[ECmail]

A smart meter was installed earlier in the year and my hot water stopped working after installation. I never connected the issue and paid £170 for it to get fixed by a plumber.
I’ve now turned on my storage heaters and both aren’t working. Can anyone suggest a solution please?

[meldrewreborn]

@ECmail

It sounds as though a 5th terminal on your meter should have been linked into the hot water and storage heater circuits, but was not installed.

I'm only a very amateur electrician but I act as agent (I'm on commission of 20% of nothing) for @retrotecchie who is a professional and can advise more fully.

In the meantime a photo of the set up might help - use the box to the left of the video camera in the menu bar above your reply to post a photo.

[retrotecchie]

Originally Posted by meldrewreborn

@ECmail

It sounds as though a 5th terminal on your meter should have been linked into the hot water and storage heater circuits, but was not installed.

Or only a 4 terminal meter was installed...

Originally Posted by meldrewreborn

'I act as agent (I'm on commission of 20% of nothing) for @retrotecchie who is a professional and can advise more fully.

There may not be any actual 'folding' involved, but there's more to life than money. Or at least that's what the Gumment seem to think...


@ECmail

As my learned colleague @meldrewreborn rightly points out, a photograph of your setup would help enormously. Ideally showing the meter make and model, and any cabling coming out of the meter showing any terminal blocks, etc. If you could also photograph any fuseboxes/consumer units that would also assist greatly. You would normally have two separate boxes if you have Economy 7 heating and hot water.

[Morphaniel]

@ECmail Hi - I've posted my experiences elsewhere on this forum but your symptoms exactly match my experience. I was lucky enough to be experienced in similar matters (in the computing industry) and therefore tested my installation thoroughly on the day of installation...

Assuming that you have a 5 terminal meter and the 5th terminal is connected then you could have one of two faults (there may be more...). I have been told that a large batch of meters went into the field last year that had a faulty switch on the low rate circuit. All should have been withdrawn/replaced by now but since your installation was done a few months ago it may be one. This is an easy thing to test by a meter engineer - they need to perform an ALCS test on the meter (which supplies the low tariff circuit for 10 minutes). A failed meter will not be able to energise the circuit as the switch will pulse. A working meter will energise the circuit for 10 minutes. You can monitor this using the storage heater LED light on the charge circuit connection

Unfortunately, that is not my problem. In my case Eon appear to have sent out a meter which is programmed to cut the low rate circuit at 1AM after it is energised at midnight (both BST times). I am therefore getting a 1 hour charge overnight which is useless. It is probable that the meter is switching the low rate circuit on by default and the EON programming is then switching it off (this assumption is made because of the non standard time for the low rate circuit start). It is easy to test this yourself because the LEDs on the storage heaters will of course light at midnight and go off when the meter switches the circuit off.

The bad news is that getting Eon to arrange an engineer appointment in either circumstance is incredibly difficult. Your best bet is to write a complaining email to 'unhappy@eonnext.com', where the response and empathy is quite good but unfortunately the support from the rest of the company is abysmal. I have been escalating my own complaint for over 6 months and currently am on my 3rd meter (not working...)

[bena]

we had the same problem when eon installed a new meter. eventually they did something to fix the problem but i dont know what.
now it happened again and its been over 10 days phoning etc, they seem very resilient to sending an engineer and say equipment is ours although it has eon labels on it and their seal. they want us to pay for an electrician, I have made an official complaint.

[meldrewreborn]

@bena

again, a photo of the installation would help. The layout of the wiring below the meter can convey a lot. How long ago was the smart meter installed?

[Kentos]

@Morphaniel
I'm having the exact same issue.
night time rate switches on 12am then turns off at 1am.
Im on my 2nd metre and found the help from eon very poor.
winter is coming and I'm going to be living in a very cold flat

[Morphaniel]

@Kentos - It is time for me to update the forum on my experience then. I had accepted the opportunity of a third smart meter installation from my Eon complaints handler but I laid down that the installation had to take place before the end of September. Eon offered me an appointment in mid October and so I insisted that an ECO emergency appointment was raised to have the meter swapped out. Luckily the ECO Engineer had a non smart Economy 7 meter available on his van and installed it. It works fine and since it is standalone (does not appear to be part of the RTS network) then it is likely I will keep it until events force us to change.

ECO - stands (I believe) for Electricity Cut Off and a meter swap out is not guaranteed. It is also a high risk strategy for E7 users as an E7 meter may not be available on the engineer van - as I have explained elsewhere I had previously been given an E10 meter with multiple low rate times which worked but was inherently unsuitable for storage heating to work efficiently.

My experience with the various bits of the system is as follows:

Eon front desk staff (hi) - very limited knowledge, probably massively overworked and underpaid, appear to have no service management IT support so pointless to use for complaints handling

Eon complaints staff (unhappy) - my handler was excellent and empathetic but again appeared to have no service management IT support and while very willing to perform 'escalations' to various internal teams was routinely ignored by them. The stress levels involved in working as a complaints handler with this lack of support internally are huge and I take my hat off to her as she retained my complaint for over 6 months and I did not always keep my composure...

Morrison Engineers - fantastic. Willing to drive a round trip of four hours just to get to me, phoned to discuss the issue before setting off and talked at my level once they understood I had a bit of experience. Also willing to do extra work or unusual things to get the job done. The downside is that there appears to be no feedback loop from Morrisons to Eon so Eon (in this latest example) did not even know that my meter had been swapped out.

[meldrewreborn]

@Morphaniel
well done. Is your non smart meter new? If so you’re probably OK for about 15 years.
we’re usually advised non smart meters are not available any longer , you may have been very fortunate in the end.

[Morphaniel]

@meldewreborn - Good question! I hadn't looked into it before you asked but I can now see that my meter (an Emlite EMB1.ay) appears to be a modern meter without the radio tech gubbins installed into it. The identical looking Emlite EMB1.az seems to be a current model smart meter which has a radio module installed above the digital meter where mine just has a blanking plate.

So it looks like I was lucky! The meter didn't appear to be new but it was zeroed, which the engineer said implied it hadn't been installed previously.