Posted by: @majordennisbloodnok

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I saw an obvious inconsistency after only a short period of contemplation so it should have been blindingly obvious to a marketing team devoting their working day to the details of the scheme.

It's likely that the price-points in that offer were made at Board level, rather than by the marketing team.

OVO Energy's directors come from a business/accountancy background.
The entrepreneur/innovator, Stephen Fitzpatrick, who started OVO, is now (only) the CEO of the wider OVO group of companies.

He seems to spend most of his time and energy at Vertical Aerospace, developing a people-carrying drone.

Compare that with Octopus (Greg Jackson) and Ecotricity (Dale Vince).
Both companies still have the innovators at the centre of the customer-facing operations.

I appreciate your sentiments about the ethics of OVO's approach.
But I'd like to remain slightly less condemnatory at this stage.

OVO's marketing team would do well to have a Membership of this forum.
That would allow them to hear what we have to say about a product strategy before they take it as far as the Board.

So I want to be welcoming, rather than appearing hostile at the moment.

My observation of their Heat-Pump rebate is that it will produce indistinct data... and hence uncertain results.

Melcloud has no communication with the customer's Smart Meter, and operates according to UTC times.

However, the Smart Meter periods will be delayed by the internal Randomised Offset to the Tariff Table.
And that's what OVO's billing system (Orion) will be using to calculate credits for participants.

The lack of correlation between the two methods of examining electricity usage will result in statistical errors.
That's not a good start when the overall aim is to gather data.

It's exactly the same mistake which DESNZ made in their Public Consultation on control of ESAs by Demand Side Response Service Providers.

You can't bill customers by one route, and issue off/on commands to their in-home appliances by another!

... well you can, but it breaches the Ofgem licence terms, and is fraudulent.

Posted by: @transparent

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I appreciate your sentiments about the ethics of OVO's approach.
But I'd like to remain slightly less condemnatory at this stage.

OVO's marketing team would do well to have a Membership of this forum.
That would allow them to hear what we have to say about a product strategy before they take it as far as the Board.

So I want to be welcoming, rather than appearing hostile at the moment.

I quite understand and, as it happens, agree. In fact, I’m not hostile so much as being very frank about the conclusions I’m drawing from their actions. If they change their actions, I’m happy to include that extra evidence in my opinions.

The fact OVO’s marketeers don’t have a forum membership is also part of the observable picture. If ever that changes, so might the picture, but more importantly such a membership will start actual communication; I won’t have to rely on just what I observe, I’ll be able to ask questions and get clarifications. That will, as you imply, improve things immeasurably.

What @toodles said about Greg Jackson is telling. Whether OVO like it or no, they aren’t just being judged in a vacuum on what they do or don’t offer. They are being compared with other companies’ offerings, and offerings that are demonstrably commercially sound. If they want that judgement to be fairer, they will, as you say, have to engage more closely with existing and potential customers.

In the hope that marketing@ovoenergy will actually read this topic at some stage, let me provide a link to points I made a couple of days ago on another topic about the 'variables' that Energy Companies have to play with in order to construct a ToU Tariff.

That discussion was also about buying in electricity to operate a heat-pump.

I think there are strategies which OVO could explore, some of which would be ground-breaking and attract widespread interest.
But they're better off by not trying to take on Octopus directly.

One possible idea is for OVO to create a lower-cost heat-pump tariff for households with pre-payment meters.
No one else has yet explored any ToU tariff for that area of the market.

As a market strategy it benefits OVO because the amount of 'discount' is being compared against a very steady tariff.
So they'd obtain useful data with less fluctuations.

If they would offer me a heat pump tariff for my dumb meter that mirrors the price of climate destroying gas or kerosene I would would give them loads of useful data! 

@abernyte I recently caught a comment from Martin Lewis about sorting out all the non-working smart meters - but I can’t recall where it was I found it. Regards, Toodles.

DESNZ publish quarterly updates on the status of Smart Meters.
The last full quarter for which statistics are available is June'24.

I have later figures for the total number of installed Smart Meters (incl non-working) as of end Sept:

• SMETS1  - 11,914,367
• SMETS2  - 20,305,041

Ofgem also published statistics (to June'24) showing the proportion of Smart Meters which are fully operational, broken down for the Large Suppliers (over 150k customers)

Note that Smart Meters which are not communicating with DCC are still correctly collecting consumption data.
That is collected 'manually' by customers providing readings online or via an App.

OVO has a particularly high proportion of operational meters.
They invested heavily in training their own meter installation engineers, rather than using sub-contractors.
OVO also picked up a substantial amount of expertise on meter installations when they bought out SSE's retail operation in 2020.
SSE had a lot of customers on pre-payment meters and a wide spread of Smart Meter manufacturers.

