Currently spending most days of the week ripping out lots of tele & timeswitches in a big rush for the RTS switch off, all great until theres signal or commissioning issues with the smart going in - or when the customer has complex live switching arrangements then it gets interesting.
I bet there's no chance of any of them showing up in the 2nd hand market, i find it a huge shame that all the expertly designed beautiful engineering of old meters, timeswitches etc are being scrapped :(
Same. And isn't it fun. When a contactor is involved in the wiring or an electrician has been really really creative it can be quite a challenging task!
@ Yes we're getting a lot of calls from customers via suppliers to come fix up their shite install. Most metering companies are pretty damn good, just supplying us with a 3 pole isolator to connect the random wiring to
Do you ever see any particularly interesting examples - and do you have to declare what's been removed or might some of the rarer ones be snaffled and saved?
@@dsesuk Remove some interesting stuff, on our software we only actually have to record the meter serial numbers removed not any auxiliary equipment, that just gets chucked in the bag but not recorded.....
The other option is for the RTS to remain in use, but not receiving any signals, and just switching using it's internal program, which can be set via signals before the service ends. They would then become like the other meter featured, with it's own internal clock. Would drift over time, but would get many months or years more use out of the devices before they are replaced. Certainly no need for anyone to suddenly have no heating, or for then to have everything billed at a single rate.
Oh, that's interesting John. I imagine it's not in the interest of big business to prolong the life of these things however. Not that much imagination is needed when you see the wording of the energy suppliers to their customers. If kept in service, I suspect these things would outlive many of the smart meters they're being replaced with.
I don't think that is possible, the only settable function within them was the "group code" for different areas of the country, surly the clue is in the name RADIO tele switch.
Great video again, David! My RTS was manufactured in 1986 and judging by the rest of the installation was probably fitted that year too. I love my storage heaters! They just fit in perfectly with my lifestyle, charging up midnight to 7am (variable). I only have 2 of them, the other rooms have oil-filled wall-hung heaters with stats on them. These are never used except in extremis. My house is very well insulated and my storage rads are only in use from November to March. My immersion heater for hot water is on a timer and as the whole house switches to off-peak around midnight the water gets heated at the cheaper rate. Thus, my long-winded ramble simply confirms that I am very happy with my set-up and I don't want Octopus messing with it...however, it seems I have little choice except to disconnect my heaters and put them on a spare way in my main CU, and put local timers in place. Octopus sent me an "URGENT" email saying I had to have a smart meter because the RTS was being switched off, and invited me to arrange a date for the installation. I entered my postcode and got an immediate reply saying they had no availability of meter fitters in my area. That has happened 3 times now. They are supposed to email me when a fitter is available...I'm not holding my breath. I don't know if the fitter will fit an isolator if I ask for one, but I suspect not. I will give him a cup of tea and fit it myself before he does his magic.
Cracking video as always , thankfully i have already forgotten what the Economy 7 advert was . However, i cannot get that " get to the point" bit out of my head and it will probably keep me up all night (or at least until my smart meter controlled storage heater contactor thumps off at 5 A.M. ).
i lived in a flat where the previous owners had somehow bypassed the timer. i didn't investigate, just accepted it. when i removed the storage heaters i fitted a socket - 24 hr off peak electricity
Living in Frogland for the last 28 years it’s really hard to understand how the UK messed up it’s smart meter roll-out so much! Here we have Linky smart meters, provided by a variety of manufacturers but all to the same specification, even down to the colour and design of the case. There’s a standard interface you can use to connect a WiFi dongle to an in home display if you want. For the vast majority of buildings they use a power-line carrier (PLC) system to send back 10 minute readings for billing. There’s also a control output dry contact to switch tariff related loads if you want via a contactor, such as immersion heaters etc. For rare cases where the PLC doesn’t reach they can be fitted with a mobile data connection, but this is rare as the PLC works fine on long overhead runs. Each substation has a PLC concentrator that forwards the data to a central system. By 2022 36 million Linky meters had been installed. Seems weird that the UK couldn’t come up with a standard and make it stick!
