[Andrew123]

Hello,

I'm hoping somebody here has the expertise to help me. I've been told by E.ON that my radio teleswitch meter needs to be replaced with a smart meter. However, my meter doesn't look like the photos I've seen of RTS meters - instead it looks like a mechanical timer. My guess is that it's as old as the building: about 40 years. Could it have an RTS component as well as the thing that looks like a timer? Here is a photo of my meter:



A follow-up question... With my system, the hot water and storage heaters are on a separate night-only circuit which is switched on and off by this meter/timer. They don't have their own timers. I am struggling to get a straight answer out of E.ON as to whether the smart meter will switch this circuit on and off, as opposed to just switching between day and night tariff rates. Does anyone reading this have an economy 7 system with an E.ON smart meter that switches their hot water and storage heaters on and off? I have read things about 5-terminal smart meters, so I believe it is possible, but E.ON customer support are not giving me confidence.

Many thanks,
Andrew

[retrotecchie]

@JoeSoap Thanks for the tag.


@Andrew123

No RTS involved in this setup. Purely a mechanical time-switch and a generic two-rate meter.

It will need to be swapped out purely because it will be so far out of it's certification date rather than for RTS reasons.

A five terminal smart meter, correctly configured for dual-rate (Economy7) should be able to provide switching for the heating and hot water systems.

Never mind what E.On Next customer services tell you. They won't be the ones installing a new meter! The meter engineers should provide a five terminal unit and correctly configure it to switch the fifth terminal on during off-peak rates.

[JoeSoap]

@Andrew123

I’ll tag @retrotecchie to take a look at this. He’s good at these questions.

[JoeSoap]

There you go 👍. Not all superheroes have capes 😂

[Andrew123]

@retrotecchie Thanks, that's very helpful. I think E.On customer services haven't been trained that these systems exist, and if they don't handle the meter installations themselves then that would explain why they can't say much about how exactly it would work. Now that I know that a smart meter can be compatible with my system, I have some faith that the engineer will do what I need - and I can check with the engineer beforehand. I was worried that I was going to be left with the hot water and central heating on 24 hours a day, and that I'd have to get an electrician in to install timers or put in a new system.

[Morphaniel]

Originally Posted by Andrew123

@retrotecchie Thanks, that's very helpful. I think E.On customer services haven't been trained that these systems exist, and if they don't handle the meter installations themselves then that would explain why they can't say much about how exactly it would work. Now that I know that a smart meter can be compatible with my system, I have some faith that the engineer will do what I need - and I can check with the engineer beforehand. I was worried that I was going to be left with the hot water and central heating on 24 hours a day, and that I'd have to get an electrician in to install timers or put in a new system.

Your post is a couple of months old, but I wanted to let you know of my experience in the same situation... I am now on my second Smart meter installation from Eon. The first was swapped out on an emergency basis because it was installed in winter and although the 5th terminal was connected properly the meter was not configured to switch the heating circuit on. With no heating, we had no choice and the replacement meter was a horrendous experience, being a hardwired economy 10 meter not suitable for our tariff or usage.

Forward on to last week and our temporary meter was replaced with a Smart meter - again a five terminal meter correctly installed as far as I can tell and configured with our correct tariff and communicating with the DCC. However, again it is not energising the fifth terminal and we have no heating (we are lucky - our hot water is on an off peak timer on the main circuit). Given that it is supposedly summer, on this occasion I have re-opened my originalcomplaint with Eon, provided them with an explanation of what remote configuration they need to do (Courtesy of Octopus!) and am waiting. Currently we are on day 7 of having no heating circuit and counting...

I wanted to post because you seem to have assumed that a bad installation will lead to you having heating runniing at peak hours when in fact it is likely you will have no heating at all! You should note that the installation Engineer (in my case) was just following instructions on his tablet and despite my prompting to ask about the secondary circuit and possibly testing it's activation in situ before he left knew nothing about it and was clearly not familiar with traditional 2 circuit Economy 7 wiring...

[Andrew123]

@Morphaniel I think I'm past the point of no return... an engineer is coming next week to install my smart meter. I was hoping that by leaving it for so long (they've been hassling me for over a year) they would have sorted out these issues. It's good that you've lowered my expectations from "unlikely to work first time" to "unlikely to work for months" as I don't like to be disappointed.

Fortunately I live in a very warm property and have separate manually controlled heaters and immersion heater, so it won't be an utter disaster for me if the night time circuit is not turned on. My (hopefully ridiculous) concern about the storage heaters being permanently on is that they may say they've done their job of supplying electricity and applying the correct rates, and the rest is my problem to sort out.

[Morphaniel]

@Andrew123

I'd be interested in your experience! Here, we are currently on Day 13 without a working heating circuit. An Engineer visited yesterday and was able to prove that the meter correctly energised the storage heater circuits by getting it to do a manual 'boost' that lit them up for 10 minutes during peak rate. He told me that installation Engineers should be doing this as a matter of course but that he had been to several installations in the last week where it had not happened.

Although he told me that following this boost the meter usually began working correctly this was not the case for us... the heating circuit did kick in overnight as the off peak timing rolled over but it stayed energised for less than an hour and then cancelled itself. The ironically named 'Smart Team' at Eon HQ are now looking into the problem again and I await developments...

[Andrew123]

My 5-terminal smart meter was fitted yesterday and seems to be working fine. I can't be sure the night circuit was energised for the whole 7 hours as it's too warm yet for me to want the storage heaters on, but it was on at 1:30 and 6:30.

[Courtney_EONNext]

Hi @Andrew123 👋, thank you for sharing your experience with switching your RTS meter to a smart meter, I hope everything is running smoothly for you! 😁 Also @Morphaniel, I hope you're well, has your issue with the heating circuit been resolved for you, we would love to hear any updates you may have 😊.