Caporegime
I hadn't received any email stating that.
I hadn't received any email stating that.
Even tells people in a huge message on the website and app.
"We're super busy today so you might have a long wait if you call.
The best day to give us a meter reading is this Saturday (our standard variable prices don't change until 00:00 Saturday 2nd April.) Make a note of your readings or take a photo of them on Saturday. When we receive this reading we will apply it to your account from 00:00 midnight on the Saturday. You will have a week to submit them to us, so please don't worry if you can't get it to us that day."
ML tells people to submit their readings on the same day -> websites crash -> Suppliers blame ML -> people call out foul play
What has this country come to !?!
People think this guy is a God but a lot of his advice is misleading.
You don't physically need to submit the reading on the same day you took it - just submit your readings days after and on the website select the day you took the reading.
Or, get a Smart meter which will submit your readings on your behalf.
Simples - no need for mass panic !
In terms of websites crashing - in my experience only Amazon survived the panic buy for PS5's and new GPU's without the site going down. It happens to 99% of websites when millions of people hit it at the same time.
What has this country come to !?!
People think this guy is a God but a lot of his advice is misleading.
You don't physically need to submit the reading on the same day you took it - just submit your readings days after and on the website select the day you took the reading.
Or, get a Smart meter which will submit your readings on your behalf.
Simples - no need for mass panic !
In terms of websites crashing - in my experience only Amazon survived the panic buy for PS5's and new GPU's without the site going down. It happens to 99% of websites when millions of people hit it at the same time.
Caporegime
Soldato
It does tell you on the website but it's not very clear. 00:00 on Saturday is what I would consider "midnight" on Friday.
Soldato
I honestly don't get why websites don't all use queuing systems, and avoid having these sorts of crashes.
Its not 2005 any more!
Interestingly I just got another message from BG saying they sent a message earlier and its fine to reply to that with readings.
Its not 2005 any more!
Interestingly I just got another message from BG saying they sent a message earlier and its fine to reply to that with readings.
Pfft. Smells of energy company pulling servers out of load balance pools or creating the virtual room via cloudflare as they know it will potentially stop or delay people from submitting readings. It's ludicrous.
If they have backend load balancers I'm sure they could take the amount of traffic. I don't recall them seeing issues with the site when they went in to administration, it was available if I recall and they would have been getting a lot of website traffic
It shouldn't take more than an hour to get to bulb,
If they have backend load balancers I'm sure they could take the amount of traffic. I don't recall them seeing issues with the site when they went in to administration, it was available if I recall and they would have been getting a lot of website traffic
It shouldn't take more than an hour to get to bulb,
Soldato
- Joined
- 22 Jan 2014
- Posts
- 3,825
He did quite clearly state that you don't need to submit them today and gave ways of doing it later. It's the usual 'Attention span of a gnat' issue where people (not you) take the first thing said and don't listen beyond the first minute.
put the tin foil hat away
Soldato
Just to give you a rough idea of some of the demand today we had over 33,000 calls answered and 2700 Social media DM's responded too. No idea on the website demand but if it was anything like our call centre today I would hate to think how many 10,000's have been on the website today. Had 800 people on calls all day and still had approx 3000 calls waiting from about 9:30am to 5pm
They've never needed it before before. So it would be a bit of a waste.
I got the opposite, Electric sending readings, gas not, IHD still not working.
I got told on Wednesday their policy is to not to activate the IHD until both work, I said thats nonsensical and they promised to turn it on that day for electric but it never happened (Octopus), will ring again during the day on Friday which will be 9th day since installation. Very frustrating I cannot see live usage merely because they have chosen to not turn it on.
I was told on Wednesday there is a small distance limit between the two meters, so not just the IHD has a low signal strength, its 10m excluding walls. 2m taken off for each wall, my gas meter is not that close to my electric meter, so the cheapness on the signalling hardware may have screwed me over, but I will push for the IHD fix, and promise not to manually send them gas readings if they dont turn it on.
Someone elsewhere on the net got told no as well, looks like the suppliers have been getting too many requests and are not happy. My sister works for centrica I can ask her for clarification tomorrow.
Soldato
If you have more than one property on your Octopus account and change a new tariff for one of the properties (if your current one is ending). Please double check it doesn't change it for all of them as I found out today. A quick call to octopus and it was sorted, but don't get caught out!
Soldato
Because it would be a huge waste of money to implement those systems along with loads of spare capacity etc. which would be unused for 99.72% of the time, just to cater for the 1 day of the year it might be needed (and is only needed because people can't listen to simple instructions about not all submitting their meter readings at the last minute because it's easy enough to take a photo and then submit a retrospective reading).
That is pure and simple lies from Octopus, there is no switching things on when the system is working, it either gets installed properly and works or it gets installed poorly and doesn't.
They've gone downhill since taking on so many new customers.
1 month+ and still no reply about my meters not working. Just get the same line of its been passed to our metering department.
What do you want them to do though?
If your smart meter is not already working its likely to not work at all for a long time, octopus can do very little about it, they have no control over the signal in your area. They can raise it with the smart metering team but they can only try to get the meter commissioned which they likely have tried already. Many areas still don't have the infrastructure to support smart meters. It also depends on how far away your meters are away from each other and how many walls/wall material are in the way, it all gets in the way of the rather crappy signal transmitters inside the meters.
The amount of calls today was crazy, was easily a couple of thousands left when I left at 5PM (compared to either 0 or less than 100-200). Was all either meter readings or complaining about prices increasing like the energy companies can do anything about it.....the hold time's was insane on how long people where willing to hold for. Wonder how many complaints will come in the tomorrow morning from people who got cut off while waiting (as the lines closed and you can't expect people to stay at work). Its not an issue when there only a few left, but when there are thousands of calls waiting at closing time, you are not going to have staff staying.
There is likely not much they can do about it tbh, your request would be submitted to the smart team, they will try commission the meter and more than likely won't be able to due to the signal issues. Its not as simple as "turning it on" the gas meter has to transmit its information to the electric meter for it to be passed back to the company, if your meter cannot get the signal across (distance, thick walls etc) they can't do anything about it.
Also withholding correct readings is your choice if you want to be bitter about it, but may come back to bite you later down the line with possible debt. You would also have no room to complain since you refused to provide readings.
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Worked fine for nearly a year no issues, just stopped working, no WAN and no HAN.