Octopus got in touch with me to warn me my meter was dangerously old and I had to get a smart meter. When I asked them to tell me how old it was, they said it had been installed on January 1st 1970. I argued that installation date was painfully unlikely and they admitted they had no idea when it was installed. (It's a Ferranti that looks like it was hand-built by Michael Faraday himself, but I wasn't going to volunteer that information)
The new storage heaters are actually very good. I was quite unimpressed that they needed a permanent supply for all storage heaters when most old properties just have an off peak supply to them. But after replacing about 50 of them at an old university building the heat difference in the morning after they had been replaced was quite noticeable. They had open door detection, motorised vents and full thermostat control. They kept their heat all day as well. They are far improved despite the annoyance of large scale rewiring to get them running.
I can always remember that 7 year period of my childhood when i was always f'ing cold - the glorious days of living in a house with shite economy 7 storage heaters.
I worked on the RTS system - first when the original computing system was replaced by a pair of MicroVAX 3100 computers and later on a software upgrade for the 286 computers in the BBC that did the actual phase modulation of the long wave signal - this upgrade increased the number of usable channels from 7 to 15. The transmission speed was a "massive" 25 bits per second (less than half the speed of an old ASR33 teletype) !!
Wonderful video Dave. Loads of RTS meters in my neck of the woods. Heading grants made sure of that. I understand a recent regulator visit to town hall proved fruitless. Ofgem have the power but are looking unlikely to do much
Some boring trivia for you. That switching cable between the teleswitch and meter is a switched neutral. One of the few you'll find in a domestic setting. Also, in London some 2 rate meters have rate 2 as the peak and rate 1 as off peak just to make things more confusing for customers.
@@John_Faultless Constant issues we have with customers having their readings reversed and being billed a shit ton for their off peak. There's bloody tons of Standard Settlement Configurations just to confuse everyone thoroughly.
Point of note. The switch under the cover only operates the load as there is a secondary switch inside to move the meter flag to off peak. When I used to install these many years ago! new teleswitches would provide 7 minutes of off peak to make the necessary tests before sealing up the equipment. After which you are bolocked
The 50 Hz frequency in the UK has a statutory limit of drift of 1% ie 0.5 Hz although NESO have a self imposed limit of 0.2 Hz and it ain't cheap to maintain this, estimated to cost £70million in 2018.
Thank you for this, I hadn't heard about the demise of Droitwich and RTS, and you did an interesting explanation. Does this also mean that 'radio controlled' clocks will stop synchronising too? And I like that at 23:09 you gave that equipment a CAT Scan 😉
Well that depends. I would suspect that the clock are a different frequency. At least in the US where we don't have tariff on meters. there is a national Time Signal used to synchronize the clocks. I would almost suspect that the UK would have their own clock synchronization frequency and that from what I understand the power companies piggybacked off of a radio transmitter for general programming. Which is of course is the transmitter that the BBC doesn't want to pay for anymore because people aren't paying their TV tax hahahaha and they're wasting more money paying enforcement.
My "smart" meter came with an "auxillary load" cable which was wired to my off-peak board, however when I moved to a time of use tarriff, the timings for this load remained on the old timings, causing peak rate immersion usage 😞 I worked around this by switching the 24 hour "booster" immersion cable with the timing controlled main circuit, I now have nothing connected to the off-peak board, with the storage heaters yeeted about a decade ago (for aesthetics rather than any view on efficiency)
Here is one for you, smart meter that controlled "happy hour" for storage heaters failed during lockdown, heating went off but as business closed not a problem, when reopened they found complete failure of the "smart meter" but said the customer would have to pay estimated charges based on pre lockdown usage including "happy hour" rates that was not provided because of the mode of failure of the meter, they would not even provide the last reading date and time received!
@@dsesuk yup, still might be having to make an appearance in court to explain how the system works......... Cuz the supplier's legal department don't have a f'in clue!
reguards to the self flashing leds they are amazing to play with even small temerature and voltage changes affects them quite a bit. if your patence enough they will eventually start slowly flashing in sink again. the ending is quite informative i also have been looking into retrain i started the 2365 qualificatio many years ago. but never finshed so i have to start again. just getting a foot on the wagon is hard enough it then there is juggling money,time and finding the right people.
