Smart meters not working N of England

So after 4 years my smart meters are still dumb. I complained to the Ombudsman about Octo as I cannot complain about the DCC as I have no contract with them.
I dont blame Octo and I dont want any sort of compensation out of them. I am hoping my complaint will allow Octo to complain and the Ombudsman force Arqiva to do something.
I think the Arqiva answer will be "we have hit out target nothing to be done".
In the North of UK the meter communication is via RF (long Range Radio), in the south is is GSM like mobiles.
RF not to good in the hilly north. FM and DAB in the car is rubbish!
Still i bet Arqiva got a good contract and didn't worry too much about the correct solution.

Anyway Octo say they are going to try me on a combined RF/GSM comms hub on the meter and see if that fixes things.

Anyone had similar experiences in the North ( I am near Skipton) and did it get fixed

SteveCook have you complained to your MP?

TX200
Nope, I guess I could try

SteveCook I think smart metering is a government project. Plus I guess a government set target too.

Whilst it might be a hard battle, the more people complain to their MPs, the more likely something will happen.

TX200
I worry that complaining to the Ombudsman about a HMGov project run by a HMGov appointed organization (Capita) to beat up on the Franchisee (Arqiva) appointed by Capita has not much chance of going anywhere..
I think Arqiva have hit the targets set to them of 99.5% domestic properties have smart meters installed. I dont think they report on working ones.
I can play 99.5% of the notes to Bolero- not necessarily in the right order.
I will report after Octo visit next Tuesday

SteveCook Best of luck with the visit.

Remember to ask why they can't take your readings via one of their OHM in-house monitors. It pulls from the meter securely (its paired by them) and is h/w supplied by Octopus which sends your readings securely to their own "Kraken" system via your internet connection.

Vestas Thanks I suggested there must be other solutions, but got a firm no
I have emailed them that suggestion

I have heard that while they want to be able to use the mini for billing, those are not yet legally authorised devices. That said, as long as they bill for the number of units recorded by the smartmeter, they ought to be free to choose to charge a discounted price for as many of those units as they want. Though TOU tariffs tend to have a higher daytime unit price, and they'd not be free to choose to charge a premium price for those. So they'd have to invent a bespoke arrangement where they discount some of the units at a cheaper price to give the correct average. Or all the units at the correct average price. Or something.
It would be rather difficult to establish in advance exactly what your contracted price was, which is probably a bit of a legal minefield.

I've never really figured out why smart meters can't optionally use the house wifi. It just seems an obvious way for everyone to get their 30 minute meter readings to their supplier. Smart meters can be read locally, the octopus mini does it and can send the data to octopus, but as noted above they are not allowed to use it for billing.

Possibly because it would be trivial to intercept and spoof unless it had bomb proof encryption.

Also home internet can be unreliable. We had an intermittent fault that took Open Reach 18 months and five site visits to fix. It was a fault in a cable in the road to the fibre cabinet.

And we had a rubbish ISP: TalkTalk that only gave a fast connection to their servers that cached popular sites like YouTube and a very slow connection to less popular parts of the wider internet at peak times. They refused to fix it and let me leave the contract without penalty.

With encryption I don't see any security issues that matter. Many folks have to give their meters readings manually anyway. The meters can always be read with a visit if fraud is suspected, or even just a drive by.
Where the customer is willing and able, I see no reason not to offer wifi.

woofy With encryption I don't see any security issues that matter. Many folks have to give their meters readings manually anyway. The meters can always be read with a visit if fraud is suspected, or even just a drive by.
Where the customer is willing and able, I see no reason not to offer wifi.

I’ve already given some input to this earlier.

From support, control and security perspectives it is far preferable for the DDC to own the collection of data end to end over a dedicated network that they control/contract out with SLA’s, etc. Imagine the difficulties and extra support overhead of smart meters not working because they are not in range of the customer wifi, the customer changed their ISP and didn’t update the password on the smart meter, etc, etc.
I worked in major IT delivery my working life and I can absolutely see why its delivered the way it is.

You would have thought that the requirement is 100% coverage though and the network provider is obligated to put in radio repeaters, mesh connections or whatever to ensure everyone is connected. Even if its only 0.1% of people not connected thats an awful lot of households affected

https://en.selectra.info/energy-france/guides/electricity/linky

Just saying 😉

kram Its a clever solution, similar to powerline in the home.

I wonder well it works in rural areas with variable quality wiring, earth faults, etc, but equally in big towns when you’ve got hundreds of devices trying to communicate.

Unlike home powerline its only trying to transmit a small volume of data infrequently so this will help with these kind of practical issues.

Our own UK power meters are supposed to form a mesh network to get over issues of poor connectivity. Not sure that bit is in use though. Any solution needs to have diverse backup mechanisms

The engineer came and fitted a combined RF/GSM comms hub with antenna and connection straight away.
4 years and solved in 5 minutes with the correct piece of kit

SteveCook Hurrah, at long long last. Celebrate by analysing all the different smart tariffs you can now change to 😂

You beat my smart meter woes by some margin, mine was only about a year and a half. Again lack of comms from the meter because the wrong type of unit was installed. When I finally got the meter swapped the engineer was “oh yes, this needs an external antenna, should never have been installed without one”. Its just getting to that point takes a lot of effort.

Congratulations though

SteveCook Taking to the ombudsman etc at least achieved something then, I reckon you'd still be sitting there twiddling your thumbs if you hadn't.

Vestas
The engineer was not Octopus but some sort of company that does meter fitting for all the energy companies.
He said all the energy companies (and his other engineer mates) ask to fit these type of meters/hub, but the DCC don't really want them to and generally wont allow it.
When Octo told me they were going to fit a meter with GSM comms, I asked if that would cause a problem being that I am in an "RF" area. They said they would deal with that issue as it was the fault of the DCC that my meters were not working

SteveCook If this is RAF Fylingdales then its largely a non-issue AFAIK.

There's a lot of "military-bands" reserved in the frequency plan which are there for now-historical reasons but the frequency plan gets updated once in a blue moon if MoD are involved.

If there IS an issue then you'll hear about it pretty rapidly - trust me on that 🙂

Vestas
They told me 4 years ago that I lived too close to Fylingdales for my meters to work. I live 50 miles away in Skipton.
Bradford, Leeds and York are far closer than me.

TX200

SteveCook
I am near Hexham now on my 3rd smets 2 in 5 years Why the first 2 failed I never get the same answer since each one failed whilst with a different energy company. I just hope this one last longer but they are all manufactured by same company!