Smart meter calls. Anyone else?

[PassingStranger]

Happening to anyone else?
Keep getting calls from electric company asking if we want a smart meter.
How to get rid?
Are they on commission or something?
It's like harrassment!
No is a complete word.
Am I alone?🙄😫

Can you tell me which providers are causing the harassment? Someone has mentioned Eon and Scottish power. Anyone else???

It's always two separate meters; joint meters don't exist. They communicate with each other via a wireless signal.

Assuming you're responsible for the utility bills, you don't need your landlady's permission to have smart meters fitted. Or, more specifically, landlords must not reasonably prevent it. Any landlord would be very hard pressed to show it was reasonable for them to prevent their tenant accessing better tariffs.

They may not save energy for an engaged consumer, but they give access to tariffs which can work out far cheaper than traditional fixed and variable options.

Thank you: a simple answer which Octopus could/would not give!
I would communicate with my landlady as the property has an annual gas service with British Gas and I don't know if they expect a certain meter to be in place and whether any change would affect her contract.
I will decline for now.

I think they are OK, but I know one wouldn't work here.

Problem is they wouldn't care about that. Just install the thing so they can tick their box for the government. The fact that it wouldn't run in smart mode they wouldn't give a damn about.

You just have to ignore them. The pestering is likely to continue as they fit out all the low hanging fruit and need to find more difficult/reluctant places to fit.

Meters are purely the responsibility of your supplier(s). They're totally unrelated to, and don't affect, the boiler and any maintenance contracts.

Any landlord would be very hard pressed to show it was reasonable for them to prevent their tenant accessing better tariffs.

I should imagine that if the landlord is letting a flat, they (or the tenant, and likewise if it's an owner occupier in a flat) could be deemed unreasonable to encourage or allow it.

Because I understand that many of the cheaper tariffs rely on using appliances eg. washing machines in the evenings/at night?

If that's true (cheaper tariffs being evening/night-time use) then it would be be too noisy and disruptive for the other tenants (and potentially against leasehold terms).

Don't have one (no mains gas here) and don't really want one. However, nobody can explain by what means the meter sends its readings to the supplier as there is no mobile phone signal here. When I asked the liars at Ovo, they said they would need to connect it to my router, to which I said that I refused as the bandwidth was already crap and I wasn't losing what little there was to provide Ovo with something I didn't want to give.

Now we have FTTP but the new router is a long way from the meter through stone walls etc so I doubt that a signal would get through. Anyone know how it reports?

Why do they need to measure half hour segments? If the idea is to bill, they could bill based upon one month, one week, one day, 12 hours. The purpose is to monitor real time energy usage. This is a big invasion of privacy.

The smart meter will not whether somebody is home. Let us even consider energy companies as completely neutrally good. That doesn't mean that the loss of privacy is immaterial, but let's even put it aside for now. Is their security totally impervious to attack? Could no bad actor ever gain access to such monitoring information? Could landlords never have the access to information over their property to monitor tenant activities?

As for specific appliances, in the US, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the US Department of Commerce, acknowledges in its report on 'Guidelines for Smart Grid Cybersecurity' that " specific appliances and generators may potentially be identified from the signatures they exhibit in electric information at the meter when collections occur with greater frequency, unlike traditional monthly meter readings or smart meter readings that occur once an hour or less frequently" (they're talking mostly about monitoring at 15 minute segments). So, not a given, but "The ability to determine specific appliances or customer patterns depends on how often the meter is collecting information and what data the meter is collecting." This publication is from 2014: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2014/NIST.IR.7628r1.pdf (I have only read some of it).

Nothing to do with being organised and everything to do with them trying to bully people into submission.

My most recent call, the woman said right off the bat: 'So when can we come and fit it?' Like it was an absolute given!

When I repeated that I didn't want one she said: 'Oh but we're not making the old ones anymore'. Bemused, I said: 'But I don't NEED a replacement of ANY kind!'

They're just following a (badly written) script!

Evenings are peak time. There are a few suppliers offering normal fixed tariffs, but only to those with a smart meter. British Gas has PeakSave Sundays, which provides half price electrify during Sunday afternoons. There are plenty of appliances that could be used at off-peak times, such as electric bike batteries and dishwashers, without creating a nuisance for neighbours.

@VeritableChestnut Thanks for correcting my misassumption.

I don't live in a flat so it's not relevant for me now but I was wondering about people who do.

They measure half hour segments, because electricity is priced on the wholesale markets on this basis. There are now tariffs, such as Octopus Agile and British Gas PeakSave, which take advantage of this functionality, and more will doubtless follow.

Suppliers already know how much energy you use. Apart from helping them plan for demand, it's neither here nor there to them when you use it. If they really wanted to, they could monitor your real-time consumption on the line before your meter, and they could have been doing that long before smart meters were invented. I understand the privacy concerns but what, really, could anyone do with the information? So, they know you used 1kWh between 5 and half 5 yesterday afternoon. What does this tell them? You used your oven? Maybe, but it could have been your tumble dryer. Or dishwasher. Or a hairdryer and a heated airer. Or all of 'em! What could they do with this information? What could they discern about your lifestyle? What could they try and sell you?

I guess you could block the number or ask them to take you off their list.

Peak and off Peak tariffs are only relevant if you have an economy 7 meter. Mostly used for those who have storage heaters. Those tariffs aren't available for everybody, only those who have a specific type of meter.

With a smart meter, you can have virtually any tariff you like, including Economy 7, regardless of whether you have storage heaters.

You can't, not unless you have a 2 rate meter.

This is incorrect. Smart meters support Octopus Agile, which has 48 rates per day, every day, so they can definitely support a basic 2 rate tariff like Economy 7. There is no Economy 7 specific model of smart meter; every model of smart meter can do the lot.

If you live in the north half of the UK, smart meters connect via a dedicated radio system, so they don't rely on mobile coverage. In areas where reception is problematic, they are working on a system that uses the customer's internet connection. The amount of data sent by smart meters is absolutely tiny, the equivalent of a few text messages per day, so would have absolutely no effect on your internet speed.

I do this for a living. The agile tariffs/electric vehicle tariffs can work with a single rate meter, but economy 7 tariffs only work with 2 rate meters.

Yes, I kept getting this one. Admittedly my meter is old, but it still works perfectly well.

I told them the truth at the time - my husband is terminally ill and we have bigger priorities than having a meter changed. They were apologetic and made a system note to not bother me for six months. Husband has since died and I'm dreading the six months running out as I don't doubt they'll be harassing me again.

So do I, and it can be done. It may be, however, that the smart meter needs to be installed in a certain way to energise the storage/immersion circuit overnight.

@VeritableChestnut is that just the north?
If someone is in the south of the UK, do they have to have WiFi? I have an elderly relative who only has a data SIM card, no broadband or WiFi, because they don't really understand or use the internet much.

I also keep getting dodgy texts saying there's a problem with my smart metre. Haven't got one so assume there's also some scam going round about smart metres 🤔

If your meter is old, its certification life may have expired. If this is the case, your supplier is trying to fulfil its legal obligation to replace it. It might seem to be working perfectly, but it may no longer be accurate.

The south half of the UK uses the mobile phone network. The customer doesn't have to have anything at all.