I did a teardown of my Radio TeleSwitch which was removed when a smart meter was installed. if you want to export solar you have to have a smart meter. I still have ecom7 which is nice as I can charge my batteries over night at 15p kWh and and use this during the day when it goes up in price during the winter months. About to pay my first electric bill in 9 months. PS even with ecom7 the last supplier charged the same for both rates? 🙂
I saw your vid - it's linked in the description of this horror. It was PV that spelled the end of my trusty Siemens S2AM digital meter as it wasn't handling export correctly so I had no choice but to have a smart meter installed. Eco7 makes sense if you have a battery solution - I should have mentioned that in the presentation!
@@dsesuk with octopus i currently pay 15p kWh during the night, but only get 15p/kWh supplying them during the day. so if the sun comes out i only lose the Vat if i did not need to fill the batteries. Thanks for the link
It'll come as no surprise that it's a British Standard - BS7647. The mighty Google point you in the right direction. The switches are grouped with a 0 to 127 value, giving 128 groups, along with a user ID. With all the takeovers and mergers, lost records, it'll come as no surprise that the energy companies, nor the DNO's won't know what is in peoples properties. They don't even know if they are necessarily have looped supplies, older now dangerous service heads, nor what fuses are in the cut outs, As for the IHD? Like you, it made interesting viewing for the first 2 weeks for parasitic drains, but the gas only updates every 30 minutes because the meters are battery powered and therefore have to work for many years. And then I got bored and lobbed it in a cupboard somewhere.
My RTS is probably doing fuck all. A good few years ago I had my storage heaters ripped out and replaced with convection heaters. The old off-peak panel they were on was ripped out and they're now all in the "peak" panel, each one on it's own breaker.
Hey Dave, another interesting video, thanks :) Just something to annoy you ... around the 6 min mark you have on screen that 1 of the mains 50 Hz cycles = 0.02 sec and that 5 cycles = 1 second. I agree with the former, but not the latter :) And in the voiceover you say that 50 of the incoming cycles would equate to 0.02 sec, but actually 50 cycles = 1 sec. It's clear what you meant to say, so not a big deal, but at least you know I was paying attention to your video!
Dave, I have a question. Is that system a ‘turn on’ ‘turn off’ or does it continually broadcast a ‘turn on’ signal at the appropriate time and go quiet causing the switch to drop back to day rate?
That's an excellent question. I don't know if it receives an OFF signal or if it has an in-built 7-hour timer that clicks it off based on when the ON signal was received.
@@dsesuk It's a phase modulated signal to switch on and off when required. It can be randomly switched on at various times during the day too. Interestingly you could do all of this with a mere 50kw signal on 198LW but they're choosing to decommission them all instead
@@2Sorts I often wonder the same too, 1 way to test would be to wait for the off peak to kick in then wrap up the Teleswitch in some sort of Faraday cage or foil and see if it goes off or just says on low rate forever. Bit dodgy, so only in a "controlled environment" I suppose.
as far as i know reading about radio teleswitches a while back they work in 2 ways. there is always a on signal which sends the teleswitch a program which could be on 7 hours. but if required they can interupt the program with another message due to grid requirements and turn it off. they can then send another on signal to contiune the program. its quite fascinating
@@TheChipmunk2008 its all about the money. just look what happened to the analouge tv frequencys the govenment sold them off to the mobile phone comapneys for 10s of billions of pounds suspect the same with the radio freqencys.
Force everybody to go to a smart meter, then hike the price for home Internet services/broadband which is needed to connect the meter to the power companies servers (the mother ship)
@@0liver0verson9or not, if you're in the area where instead of using the o2 2g network it uses the dcc network. Either way, doesn't use your home service at all
@@Arachnoid_of_the_underverse Yes for the original Smets1 meters, which were rushed out thanks to British Gas. They will all have to be replaced with Smets2 (or even Smets3 by that point) in the next few years. It's not great planning is it lol
You can buy The in home display from a company called ivie that a lot of electricity companies use and they are very easy to set up i had to buy a new one when mine got stolen lol
I'm glad that it's not just me who is amused by all of those miracle products that you get on youtube adverts. I only see them when I'm on the iPad because all of my PC's and laptops are adblocked to high heaven xD Wasn't Economy 7 something to do with encouraging people to use electricity overnight because it give all of the big nuclear power stations something to do because they don't like being throttled down?
