We were anxious to retain the automatic switching on and off of the storage heaters, and this was achieved by the new meter being programmed to switch tariffs 6 times per day so that we had 3 hours of cheap rate in the afternoon, 2 in the evening, and 5 overnight.
We were worried about the increased unit cost but managed to offset this somewhat by using the electricity carefully in the cheap periods. The in house display was never accurate for the time switches so we often verified the timings by checking the meter. We could easily see when the load came on with the heaters starting up on the in house display. So we are confident that it switched at 7 mins past the hour both at the meter tariff, and the heaters themselves. When the clocks change the times stayed the same in GMT and we adjusted our useage accordingly.
By careful management we managed to achieve 90% of our units at the cheaper rate.
Today I was doing my usual check that the timing was as I expected now we are on BST. The meter, however, failed to change to cheap rate at all !
After a long call to a very helpful customer service agent it transpires that as our tariff was never actually described on the bill as Economy 10 with Eon, when the account migrated to Eon Next it was transferred as an Economy 7 tariff. Our heaters continued to come on at the times programmed by the engineer, so we are being billed at high rate for the 5 afternoon and evening hours. Also of course any other energy we have carefully tried to schedule into these hours.
Very luckily the migration happened in the last month, or it could have been disastrous. As it is, apparently it will take up to 10 days to even make contact with the Complex metering team. Until then we will just have to switch the heating off during the day. We have no way to override the meter settings so the heaters will just get 5 hours cheap rate at night, and only if we get up at 1.30 to switch them on.
Is there anybody here who can help speed up the restoration of our tariff ? One of us is aged 85 and we have snow forecast this week. We will really miss the afternoon and evening boost. We cannot afford to use it at peak rate and have a 50 % price rise looming at the start of April.
I am sure this must have happened to all the E10 customers who were migrated, and most of them will not realise until too late.