We as your power provider put your meter in, and are chargeable for amassing meter readings from it to verify your payments are correct, however we’ve got to work with two totally different third occasion organisations to really pay money for that information.
The DCC (Knowledge Communications Firm) is the federal government physique chargeable for the connectivity of all sensible meters (i.e. ensuring all of them talk safely as they need to do). We then have to make use of a unique firm, TMA, to attach between the DCC and our sensible meters – it’s the one method we are able to ship or obtain information with our meters.
TMA have been experiencing various technical points just lately which imply that typically they cease with the ability to join with a few of our sensible meters – virtually, from time to time this implies we cease receiving meter readings, or with the ability to ship messages (like updating tariffs).
Usually these points are mounted by TMA inside a day or so of us reporting them however it might probably take a few days for the system to ‘catch up’ the info missed. Their system does all the time ‘catch up’ in the long run, so this gained’t have an effect on your billing or what you might be paying in any method over time however can imply within the quick time period, our visibility of your meter readings is affected – so, you would possibly discover your utilization or meter studying part hasn’t up to date in your on-line account.
The innovator’s problem
The reality is, these points crop up for each provider, however the overwhelming majority of power prospects do not discover the odd day of lacking meter readings, as a result of their readings are solely actually vital roughly as soon as monthly (or typically, much less!) once they’re being billed.
We wished to write down this word as a result of we’re very fortunate to have particularly engaged prospects on sensible tariffs like AgileOctopus who play shut consideration to their readings half-hourly due to the distinctive method they pay for energy. This type of enthusiastic curiosity in power consumption is sensible – remarkable in power beforehand – but it surely does imply these beta prospects would possibly get uncovered a little bit extra to the occasional outages of third events like TMA. We do every thing we are able to to minimise this as a lot as potential, and usually, they’re fairly uncommon.