of any supplier.
As a result of that search I discovered that smart meters actually record data every 10 seconds. One CAD supplier also told me that historical data is recorded for 13 months, apparently the limit for CAD. I'm not sure if that's on the meter itself or at DCC. I think there are different data parameters for gas and water.

What led me down this path was the fact that I recently switched supplier. My new one doesn't have the data access that the old one did, but a much more lucrative tariff. Swings and roundabouts, I suppose.

From the SMETS 2 functional spec:

"5.6.4.28 Profile Data Log
A log for storing UTC date and time-stamped **half hourly** data (the amount of energy
Imported or Exported in a half hour period) arranged as a circular buffer such that
when full, further writes shall cause the oldest entry to be overwritten. The log shall
be capable of storing:
i. 13 months of Consumption;
ii. 3 months of Active Energy Exported;
iii. 3 months of Reactive Energy Imported; and
iv. 3 months of Reactive Energy Exported. "


A snapshot is stored every half hour, within the meter, for 13 months of imports and 3 months of exports. Depending what you have authorised, the retailer can ask DCC to retrieve these for once every halfhour/day/month. They can't ask retrospectively, eg to retrieve a previous residents consumption data.


The CAD or inhome display is sent a snapshot every ten seconds (you can see these numbers change on your display) but these 10-second data are not automatically stored anywhere, frustrating if you wanted them.

If you do want to store ten second data, there are some CADs that can do this. We have a Chameleon CAD/IHD that can upload the data to Chameleon's website every ten seconds, but they stopped doing that for us when we changed supplier, and the interface to view it (via Samsung) was pretty rubbish anyway.

To update, I was gifted a new IHD as part of a trial but now my problem is my Supplier hasn't programmed the SMETs 2 meter with my dual tariff details. Consequently the IHD is showing wrong totals as if all previous usage was at the day rate. It's frustrating as the Supplier helpline operatives don't even understand how the system should work.

AFAIK the Supplier programm's the smart meter, which then relays that detail to the IHD so every 10s.
Has anyone else had Supplier problems, with them not setting appropriate dual tariff rates on the meter.

I know it doesn't affect billing or even the suppliers Apps if they have them which are generally updated at the end of each day when they recover the bulk usage figures from DCC and then apply the tariff rates.
By then the data is historic and only by feeding the meter with the appropriate details can it become almost real time, I think, as was intended.

I've had a brief look at OFGEMs Supplier licensing rules but can't find the appropriate chapter and verse except that they have a responsibility for IHDs and their maintenance.
My gut feeling is that money comes into it somewhere; e.g. if they have to go to DCC to change tariff details on a meter, DCC charge them, just a wild guess.

E-on next