Oh Dear. Unfortunately HRH Prince Phillip aka the Duke of Edinburgh is no longer around to tell you
RTS turn off
- Thread starter DiyNutJob
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Is that the type with LCD display giving time, date and day/night kWh readings? My brother's was that type till he went smart meter. I told Octopus I would be happy to change to that type but they wouldn't do it.
I would prefer (slightly) to keep the functionality but it won't happen with Octopus and if I change supplier I doubt the new one would do it either.
Sounds like a different system with 2 meters. Mine has 1 meter with 2 mileometer-type displays, the RTS telling it which one to use (till it was switched off)
Everything electrical was at day or night rate, probably different if there are storage heaters or dedicated feeds to eg an immersion heater
I have one of those as years ago I changed to a economy 7 tariff but never had any timed stuff but after a while I realised that despite changing my lifestyle to make use of the E7 it actually turned out that it cost me more because the standing charge and the day rate was higher than just a single rate so I changed back to a single rate.
Had about 10 letters and 15 phone calls telling me that my meter is out of date and needs replacing otherwise I will have no heating.
I kept telling them its not a timed thing attached to anything. When ever I send in my readings I just give the day and night number and they get added up together as one day rate.
Yes - well, that plus an awful lot more. It's almost a 'smart' meter, but lacks the comms module and a 'remote disconnector'.
Although mine is configured to just use two of the registers ('day' & 'night') for my E7 tariff, it actually has a total of 8 TOU registers (a 4 maximum demand' ones) for each of which it stores both kWh and kvarh, and can cope with a maximum of 48 switching times, GMT/BST changes and 'seasonal' changes. It also stores lots of events (e.g. 'lost power') and 'tampering' data. The manual runs to nearly 160 pages, but this summarises what it can handle, 'tariff-wise'....
I doubt that any supplier will any longer fit anything other than a 'smart' meter. Despite some people believing that they can 'refuse' to have a 'smart' meter fitted, I suspect that we are gradually approaching the time when any alternatives will simply no longer be 'available' - so they would then have to choose between having a 'smart' meter and not having an electricity supply
That was the second system I had here, other than that the switching was done by an external mechanical time switch, rather than RTD. However, prior to that there had been two separate meters, each with just one 'mileometer-type display', but that was changed pretty soon after I inherited it!
That's always been the case here - from start of my occupation to present, with 'everything electrical' switching between the 'day' and 'night'. tariffs'. There had originally been night storage heaters here, switched by contactors controlled by the same time switch as the meter(s), but they were out-of-service by the time I moved in.
Yes, in the absence of night storage heaters an E7 (or similar) tariff is usually going to cost more than a single-rate tariff for most people. I'm probably an exception, since by adjusted our 'lifestyle' (and doing most water heating by nocturnal immersion) we've managed to benefit from E7 so far - with generally about 50% of our usage being at 'cheap rate' (with most suppliers, 'break-even' is around 35%).
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I did look a few times in the past at off-peak, and until I had batteries installed, as you point out, it often costs more than a single-rate tariff. Even with storage heaters, it would seem prudent to move to single-rate tariff in the summer months.
Not sure on the rules with Octopus, but British Gas wanted to charge me £75 to leave them when on an off-peak tariff, I had to wait until it ran out to move. I was surprised one year after going on their EV tariff, they auto moved me back to a single rate tariff.
The economy 7, economy 10, and the solar and heat pump tariffs, all charge more for off-peak, to what is paid for export, so one would need to be very careful on how much one charged ones batteries, but the EV tariff, although for a shorter time, off-peak is less than what is paid for export, so I can simply fully charge batteries overnight. The battery plus solar means most days in summer, I do not use any peak power.
However, in the winter I do run out, and I looked at the solar tariff which between 4 pm and 7 pm is very expensive, and how many times I had run out of battery by 7 pm, and decided I did not want to check my battery state at 2 pm every day to see if the battery needed a top-up. I simply want to sit back and let it do its own thing.
Yesterday my wife said put on the washer before you go to bed, and I knew state of charge at 9:30 pm was 80% so said just put it on. Still had 37% left by 1:30 am when it starts to recharge, so a state of charge meter that I can glance as rather to using the PC or phone, would be handy.
But when I was looking at Flux, I wanted to work out costs, but the graph the solar software produces would need area under the graph working out, far too much work, and I was never into calculus, and the smart meter info was useless, as it only shows import and export, not what I use.
I am personally inclined to take the view that life is too short to spend time and effort (and probably cost) on that degree of 'micro-management'! To change tariff every 6 months would be a hassle (and probably cost). Indeed, taken to it's ultimate conclusion that approach would presumably have one 'changing tariff' every time the weather changed, one went on holiday or whatever!
More sensible, in my opinion, is to estimate which (unchanging) tariff would be the most beneficial over a whole year and just stick with that!
Having said that, the gradual move to 'dynamic tariffs' (seemingly only really Octopus at present) will presumably make things very different at some point in the future.
Sounds like a fancier model. Bro's, in addition to time and date it had 4 readouts, day kWh, night kWh, the sum oof those plus a 4th one I don't think we ever worked out what it meant.
I think it's pretty 'standard'. In fact, I think that my one is probably fairly 'obsolete', given that the User Guide is dated 2011.
Mine is a bit more complicated because it's a 3-phase one, and displays some of the information separately for each of the three phases, but, bearing that in mind, it can display about 250 different bits of information and can be see in this 'User guide (click here).
A much more detailed technical description can be found here (click here)
Bro's is 3-phase. I can't remember what it looked like, but not like your link, and I can't find anything I recognise on the web. I used to post his readings (EON-next) as he's not much good on computers! I didn't study it in detail but can only assume it gave total kWh for all 3 phases as we submitted just 2 sets of figures, day and night kWh, each month.
Edit - thinking about it, maybe there was a KVAr figure, but if so we didn't submit it to EON.
I'm sure that there are, and have been, any number of products out there.
As I said, my meter does give me kVArh figures, but they are of no interest to the supplier, since, as far as I am aware, domestic customers are always billed according to kWh used, not kVArh (i.e. regardless of power factor).
As the manual indicates, it clearly could be very different, but my meter is configured to give me just total kWh and total KVArh (across all three phases), separately for 'day' and 'night'.
Agreed, I don't know offhand whether it changes above a certain usage, or on type of business, but it doesn't matter for current purposes.
OK, sounds like his was the same, except I don't think there was an option to configure it, it just came like that.
I know very little about it, but I believe that, for non-domestic customers, power factor is very much part of the billing equation (or maybe, even, how low a PF is 'allowed'). Apart from anything else, low PFs mean higher currents in supply network,hence potentially fatter cables.
As far as installation was concerned, mine just "came like that", too - i.e. I don't think that the guy who changed it (who was merely a 'meter changer') did any configuration on-site. However, given the hundreds of things that it seems to be able to display, I can but presume that it was 'configured' before it was brought her, such as to display just the few things I've described.
Anyway, returning to how this discussion about my meter started, the point is that it supports a dual-tariff (such as my E7) without being (or, at least, without being used as) a 'smart meter' - so it's simply not true (in a literal sense) that a 'smart' meter is the only possible option for those whose RTS has (or soon will) stopped working. However, as I've said, whether suppliers would be prepared to install anything other than a 'smart' meter is a rather different question!
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