Pretty much the same on Octopus Agile, run things overnight and after lunch when it's cheaper. These off peak tariffs are likely to become more important as we have a increasing mix of renewables in our energy supply that cannot be varied on demand like the fossil fuels they replace.
Let's go back to the beginning of the video. Many of the promises made by marketers are the words of people who skipped physics lessons at school, I suppose. There is also the promise of home heating with appliances that consume almost no energy. The Laws of Conservation don't exist for them to think about...
Currently spending most days of the week ripping out lots of tele & timeswitches in a big rush for the RTS switch off, all great until theres signal or commissioning issues with the smart going in - or when the customer has complex live switching arrangements then it gets interesting.
I bet there's no chance of any of them showing up in the 2nd hand market, i find it a huge shame that all the expertly designed beautiful engineering of old meters, timeswitches etc are being scrapped :(
Same. And isn't it fun. When a contactor is involved in the wiring or an electrician has been really really creative it can be quite a challenging task!
@ Yes we're getting a lot of calls from customers via suppliers to come fix up their shite install. Most metering companies are pretty damn good, just supplying us with a 3 pole isolator to connect the random wiring to
Do you ever see any particularly interesting examples - and do you have to declare what's been removed or might some of the rarer ones be snaffled and saved?
@@dsesuk Remove some interesting stuff, on our software we only actually have to record the meter serial numbers removed not any auxiliary equipment, that just gets chucked in the bag but not recorded.....
The other option is for the RTS to remain in use, but not receiving any signals, and just switching using it's internal program, which can be set via signals before the service ends. They would then become like the other meter featured, with it's own internal clock. Would drift over time, but would get many months or years more use out of the devices before they are replaced.
Certainly no need for anyone to suddenly have no heating, or for then to have everything billed at a single rate.
Oh, that's interesting John. I imagine it's not in the interest of big business to prolong the life of these things however. Not that much imagination is needed when you see the wording of the energy suppliers to their customers. If kept in service, I suspect these things would outlive many of the smart meters they're being replaced with.
I don't think that is possible, the only settable function within them was the "group code" for different areas of the country, surly the clue is in the name RADIO tele switch.
Great video again, David! My RTS was manufactured in 1986 and judging by the rest of the installation was probably fitted that year too. I love my storage heaters! They just fit in perfectly with my lifestyle, charging up midnight to 7am (variable). I only have 2 of them, the other rooms have oil-filled wall-hung heaters with stats on them. These are never used except in extremis. My house is very well insulated and my storage rads are only in use from November to March. My immersion heater for hot water is on a timer and as the whole house switches to off-peak around midnight the water gets heated at the cheaper rate. Thus, my long-winded ramble simply confirms that I am very happy with my set-up and I don't want Octopus messing with it...however, it seems I have little choice except to disconnect my heaters and put them on a spare way in my main CU, and put local timers in place. Octopus sent me an "URGENT" email saying I had to have a smart meter because the RTS was being switched off, and invited me to arrange a date for the installation. I entered my postcode and got an immediate reply saying they had no availability of meter fitters in my area. That has happened 3 times now. They are supposed to email me when a fitter is available...I'm not holding my breath. I don't know if the fitter will fit an isolator if I ask for one, but I suspect not. I will give him a cup of tea and fit it myself before he does his magic.
Cracking video as always , thankfully i have already forgotten what the Economy 7 advert was . However, i cannot get that " get to the point" bit out of my head and it will probably keep me up all night (or at least until my smart meter controlled storage heater contactor thumps off at 5 A.M. ).
One way or another, this video will haunt you!
i lived in a flat where the previous owners had somehow bypassed the timer. i didn't investigate, just accepted it.
when i removed the storage heaters i fitted a socket - 24 hr off peak electricity
Living in Frogland for the last 28 years it’s really hard to understand how the UK messed up it’s smart meter roll-out so much! Here we have Linky smart meters, provided by a variety of manufacturers but all to the same specification, even down to the colour and design of the case. There’s a standard interface you can use to connect a WiFi dongle to an in home display if you want. For the vast majority of buildings they use a power-line carrier (PLC) system to send back 10 minute readings for billing. There’s also a control output dry contact to switch tariff related loads if you want via a contactor, such as immersion heaters etc. For rare cases where the PLC doesn’t reach they can be fitted with a mobile data connection, but this is rare as the PLC works fine on long overhead runs. Each substation has a PLC concentrator that forwards the data to a central system. By 2022 36 million Linky meters had been installed. Seems weird that the UK couldn’t come up with a standard and make it stick!
