Octopus Economy 7 - Night period timings with SMETS2 meter

Following the GMT/BST clock change on Sunday, and after following guidance from the Octopus web site, I adjusted my car charging schedule from 0045-0715 GMT to 0145-0815 BST. The car charge definitely finished at 0815 as I was watching the live consumption on both the GE app and the MyEnergi app for the Zappi chargepoint.

Luckily I took manual meter readings of the day and night registers before and after my charging session, as now I find there is an increment of 4 kWh on my day register when there should not be. I have emailed Octo with this for them to 100% clarify the time period for the night tariff.

Has anyone else had this issue?

Hi Simon, I was told recently that Octopus may use the individual 30 minute time slots for billing purposes, rather than the night and day registers in the meters. I am not sure if this is true or not, but it may explain why you are seeing what you are seeing.

(They may do this so that single register smart meters can be used for multi-tariff customers).

Proof may only come when you get your next bill. But I would be interested to hear what they come back with (if you are that lucky!).

ToothyChris Proof may only come when you get your next bill.

Think I'd prefer to be sure sooner rather than later. They should be able to say whether the smart meter registers are used or if it is the 30-minute DCC summaries that are used. The latter could be the default for all customers since, while a pain to have to do, at least it would be the same for all customers on time of use tariffs.

When my SMETS2 electric meter was installed in mid December 2022, it was configured from the off with day and night registers in line with the replaced non-smart meter that was also Economy 7 from original installation and had 2 registers.

I have submitted manual meter readings of the 2 registers on certain days of the month (1st and 16th) to trigger Octopus to provide a costed bill to date. Periodically they have triggered a smart meter reading (I assume from the 2 cumulative registers) and provided costed bills on other dates as well. In these instances the bill shows a mix of customer and smart meter readings (cumulative values) that can be either the start or finish of the billing period.

Obviously with Intelligent Octopus with different prices per 30 minute period it is not practical to use separate registers for each period, so in those instances it makes sense to just use the 30 minute DCC summary data, but on Economy 7 I would rather have a reliable fallback method for allocation to the 2 tariff rates to cover periods when the DCC data fails to get as far as Octopus for whatever reason.

Saying that, in late February Octopus downloaded the new tariff rates (from 1/1/2023) to my SMETS2 meter and managed to screw up the day/night allocation to the 2 registers. I spotted this at my 1st March meter reading, however the end of February period from the DCC data total consumption matched the total across the 2 registers so I was able to verify my actual day/night consumption and Octopus credited my bill with the difference in cost.

Also the DCC data is not always coming through on the Octopus customer portal during the following day. I was missing a day of gas data for 5 days before it got populated, so not sure how reliable it actually is.

For now, I have adjusted my GivEnergy and Zappi charging time schedules, so I now effectively have an Economy 6 tariff from 0130 to 0730 BST until Octopus get round to confirming the actual timings.