Martin Lewis (Energy Saving Expert) stated a couple of weeks ago that 19% of installed Smart Meters were non-working.
That was widely reported in the national press, with varying levels of accuracy and re-interpretation by journalists!
However, that figure is obtained by public surveys, and includes people who thought their Smart Meter wasn't operational because the IHD wasn't communicating (correct) data.

Posted by: @abernyte

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If they would offer me a heat pump tariff for my dumb meter that mirrors the price of climate destroying gas or kerosene I would would give them loads of useful data! 

There is extensive development work being done to provide 'fixes' for energy consumers whose Communication Hubs aren't fully functional.

A lot of that has been concentrated on improving the Home Area Network (HAN), which uses a super-encrypted derivative of Zigbee (v. 2.5) at 2.4GHz.
AltHAN Co works with specialist communication companies like SMS to trial new approaches.

AltHAN Co already has dual-band comms hubs with an extension of Zigbee operating at 868MHz.
That has longer range and better penetration of stone walls.

There are over 100,000 homes which are statistically unlikely to ever be capable of connection to the Wide Area Network due to signal strength, reflections and absorptions.

Proportionally more of those are in the Northern Territory for which Arqiva holds the WAN licence.
They use the old ITV 440MHz band rather than GSM mobile frequencies to transfer data to/fro DCC.

There are several solutions being developed.
These include an IHD with integral WiFi to pick up the consumption readings across Zigbee, and forward them to your Energy Supplier across the internet.

A number of security concerns mean that this approach has some constraints built in, but OVO's IHD6 operates in this mode.

I'm unsure how to respond to the measurements of climate-destruction alternatives.
Surely such data is available from other online sources, and could be picked up using an API?

@transparent Our SMETS1 smart meter was ‘updated’ some 2 years or more ago; the update was carried out on-line and as a result O.E. are able to obtain HH readings though I note they sometimes have problems and the information on a day’s consumption is sometimes several weeks in coming through. Is it likely that the ‘on-line’ update made it a SMETS2 in all but name? Regards, Toodles.

Yes @toodles  AFAIK all SMETS1 meters (with an operational WAN connection) have been upgraded to SMETS2 firmware.

That operation started in 2021, with Energy Suppliers allocating SMETS1 meters with their customers to be upgraded in batches.
Where the upgrade failed for whatever reason, installation engineers were sent to site to do a full replacement with SMETS2 hardware.

A lag of several weeks in consumption data being available for you to see is almost certainly due to ongoing development of in-house software by your Energy Supplier.
They will concentrate first on ensuring that the billing software is correctly receiving and recording your data.
The customer-facing data is a secondary issue.

Proportionally more of those are in the Northern Territory for which Arqiva holds the WAN licence.

Glad to hear that Arqiva are still trying. I and my 16 neighbouring properties are sheltered from the old TV transmitter mast that they use, which is also 70 miles away and was never going to work, did they listen....no! They just banged in a smets1 and smets2 in some neighbouring properties and stood and shook their heads when it failed to connect and then were surprised when the rest of the village said no thanks.  Mind you, using GSM isn't going to work either, same issue.  Looks like we might be in the 100,000 dead zone.

/moan-rant

@transparent  Thank you @transparent, I have had several occasions when Octopus were unable to produce an accurate bill due to missing data, days later, they have then ‘sorted’ the problem and completed the consumption figures. The last time this happened was after one of their ‘Free Electricity’ days on the 31st. August when they could not detect my consumption during that hour. They sent a summary explaining they did not have a reading and gave me the national average figure for the hour. It just so happened that I had the figures from the O.E. app and sent them a screen shot of that full day’s consumption, they then amended the amount I was credited. I wonder if the original specification for SMETS was drawn up with quite so many functions in mind! Regards, Toodles.

Posted by: @toodles

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I wonder if the original specification for SMETS was drawn up with quite so many functions in mind!

Yes it was.
I have a number of copies of the SMETS2 spec here as it progressed through the approvals process.

The major problem is that Ofgem isn't requiring Energy Suppliers to fully implement the SMETS2 features.

I don't know of any Supplier who populates the Tariff Table (matrix) with the current price information, for example.

On the days when Octopus has been recently offering free electricity, customers should've been able to view that by pressing the buttons on the ESME (electricity meter) until the LCD showed the ToU tariff information. Depending on what IHD you have, it should also have been visible there.

The way Octopus are applying the free cost is within their Kraken (billing) system after they've retrieved the consumption data for that period.
That's flawed maths because it doesn't account for the Randomised Offset to the Tariff Table.