Energy

We all use it. We should probably all use less of it. A few years ago I had solar panels put on my roof and they’ve been generating clean electricity ever since. Outstanding. And I get paid to do so! Quite mad in the scheme of things but who am I to complain?

Somehow suppliers need to keep track of the juice we use. Not so easy when they email a please send us your meter reading email. That would entail finding the meter box key, going outside, looking at the number, remembering it. Pfft. Yeah, right. Go back inside, grab pencil and paper or some other e device suitable for note taking. Go back outside, get meter key, look at meter, note down reading. Go back in, find email, find how to respond via website, enter reading. Let’s just say I didn’t exactly do it religiously.

So when I was offered free installation of a smart meter before Christmas I was irritated to find they couldn’t accommodate my schedule. As in I work during the week. Meh. The offer came around again, as I knew it would, but this time I got a slot that coincided with me taking time off to look after the kids during the Easter holidays. Great.

Installation

Pretty painless as it goes … ok we lost power for an hour or two but it was one of the rare sunny days we had in March and I’d prepped the kids for a power-free internet-free time. Reading in the garden then The engineer showed me the meter - pretty foolproof and its graphics are a bit of a throwback to older times. Let’s just say they’re not HD… Disappointingly they don’t measure how much electricity my solar array is generating and the engineer had no clue about whether such a meter even exists.

He also said the gas reading could take up to 24 hours to come through. Even though the electric reading was already hooked up and reacts within a few seconds (e.g. turn on the kettle and you can see the reading leap into the red). I should have smelt a rat at that point…

At First

All is good. The little blue flame comes on when the boiler’s active (there’s no indication of how much gas is being used unlike the electricity meter, it’s either on or off) and electricity usage is pretty stable.

But then

My wife pointed out one evening the gas usage looked … well, wrong. Actually one of the kids had noticed. We hadn’t changed behaviour (the house is heated to barely warm and we’re not wasteful of hot water … and the gas doesn’t power anything else, we’ve got electric ovens and hob) but the amount of gas we’d apparently been using was, well, unusual.

I guess it’s better illustrated with pictures:

One day’s gas usage. Weird because 26p is the daily fixed charge. So we used no gas? Hmm.

Today’s gas usage. It’s the same day. Forty odd quid in a single day. I don’t think so.

#wtf - that’s an order of magnitude more than the already silly amount from the previous screen.

Next Steps

I see if I can smell gas, perhaps there’s a leak. Nope. Unless my nose is right next to the external meter. So I don’t think that’s a problem. We turn off the heating anyway. Gas usage doesn’t move from one hour to the next. The reading on the smart meter inside appears to match the (unmoving) reading on the outside meter. Although I can’t see where the decimal point is. Where are my glasses?!

It’s gone 8pm so I bash off an email to British Gas customer services. I’m not hopeful of a response.

Fortunately my wife’s taking over child rearing duties for the rest of the week so she volunteers to call British Gas in the morning. Two twenty minute phone calls later and she’s found:

• Our usage is normal according to the readings they’ve been sent by the smart meter, i.e. it hasn’t deviated from our pre-smart-meter usage
• The smart meter inside is wrong and we should ignore it for gas costs
• It happens with some customers but not all
• It’s been going on for months

All’s well?

… that ends well. Maybe. But we can’t help wonder:

• Why people aren’t told this may happen - we can imagine grannies turning off gas and living in fear of the next bill
• Why hasn’t it been sorted out already … months is a ludicrous timescale to put up with such wrongness

Smart meter my arse.

Update 3rd April

After some tweeting to @BritishGas they recommended I turn the smart meter off for 24 hours then switch back on as it’d then check for updates. Somewhat sceptical I did it anyway. Sceptics rejoice … yeah, that didn’t fix the problem: