Check the Clock on your Night Rate Meters

Piliger

I hope Mods allow this post as I think it is very relevant to anyone renting and using Night Rate Electricity for Storage heaters and Washing Machines etc.

I became convinced that my Storage Heater was not operating correctly.

Through the help of Electric Ireland's Dave here on the Electric Ireland Forum on Boards - I was able to send through a photo of my Night Rate Timer Clock located in the same box as the Meters.

It turns out that the Clock was waaaaay off ...... we are not sure if it was 2 hours or 14 hours off I hope that it will be possible to find out at some stage.

The implications are enormous for the cost of heating through the winter. Luckily I have only been in this apartment since March 2012.

I advise EVERYONE to go and check their Night Rate Clock ! and note that the "clock" part appears to be on a 12 hour setup while the timer is on a 24 hr. So I still haven't figured out how anyone can tell if it set to 8am or 8pm ..... hopefully that will be resolved soon.

Thanks to Dave from Electric Ireland for the help.

dfin

Hi Piliger,

Did you get this resolved? Did ESB Networks charge to get this fixed? Did your supplier offer some sort of finacial correction for the fault?

Thanks

dcmm

Yes, help. I have a night meter too, wouldn't have a clue how it works

dfin

Hi dcmm,

A quick check you can do would be to check your meter to see that it is switching from day to night and back at the correct times. For example, during the day and you would expect to see the small arrow on the right of the meter pointing up towards day and the counter on the Day Meter should be increasing if there an electrical load present



The "clock" that Pilager warns about is the timer shown below



This photo taken at the same time as the previous one and is reading about 12:50pm. The "outer ring" on this timer is what conrols the changeover between the Day and Night counters. As the "clock" or timer is set up on install and sealed, it will not change with day light saving scheme and so will either an hour ahead in summer or an hour behind in winter (depending on how you look at it)

In this last photo you can better see than this timer was set to change to Night setting at 23:00 and back to Day at 08:00.



As this is a mechanical "clock"/timer it's possible it would drift out of sycnh over time (possibly lose power during a power outage for example). This would mean that a householder could set their storage heaters to run during the hours they think they are charged night rates i.e. 11pm to 8am mistakenly thinking they are getting a lower unit rate but in reality their timer has drifted out of synch and they are charged some of that high useage time at day rates

dcmm

Thanks very much "dfin" for your very helpful reply. I'm up at 6am (to Dublin) tomorrow,so will check your with your helpful pics, when I get back, tomorrow night. Thanks again:)