The heating in my place is via storage heaters. So they heat up over night on cheap electricity and then discharge the heat over the day. To do this they are all wired into a separate fuse board that only becomes live when the meter switches to over night mode.
For those not familiar with the UKs system, think of the meter as having one incoming feed, and two outgoing. One outgoing is live 24hours a day, the other turns on at a set time, and then off again. This switching is all done automatically.
OR….. It used to be done automatically, it has not been working for a few days. I did not spot when it stopped working because it is not the cold yet so I only had the one heater on. When I spotted that heater not working, I tested it, and then turned some others on to check. All remained cold the following day.
Ergo, the meter is not turning the second feed on, so must be broken. Sever calls to the Power Supplier who just kept suggesting I hire an electrician to come check the heater, until I could get them to understand the issue is on their part of the system. And they agreed to send out an engineer.
The engineer turned up and said I needed a smart meter, I said No. I did not want spyware in my house. It was then that I found out that the original plan was for all normal meters to be turned off last June, and they needed to be replaced. If you want access to cheap overnight power you needed a smart meter, if you were happy for the same price 24 hours a day you could have a dumb one (but they had no dumb ones anyway).
It was while chatting to the engineer that I discovered the reason for the change was (and I am still in shock). The UK meters are controlled by radio waves from radio stations. They play a sequence of beeps at a set time to turn the overnight on, and then off again. And since UK radio stations are all going digital the signal is going. The government has pushed it back a bit from the June deadline since a large number of the UK still runs off radio waves.
All our technology and we need Radio 4 to control our meters… Madness
The engineer sorted the meter swap so heating worked again, and it only took him 2.5hours to do what I calculate as a 30 minute job (And that 30 includes a coffee break).
