(Not So) Smart Meters - You Have Been Warned.

[Canary42]

A man has been charged an £40,000 for electric in a single day - after a smart meter gaffe.

He confronted supplier EDF over the charge and was told smart meters are "never wrong".

The supplier told him they would be upping his direct debit to £400 a month because of the readings.

https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/man-raging-over-40000-electricity-23763766?fbclid=IwAR1XsUAHe5WdK-K8EkXVUmhmkmmC5VR7wErVHLu4_ba8xgS81ySQjN6MN7E

[jno]

they must have got their software from the same people as Royal Mail did.

[ichkeria]

It isn’t going to put me off sorry.
At £400 a month it would take them 100 months or over 8 years to recoup that assuming he even stayed with them.
I’m slightly sceptical

[Deskdiary]

I'm a little sceptical too.

Even the most slavish "computer says no" non-thinking operator would know £40k in a single day was obviously wrong.

[douglas9401]

The "article" continues that it was all sorted out eventually but that seems to have been missed by our reporter.

The company that posts this stuff, (Insert city name) LIVE is the lowest form of journalism in my opinion.

[roopower]

Even a cannabis farm wouldn't use that much in a day, I wouldn't think

[barry1010]

Birmingham Mail Live is truly dreadful. The reports often miss out the important bits and cause readers to froth at the mouth over a non-story.
It's supposed to be local - the man in this report lives in Scunthorpe

[ToraToraTora]

Smart meters are not "smart" - they only process what is sent to them from the main meter. So assuming we accept that the man has not used £40k worth of electricity, one of 3 things has happened
1) The meter has mis measured the amount used
2) The meter has mis communicated the reading
3) The system that processes it has a fault.

my guess is a software fault somewhere in the system that gets the data from the meter and sends it to the bill processing system.

The first thing to do is to check the actual readings and work out how much is used independently and take it from there.

[ToraToraTora]

There is a 4th possibility though very unlikely, the meter is correct and there is some sort of massive power leak on the man's side of the meter.

[barry1010]

People have been sent extortionate bills in error for many years, long before smart meters, mistakes happen.

[youngmafbog]

Its actually fairly easy for them to see a large error like this. They [network] know how much goes through the sub stations so add up the local amounts and find out if its true.

However I suspect what TTT says is true and that wouldnt take a competent IT person long to work out.

[Gromit]

All the Smart Meters have been reset to new tariffs OTA, and it is obvious a glitch or interruption occurred when that happened, leading to the erroneous reading.

[calmck]

In January I finally had EDF acknowledge an incorrect reading dating back 3 years and in March received £8250 refund!

[ichkeria]

If we’d had smart meters all along and then they announced they were instead going to send people to our homes to do readings instead, or we’d have to actually send the readings in ourselves I think there would have been uproar

[Hymie]

TTT – your 4th possibility is not possible, otherwise he would be consuming £1,667 worth of energy per hour. At 30p per kWh that works out at 5,555 kW requiring a continuous current draw of 23,000 amps (most domestic consumer units are fused at 100A, or less).

[Arksided]

Goggled Tesla...

'Did Nikola Tesla create unlimited electricity?

One of the Nikola Tesla's attempt to provide everyone in the world with free energy was his World Power System, a method of broadcasting electrical energy without wires, through the ground that was never finished, but his dream of providing energy to all points on the globe is still alive today...'

Yes he did they're all running off my smart meter.