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VCooper has always budgeted carefully to pay its utility bills on time. She now risks canceling a holiday to celebrate her husband's 70th birthday after her supplier, Shell, converted her £ 1,450 credit into a £ 666 day-to-day delay. The cause was the botched installation of a smart meter that was supposed to save him money.
"An engineer arrived in October 2017 and at 8 pm he was still struggling to get the new meter to detect the signals," she says. "He took it out and put our old counter back in and came back the next morning. The smart meter still did not work, so he installed another, which already contained a reading. "
Fearing that the inherited meter reading would affect his bills, Cooper informed Shell, who told him to photograph the screen and send it by email. She did it several times and spent the following months unsuccessfully asking for an updated bill. In the meantime, she continued to pay her usual monthly levy of £ 104 and learned that she had a £ 1,450 credit. Then, 18 months after the aborted installation, the updated bill arrived and asked for £ 666. "I'm retired and disabled, my husband is worried about it," she says. "We absolutely can not find that kind of money and I do not think we should, because they have not read the meter for nearly two years."
Cooper is one of many landlords who have paid a high price for the smart meter deployment, worth £ 11 billion, that the government is supposed to automatically send data to suppliers and remove the uncertainty of the estimated readings. Some had to pay the bill for repairs after technicians damaged their property. Others, like Cooper, had to deal with fantastic bills because their new counter was not working. And hundreds of people found that their meters were no longer working after switching suppliers to reduce costs.
Shell, while admitting that its mistakes have caused the rapid rise of Cooper's debt, insist that his responsibility is engaged although, according to the rules enacted by the regulator, Ofgem, companies can not charge retroactively to their customers the energy used more than 12 months ago.
He proposed to reduce the debt by £ 300 as goodwill and spread the balance on an affordable repayment plan. "We would like to apologize to Ms. Cooper for the stress caused by the failures of our customer service," said the company, whose website promises that smart meters will give back control to the customer. "After reviewing his account, we found that his meter was not initially updated on our systems, which explains the bad billing of his account.
"Obviously, we did not do the work necessary to quickly fix the problem, but we registered its meter counter in the system."
Suzanne Godfrey was left with disabled heating and hot water systems after EDF sent a technician to install a smart meter, and she was told that she was responsible for the repairs. "During the installation, they turned off and on the power supply, but could not restore power to the underfloor heating or the secondary hot water loop," she says.
"They sent an electrician but he did not know how to restore power. They refuse to call in a specialist heating engineer and questioned the quality and condition of the equipment, which was only three years old and that was working until the moment EDF cut the power supply.
"I'm stunned by the fact that a large company can request access to my home, do problematic work and move away from it."
EDF says that customers are warned to turn off sensitive equipment, including boilers, before installing a smart meter – Godfrey denied receiving it – and explained that 39, it would not guarantee the reimbursement of the cost of a heating engineer, the system having fault underlying.
During a winter's night, Samuel Crisp found himself without heat or electricity, after installing a smart meter at Ovo. It turned out that the meter had been accidentally settled on a pay-per-view configuration and, after badyzing the emergency balance, his offer had been disconnected while his online account had a credit of £ 300. Ovo gave him £ 150 as goodwill.
SThe energy consumption on the meter was intended to save money, but estimates of potential savings were revised downward. Photography: Yui Mok / PA
Critics say that turns have been made to achieve the official goals. In 2016, the government announced that it expects its suppliers to offer or install smart meters to all their customers by 2020, an unrealistic goal.
This initiative follows the European Commission's 2009 directive on electricity, which envisaged that smart technology would be offered to 80% of European households in the years to come. The United Kingdom opted for 100% coverage on the same date. gas and electricity operators, who have the labor and infrastructure to install entire streets at once, instead of being at home.
The National Audit Office predicted that taxpayers would pay half a billion pounds more than expected for the project over the next few years. At the same time, the government has revised the annual sum, which in its opinion badumes that the smart meter will save each household £ 26 to £ 11, while the cost of each installation of £ 270 is pbaded on to higher bills.
In a hurry to meet deadlines and avoid fines, vendors continue to install old, first-generation meters, which stop transmitting live readings when a customer changes hands. provider, since there are not enough updated meters.
There is also a shortage of properly trained technicians. Consumer group who? estimates that facilities should triple to 30 minutes to reach the target set by the government, although Ofgem insists that suppliers have sufficient resources.
Martyn James, of Resolver's complaint-handling website, said she received hundreds of complaints from incompetent installers and botched jobs.
"Customers complained of counters with holes drilled to fix them to the walls, damaging counter mechanisms, long waits for missing parts and display problems that do not work, bad readings and bills random, "he says.
"In one case, an installer caused a gas leak and when a crew came to replace the pipes, she found that she would have to cross an asbestos panel. They insisted that the customer had to fork out a four-digit sum for the specialists to remove before repairing. "
Most suppliers limit their responsibilities in their terms and conditions. According to Ofgem, customers may be required to update unsafe connections and devices before they can proceed with an installation – which, if the old meter has already been removed, may leave them with a large and unavoidable bill. If the damage is caused by the installation, the supplier must remedy, but the problem is that of negligence if the company denies any liability.
Customers who believe they have been unjustly left out of their pockets can take their case to the Energy Ombudsman, who has received 86 complaints about substandard installations in the past 12 months. "In cases where the supplier is responsible for damage to the customer's property, we expect the supplier to compensate the customer," he says.
Valerie Cooper has accepted the £ 300 offer from Shell, although she still disputes the accuracy of the bill. "I was going to fight until the end but I can not stand the stress anymore," she says. "I will pay the others right away to eliminate them and I will save and take my husband another time."
Is it time to call "stop" as the deployment continues?
Smart meters automate readings to make it easier for households to understand energy consumption and are seen as an essential upgrade to the energy system, allowing the UK grid to cope with a growing but variable amount of energy wind and solar.
Last year, Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer launched a public relations campaign to encourage users to use smart meters. They visited cities in the United Kingdom during the "Smart Energy" tour.
The devices could also reduce the need for costly improvements to power grids, facilitate the integration of electric cars into the energy system and open up a host of innovative tariffs with energy costs based on the duration of use.
Although considered an essential basis for most of the United Kingdom's energy future, its deployment has been fraught with difficulty in trying to meet the 2020 deadline, which is to say the installation. 53 million devices. One of the largest infrastructure projects in the UK was shut down due to problems after the change of customer. Many meters have lost their intelligent functionality after the change of supplier, which means consumers have to re-submit the readings manually.
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