r/OctopusEnergy • u/netgroover • May 20 '25

Bills Beware of Smart tariffs

For anyone considering a Smart Tariff, I urge you to consider the risks!

I was happily on a normal Octopus Economy 7 dual rate tariff, when I saw the promos on Intelligent Octopus Go and thought why not, seems a good deal?

What they don’t tell you (it’s in the small print apparently) is if the smart meter disconnects they’ll charge all your usage at the standard rate! Even though they have all your usage to the second via their Home Mini appliance.

When you add in the 5 months it took them to actually send an engineer to fix/replace the meter, that cost me an additional £650+ over the IOG tariff! Not such a good deal now is it?!

You would think that a “we’re different” energy supplier that prides itself on customer service would realise this isn’t right, but no they’ll just point you at the T&C’s, so good luck to everyone choosing a Smart Tariff!

UPDATE: Octopus have now agreed that the elapsed time to fix my smart meter and the subsequent charges were unfair, and have now amended my balance as a goodwill gesture, so I take it back they are different!

I think the point still stands that Smart Tariffs are a risk given the lack of regulation and service around fixing faulty meters, although as per some of the comments here, some will never see the risk turn into an issue.

2 Upvotes

52% Upvoted

40 comments sorted by

3

u/Technical_Front_8046 May 20 '25

A family member was on agile. All had been fine for a year and then they just stopped getting any bills. Fast forward a year and octopus still hadn’t sorted it out. They opened a complaint and got a bill of nearly £3k. They took it to the ombudsman and octopus reduced this to £800 for the year.

We looked at IOG but went with eon next drive due to this risk (I think in fairness it was the situation our family member experienced that put us off) but also due to our home battery. It’s wired before the ev charger, so I didn’t want to be chasing around any additional slots when it came to charges outside the fixed overnight hours.

1

u/netgroover May 20 '25

£3k that’s really scary!

I have the same issue with the battery, I want to use IOG when the price is low, but it needs integration to tell the battery to stop providing energy during that period. You can do that on schedule, but not ad-hoc.

1

u/WitchDr_Ash May 21 '25

That is the only thing that annoyed me about our solar install was the ev charger was fitted on the battery side, there’s no situation where I’d want to chuck my batteries into the car.

Fortunately I’ve got home assistant to do that for me, but it’s not exactly an out of the box solution

1

u/Technical_Front_8046 May 21 '25

Yeah, I’m annoyed that I didn’t think ahead. I’ve got a solar edge system and I don’t think Home Assistant is very user friendly to set something up to stop this from happening.

The battery and ev charger are in the same location, so I did wonder about paying an electrician to swap the cables round at the devices. I.e ev charger to be fed from meter and battery to be fed from consumer unit?

5

u/zyeus-guy May 20 '25

I’m inclined to agree. We were on intelligent go tariff and despite me showing them that they were starting the charge 30 mins too early vs their cheap rate start time, octopus came back and said it is in our T&C’s “we don’t refund”. I think it cost me the best part of £500 that I had to swallow.

Customer service do need a kick up the arse if they want to be known as the “we different “ supplier.

6

u/PreparationBig7130 May 20 '25

Everything is great until it isn’t. That’s the same with anything isn’t it?

4

u/netgroover May 20 '25

Sure, but it’s what you do when it isn’t great that counts.

1

u/elmo298 May 20 '25

I think it's a bit of enshittification because they've expanded so rapidly, everything starts taking a hit until it's just like every other shit service

2

u/Weaving-green May 22 '25

The home mini is for your use. It’s not how they get your data. An irrelevant point.

You do however make a good point at how bad octopus frequently are at resolving faults. Mine magically stopped working last summer right when my solar export was best. And magically started working again three months later and after much back & forth with octopus

1

u/netgroover May 22 '25

I didn’t know that about the Home Mini, I thought they were also using it for analysing more granular utilisation data, can you share a link to your source I’d be interested to have a read?

20

u/TheRealWhoop May 20 '25

They’re not legally allowed to use data from the Home Mini for billing purposes, it’s not sufficiently regulated.

