Crazy Gas Usage - Smart Meter Overreading

  • Eddietwadds's Avatar
    Level 1
    Sorry for the sensationalist first post. Smart meter was installed on Friday and worked fine yesterday and today.

    However, the reported gas usage this morning is already at £1612.72 or 18MW in just an hour. Clearly something is wrong. Will this automatically pull through to the billing record and how do I stop this.

    For the record, I am not heating an Olympic sized swimming pool...😎

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  • theunknowntech's Avatar
    Level 80
    Hi @Eddietwadds ,

    I'm theunknowntech, a mysterious forum volunteer who is known to prank the moderators with almost impossible and extremely difficult challenges. :)

    To me, that looks like demo data which will be replaced at the end of the commissioning process which takes around six weeks. It won't carry over to your actual bills though, because a different system is used for that which doesn't rely on your IHD. There's not much you can do in the meantime though I'm afraid.

    If you keep having problems with your IHD, you might want to consider an alternative. Unfortunately, the IHDL SmartView 2 has proven itself to be an absolutely horrible IHD for many years and IHDL has never really made any efforts to fixing the many bugs in their stuff. The best alternative IHDs I can recommend would be either the ivie Bud or the Hildebrand Glow. You'll need to order them directly from the manufacturers as those from any other source will not work.
    Just another guy passing by... The unknown tech way...
    Pete is an IHD Tariff Update Robot! 🤖 Anasa is a Giant Enemy Robot Spider 🕷 🤖 Hannah is neither! Need Customer service? click here! Replacement IHD Guide? Here it is!
  • meldrewreborn's Avatar
    Level 91
    @theunknowntech

    You are an enthusiast for smart meters and I'm not. I fully respect your knowledge on the topic. But do you think that a system that takes 6 weeks to complete commissioning of an IHD is fit for purpose?

    If these systems are so important, why do we put put up with wait times reminiscent of the service BT used to offer in the 1970's? (yes I'm that old!)
  • theunknowntech's Avatar
    Level 80
    It's more about commissioning the meters than the IHD, but as suppliers can't establish a proper connection to the meters until later in the process, there's not always a way to update the tariff rates on the meter initially. There's a whole bunch of testing, encryption, security keys and other connections to setup along with pulling down firmware updates for all the equipment - this stuff can sometimes sit on the shelf for a few months - that has to complete before the supplier is allowed to gain access.

    It is speeding up though and in some cases, there's extremely fast commissions that complete in as little as two weeks. However, six weeks remains the rule of thumb at this moment in time. It's also the case that the tariff rates are set on the meters rather than the IHD and the IHD merely retrieves them when it checks in. This is why I always say to target the update commands at the meters rather than the IHD.
  • Eddietwadds's Avatar
    Level 1
    JFI - my rates are correct on the IHD. Day 1 and 2 it read fine. Now, I am powering the whole town!