If a national technical roll-out can be mismanaged, we Brits are the best for borking it up!
Octopus got in touch with me to warn me my meter was dangerously old and I had to get a smart meter. When I asked them to tell me how old it was, they said it had been installed on January 1st 1970. I argued that installation date was painfully unlikely and they admitted they had no idea when it was installed. (It's a Ferranti that looks like it was hand-built by Michael Faraday himself, but I wasn't going to volunteer that information)
Indeed, a testament to how well engineered it is if still running decades later.
I have a 1962 Email meter still live on my suburban Brisbane, QLD, AU property.
January 1st 1970? That's the unix epoch, they've probably defaulted any records without data to a timestamp of 0...
The new storage heaters are actually very good. I was quite unimpressed that they needed a permanent supply for all storage heaters when most old properties just have an off peak supply to them.
But after replacing about 50 of them at an old university building the heat difference in the morning after they had been replaced was quite noticeable.
They had open door detection, motorised vents and full thermostat control. They kept their heat all day as well. They are far improved despite the annoyance of large scale rewiring to get them running.
They're probably great if you have a model with a decent UI controller. Mine, when I had one, was hopeless and I was glad to see the back of it.
I can always remember that 7 year period of my childhood when i was always f'ing cold - the glorious days of living in a house with shite economy 7 storage heaters.
I worked on the RTS system - first when the original computing system was replaced by a pair of MicroVAX 3100 computers and later on a software upgrade for the 286 computers in the BBC that did the actual phase modulation of the long wave signal - this upgrade increased the number of usable channels from 7 to 15.
The transmission speed was a "massive" 25 bits per second (less than half the speed of an old ASR33 teletype) !!
Ah, but speed is only important when downloading porn. For rock solid signalling this has proven robust for a long time.
Wonderful video Dave. Loads of RTS meters in my neck of the woods. Heading grants made sure of that. I understand a recent regulator visit to town hall proved fruitless. Ofgem have the power but are looking unlikely to do much
Some boring trivia for you. That switching cable between the teleswitch and meter is a switched neutral. One of the few you'll find in a domestic setting.
Also, in London some 2 rate meters have rate 2 as the peak and rate 1 as off peak just to make things more confusing for customers.
Boring? I just got a bonk-on John!
@@John_Faultless Constant issues we have with customers having their readings reversed and being billed a shit ton for their off peak. There's bloody tons of Standard Settlement Configurations just to confuse everyone thoroughly.
@dsesuk 😂😂😂
So you can’t get free electric out of it.
My thinking is us ham radio people could generate the radio frequency to switch it on will we get lower rate or are they killing that as well
I don’t think I ever seen one of those things . ? If I have I don’t remember .
Interesting video David .as always 👍
Cheers Sean. I wonder if they were more common in certain areas over others?
Wouldn’t surprise me.
just read 51 comments and no wisecrack about Linda's box. . . . . disappointed 😒
Pshaw! Nobody interacting with this nonsense channel has any imagination!
Too hard to type one handed 👋
My faith has been restored 😂😅@@harveycreekin
Point of note. The switch under the cover only operates the load as there is a secondary switch inside to move the meter flag to off peak. When I used to install these many years ago! new teleswitches would provide 7 minutes of off peak to make the necessary tests before sealing up the equipment. After which you are bolocked
Ah, that's good to know. I should have looked closer at mine when I opened it!
The 50 Hz frequency in the UK has a statutory limit of drift of 1% ie 0.5 Hz although NESO have a self imposed limit of 0.2 Hz and it ain't cheap to maintain this, estimated to cost £70million in 2018.
Thank you for this, I hadn't heard about the demise of Droitwich and RTS, and you did an interesting explanation. Does this also mean that 'radio controlled' clocks will stop synchronising too? And I like that at 23:09 you gave that equipment a CAT Scan 😉
Well that depends. I would suspect that the clock are a different frequency. At least in the US where we don't have tariff on meters. there is a national Time Signal used to synchronize the clocks. I would almost suspect that the UK would have their own clock synchronization frequency and that from what I understand the power companies piggybacked off of a radio transmitter for general programming. Which is of course is the transmitter that the BBC doesn't want to pay for anymore because people aren't paying their TV tax hahahaha and they're wasting more money paying enforcement.