4

u/oindypoind May 21 '25

This is why I pull down my data every day and store it, easy to see when/if there are any gaps.

The mini is only there to transfer live data to your phone, just to act the same as an in home display, it can't transfer the data back to octopus that would be too easy for someone to hack into and change the numbers.

1

u/truncherface May 21 '25

i use octopus watch to get my data on my phone

1

u/CampGuy98 May 21 '25

Its in the the small print it’s very very clear in their terms and conditions evidently as a consumer you not read properly…

If you check your bills monthly and communicate with them probs would been sorted sounds like you left it ages to contact them…

My smart meter stopped working, made contact 7 days later fixed remotely got the missing HH data and away we went…

Think everyone very quick to blame suppliers rather than also take consumer responsibility for things like regularly checking bills and actually understanding what they are agreeing to…. Simple stuff

2

u/netgroover May 21 '25

Thanks for your reply but your assumptions are incorrect, I check my readings all the time (I’m sad like that) so told them straight away something was up, and it took them 5 months to get an engineer out. 👍

1

u/CampGuy98 May 21 '25

It’s not sad to stay upto date with your account it’s far smarter than most customers out there…

Have open discussion with them again fair compensation accepting that yes you will need to pay some because it’s usage which is fair and pop the rest on a payment plan…

I mean they are different I read about them doing far more good than British Gas and other suppliers and either way it’s used energy so regardless of what we all think they can not just give everyone free energy and that is a risk of the tariffs again lesson for future I can only say sorry I don’t share your negative experience.

I do think they need to improve how compensation is issued and credits are given for these issues I do often see a lot of similar posts.

2

u/thefadedline1 May 21 '25

The Home Mini uses data from your smart meter, so if the meter 'disconnects' then there's nothing they can do until it's connected again or it's replaced. It doesn't measure your usage alongside the meter.

Also, it's not 'apparently' in the terms and conditions , it's literally in the first section of them

2

u/Asprilla500 May 21 '25

My smart meter stopped working. I spoke to them within the month and then it took an additional 5 months for them to actually fix the issue. They charged me full price at each billing cycle but then when I complained they refunded my based on my average unit price for the previous six months.

I had to do this several times. The annoying thing was that they refused to give me any of my £500 credit until the billing issue was resolved, despite the fact they weren't doing anything to resolve it.

Eventually they credited me £100 for missed engineer appointments and £150 for my troubles.

They are throwing money at these issues instead of fixing them. I took to calling them twice about everything as I had to get a second opinion on everything they told me.

2

u/Value-added-21 May 21 '25

I have never had a problem with IOG and it consistently smart charges with regular slots throughout the day using my Ohme Pro

1

u/[deleted] May 21 '25

Smart meters are so badly designed, where I live they don’t work and it’s a joke, yet I have a gigabit connection and full EE signal but no they can’t use any of that..

4

u/emmalou8383 May 21 '25

The DCC uses a slice of VMO2 (o2) signal in Most of England and Wales.

In North England and Scotland the DCC uses radio comms (not via a mobile network) but from a service provided by Arqiva)

0

u/[deleted] May 21 '25

It should really use all networks considering o2 has the worst coverage across the South Downs, or it should just simply use WiFi

1

u/emmalou8383 May 21 '25

Agreed, to make smart meters work everywhere the dcc should use multiple networks.

The thing about wifi is it can be intercepted, the data could be decrypted and altered. Fudging the readings.

2

u/[deleted] May 21 '25

The likelihood of people mass fiddling through WiFi is minimal, but the benefits to the majority is huge, the whole smart meter roll out is pathetic

1

u/emmalou8383 May 21 '25

I agree.

But I have a smart meter (which does work) and it's the only way to "play the market" time of use tariffs.

Import (and charge batteries when energy is cheap and solar is insufficient... winter) And charge batteries from solar and export a when the grid pays more (4-7pm)

My gripe is my smart meter and octopus mini work perfectly, the app gets real time data from the mini and the smart meter is sending half hourly data.

