I think they read my gas meter, because they are *exactly* that kind of stupid.

@gsuberland I got a £10k electricity bill from Octopus one month. The smart meter works fine, it took a human coming out to do the regular mandated manual reading to screw it up. He read the lifetime use value, rather than the last billing period 🙄

But you also would have *hoped* that their billing problem might flag such outlier bills and have them investigated before sending the bill out, no?

@WiteWulf ohhh their billing system is garbage.

the smart meter enrolment failed for one of the meters (gas or electricity, I don't remember) so they failed to bill me for a year. I never noticed because it was supposed to be direct debit and I have ADHD so it's not like I'm paying attention to my bills. then they sent me a huge bill for the full year amount. was a big problem for like a year.

I think when they came to repair the damaged stopcock in front of our shared driveway (only took them 18 months) they sent some numpty to go check for a meter and saw my gas meter cabinet was open, so they reported that as the water usage even though neither of our properties is metered.

@gsuberland that would be... something.

@gsuberland best check they didn't replace the stopcock with a meter. That's what they do now, based on a sample of 2 on my street.

Coincidentally, they're using Octopus Energy's Kraken platform for their smart meters. It's designed to produce open data, but they won't allow us access to that usage data and "have no current plans to".

They're on LoRa 868MHz. Someone will crack it soon enough.

@greem I'll go open it in a bit. but if they just installed it then they a) can't possibly have any data yet, and b) would be measuring both our properties as a combined pipe.

@gsuberland @greem they’ve just put a meter *somewhere* and attached it to a property. It’s covering an entire city.

@dysfun it's Severn Trent. you don't get to be that level of mismanaged without hiring complete smoothbrains.