Smart meters cause soaring bills True or False

[littlespark]

Is there not a statement in the contract that says what tariff you would be on? So them hiking it up at peak times shouldn’t put you over a set amount.

 

[UNG]

At the moment, yes, but ultimately it will become a much more sophisticated version of Economy 7, with multiple tariffs, and hopefully smart appliances will detect these tariffs, and things that can, will use power when it is cheapest.
Advantage to the supplier is that it will smooth out peaks and troughs in demand, or more likely, match the demand to when there is available renewable energy.

I like your optimism
The days of cheap or cheaper periods of electricity are numbered as we move to a mostly or completely electric society, I don't see where these peaks and especially the troughs are going to occur. Smart appliances are all very good but what if the supplier only allows the washing machine, tumble dryer, dishwasher etc to operate on 2, 3 or 4 days a week to balance the load. What if we get to the point of charging the EV or washing the clothes which wins


Forget the supplier T&C's read the SMETS specification documents, SMETS 2 is the current version but SMETS 3 is on the way. These smart meters basically are giving someone else control of your electricity use may be not now, but it will be a slow creeping takeover of control in the next few years / decade. IMO smart meters are going to be the new form of rationing.
It would appear that the thoughts of Eric Arthur Blair are not that far away from becoming true

 

[Marvo]

In theory the type of meter should have little of no effect on the monthly bill assuming they're equally accurate. A smart meter would however make it possible for them to bill customers in KVA/h rather than KW/h as they traditionally have done for domestic consumers and that could make a considerable increase in the monthly amount payable. All of a sudden those cheap LED lamps and power supplies with an apalling power factor are going to be expensive to run.

 

[Gavin John Hyde]

wHATTTTT! How? I pay 130 pm and 250 when with British gas. I want some of what you are doing. Oh btw I am with octopus. Feel a bit guilty as I have been known to eat a little here and there.

They key @Vortigern is refer all your friends and family. You get £50 they get £50.
I refer at least 1 or 2 sometimes more a month. When doing EICRs i stuck stickers and qr codes on the board saying free £50 if you switch to Octopus!! Students often do scan and sign up! Reminds me i need to get.more printed!
Those £50s soon make the account look good. As mentioned in earlier post i got a bandb owner to switch all her supplies. A nice few hundred for that one!
We dont have our ev at.present (software issue) so not using much in way of electric overnight.
If everybody on the forum referred one person like dominoes it would make us all a bit of wonga

 

[Simon47]

Yes, the referral bonus from Octopus is quite nice ?
In principle, having a smart meter should not change what you pay/get charged for on any given tariff. But ...
There have been issues with some types of meter - it's not whether it's smart or not, it's specifically being electronic and the type of measuring circuit.
It was found in the Netherlands a few years ago that some meters were over-reading by a factor of up to 6 when presented with non-linear loads and/or noise. It was not that they were smart, it was that they used a Rogowski coil to measure the load and the electronics had been poorly designed. IIRC it came to light when a solar PV farm found their metered output very different to that reported by the inverters - or perhaps that was a similar but different incident.

 

[Mike Johnson]

This sort of soaring price's did the round in France when they first started to be installed, in most case's it turned out to be under reading from the existing old meter, my meter is in a locked box in the road about 20m from the house, so I don't know if I even have one, do I care, no I have just signed the pre-contract of sale. ?

 

[telectrix]

contacted octopus this morning. they quoted a ridiculous tariff. leccy - 28p/kWH.

 

[brianmoooore]

That's about the going rate after the gas price increases. I've just been quoted 26.73p.

 

[MJPD29]

They didn't even quote me. Just told me in the current climate I'm better staying with my current provider.

 

[Vortigern]

Recently I was asked on a commerical site to answer some questions as they are changing to smart H/H meter three phase. I was asked among other things what the demand was for the whole site! Thats sixty offices and 3Ph 200a. After much humming and what have you we worked out the Kva and told them. The point is that you had to accurately do this or suffer a penalty costwise if you exceeded the required Kva, so no pressure then. The penalties are quite high as well if you exceeded it. This was per month. So there can be other costs associated with going smart on commercial. Something to watch out for. By the way we got it right!

 

[telectrix]

21.8p for 1kWH leccy. we'repaying for all them bloody windmills. green energy..... shove it. build a couple of nuke power stations.

 

[Simon47]

The point is that you had to accurately do this or suffer a penalty costwise if you exceeded the required Kva, so no pressure then.

But that's nothing new and again isn't specific to smart meters.

 

[brianmoooore]

21.8p for 1kWH leccy. we'repaying for all them bloody windmills. green energy..... shove it. build a couple of nuke power stations.

I expect that Telectrix, like me, can remember the opening of Calder Hall, and the announcement that electricity production would 'soon be too cheap to meter'. Wonder what happened to that one!
The 'strike' price for Hinkley C, at 9.25p/kWhr (subject to increase with inflation), which seemed outrageously high when announced, now seems more attractive by the day.

 

[Vortigern]

I recall as a kid the headlines showing a piece of coal and saying the equivalent nuclear engergy from that size could power a city and that electricity would be free! Must have been around 1964, so much for that then!

 

[freddo]

LOL my supplier has just emailed me: 'We're increasing your Direct Debit, to help cover future price increases.' Imagine if I charged customers for electrical work I might (or might not) carry out at some point in the future!

 

[Simon47]

I expect that Telectrix, like me, can remember the opening of Calder Hall, and the announcement that electricity production would 'soon be too cheap to meter'. Wonder what happened to that one!

We know what happened to that, it got nobbled by the "we want zero risk" brigade pushing costs up by taking the R out of ALARP on safety.

The 'strike' price for Hinkley C, at 9.25p/kWhr (subject to increase with inflation), which seemed outrageously high when announced, now seems more attractive by the day.

Indeed it does. Of course, that doesn't stop the renewables lobby criticising it for being an outrageous "subsidy" as the windmill operators sit back and harvest the "but it's definitely not a subsidy" ROCs while quietly ignoring the externalised costs of dealing with their intermittency as they talk about how cheap wind power is (if you ignore the subsidies a.k.a. ROCs and externalised costs).

LOL my supplier has just emailed me: 'We're increasing your Direct Debit, to help cover future price increases.' Imagine if I charged customers for electrical work I might (or might not) carry out at some point in the future!

The difference being that (unless you switch suppliers, in which case any credit balance will get transferred or refunded), you have contracted to take energy on an ongoing basis. It seems sensible for the energy suppliers to manage customers' DDs so as to avoid racking up large debts that they then might struggle to clear. I know we're in credit with our supplier at the moment because we use less gas and lecky during the summer - but by next spring we'll probably be in debit. If we, or rather our supplier, gets it right then we'll keep to a fairly stable DD without building up massive credits or debits with them.
An equivalent might be that you contract with a commercial customer to do ongoing works - e.g. a rolling plan for inspection and testing such that everything gets done every so many years - and you charge a fixed monthly amount. If you know your costs are going to go up massively, you would be looking to adjust your monthly charge to suit. Also, you probably won't do the same amount of work every month as you fit it in with other work - so some months you'll be doing work you're not charging for, and other months you'll be charging for work you're not doing (in that month).