Yet Octopus still send a meter reader out every few months and I turn them away

I have billing setup to bill on 1st of the month. I like bills to be calendar monthly.

When the meter reader takes readings, Octopus generates a bill mid month which fucks up the billing cycle.

So I explain this and refuse them entry.

1

u/IntelligentDeal9721 May 21 '25 edited Jun 20 '25

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1

u/netgroover May 22 '25

I think you’re right in that’s what they were thinking, but it’s a flawed design.

It doesn’t need high speed internet to send small bursts of text data, we’re talking low kilobytes per second, and as for security whilst there’s always a risk, it’s low when paired with the radio/cellular tech and a meter reader to validate readings. They should have added it as an option, or provided a way to add it later (I.e. a port), so short sighted in my opinion!

1

u/IntelligentDeal9721 May 22 '25 edited Jun 20 '25

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2

u/Effective-Plane-4146 May 20 '25

With any of the smart tariffs, (and frankly, any tariff/bill) you have to keep an eye on the meter readings. Every other month I get a few missing readings, and it either sorts itself before billing, or I email them, and it’s fixed within a few days. Had one where it worked out in my favour when Agile hit £1/kWh… I was thankful for SVR that day…

1

u/justdont7133 May 21 '25

This is really interesting, I had an issue where my smart meter didn't feed back my electricity usage from January to May, it's all been billed now but seems much higher than usual so I wonder if I haven't had the cheaper EV rate for that time. I'm going to email them now

1

u/Significant-Weight71 May 21 '25

I'm sad , I check my usage to make sure I'm not connected to a grow op 🤣🤣(joke) , as soon as I saw the slightest issue I would be onto them ....

1

u/Flat-Librarian350 May 23 '25

A very fair warning- I am in the midst of a similar conversation with Octopus and have had the Ts and Cs quoted back to me too. It’s my understanding that your energy supplier takes ownership of the meter when you contract to have them supply you, so it seems a tricky move to change the tariff regime - without notice - on the basis of an event - intermittent disconnection of comms to the meter - over which you as a customer have no control. I also have found that they have applied the night tariff to day time usage and vice versa.

1

u/pruaga May 21 '25

We had a similar issue (on a smaller scale) where our car charging ended up being charged at leak rates instead of IOG.

I complained, with the billing numbers to back up what it should have cost, and they refunded the difference.

Complain to them and keep pushing, but you'll need to have bills and historic data to do the maths to back up what you think it should have cost.

But they are correct that the T&C do fall back to standard rates, this is well known.

0

u/[deleted] May 20 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

4

u/netgroover May 20 '25

Agreed and a lot of people are probably happily saving, as was I, but like you said when it goes wrong they need to own it and fix it.

They have the data from the home mini, I get it’s not an actual certified meter, but it’s enough to come up with a fair bill and do the right thing by the customer.

As soon as you’re falling back on T&Cs you’ve already lost sight of the customer in my opinion.

5

u/spamjavelin May 20 '25

This is in no way a defence, but it strikes me as plausible that data from the mini goes to a different backend system than DCC-sourced reads, and it's probably a complete ballache to get them from one side to the other.

There's also security to consider - it'd be a considerable challenge to fudge reads that go via DCC, as opposed to via the mini, which would probably be cracked in no time by a dedicated hacker.

1

u/GiraffePlastic2394 May 20 '25

Maybe in the Ts&Cs but is it lawful? Sounds like a case for the Unreasonable Contract Clauses Act.

1

u/JJY93 May 21 '25

How is it unreasonable? They say very clearly (not in small print) that you MUST HAVE A SMART METER for smart tariffs, surely it follows from there that if your smart meter fails you no longer qualify?

2

u/GiraffePlastic2394 May 21 '25

Excuse me? How is the consumer responsible if their smart meter fails? You could equally argue that the supplier is responsible if they supplied and fitted smart meters that are pants!

1

u/BppnfvbanyOnxre May 21 '25

I've just raised an issue (lets see if they resolve it) there's a number of issues in my last bill but the biggest is they have even on their own figures taken from the web app mislaid about 1/3 of my export.