I think they are synced from Rugby.
The time signal is a different thang - used to be in Rugby but moved to Cumbria a few years ago.
@@dsesuk A better outlook I guess ?
@ Ahh, thank you!
My "smart" meter came with an "auxillary load" cable which was wired to my off-peak board, however when I moved to a time of use tarriff, the timings for this load remained on the old timings, causing peak rate immersion usage 😞 I worked around this by switching the 24 hour "booster" immersion cable with the timing controlled main circuit, I now have nothing connected to the off-peak board, with the storage heaters yeeted about a decade ago (for aesthetics rather than any view on efficiency)
How annoying. Goes to show though that if you're switching between flat rate and off-peak tariffs, it pays to check the timing in play.
Here is one for you, smart meter that controlled "happy hour" for storage heaters failed during lockdown, heating went off but as business closed not a problem, when reopened they found complete failure of the "smart meter" but said the customer would have to pay estimated charges based on pre lockdown usage including "happy hour" rates that was not provided because of the mode of failure of the meter, they would not even provide the last reading date and time received!
The more complexity you introduce, the more there is to go wrong.
@@dsesuk yup, still might be having to make an appearance in court to explain how the system works......... Cuz the supplier's legal department don't have a f'in clue!
By chance Ofgem had an advert on TV about an hour ago about the RTS system shutting down
I've not had the pleasure of seeing that - I'll keep an eye out when the wife's watching Coronation Street!
@@dsesuk It's on their RUclips channel: ruclips.net/video/Ba_bxM_x9Gw/видео.html
reguards to the self flashing leds they are amazing to play with even small temerature and voltage changes affects them quite a bit. if your patence enough they will eventually start slowly flashing in sink again. the ending is quite informative i also have been looking into retrain i started the 2365 qualificatio many years ago. but never finshed so i have to start again. just getting a foot on the wagon is hard enough it then there is juggling money,time and finding the right people.
It'll be an interesting chat if it comes off Ryan. There are a lot of people in that boat.
I did a teardown of my Radio TeleSwitch which was removed when a smart meter was installed. if you want to export solar you have to have a smart meter.
I still have ecom7 which is nice as I can charge my batteries over night at 15p kWh and and use this during the day when it goes up in price during the winter months.
About to pay my first electric bill in 9 months.
PS even with ecom7 the last supplier charged the same for both rates? 🙂
I saw your vid - it's linked in the description of this horror. It was PV that spelled the end of my trusty Siemens S2AM digital meter as it wasn't handling export correctly so I had no choice but to have a smart meter installed. Eco7 makes sense if you have a battery solution - I should have mentioned that in the presentation!
@@dsesuk with octopus i currently pay 15p kWh during the night, but only get 15p/kWh supplying them during the day. so if the sun comes out i only lose the Vat if i did not need to fill the batteries.
Thanks for the link
Surely it can't be that difficult to adjust the time switch 🤔
Thank you David interesting .
It'll come as no surprise that it's a British Standard - BS7647. The mighty Google point you in the right direction. The switches are grouped with a 0 to 127 value, giving 128 groups, along with a user ID. With all the takeovers and mergers, lost records, it'll come as no surprise that the energy companies, nor the DNO's won't know what is in peoples properties. They don't even know if they are necessarily have looped supplies, older now dangerous service heads, nor what fuses are in the cut outs, As for the IHD? Like you, it made interesting viewing for the first 2 weeks for parasitic drains, but the gas only updates every 30 minutes because the meters are battery powered and therefore have to work for many years. And then I got bored and lobbed it in a cupboard somewhere.
Have you played about with the big Venner to see how long it'll keep ticking on a full wind of the spring?
I haven't. It may be something I have to play with!
They are good things.
My RTS is probably doing fuck all. A good few years ago I had my storage heaters ripped out and replaced with convection heaters. The old off-peak panel they were on was ripped out and they're now all in the "peak" panel, each one on it's own breaker.
Hey Dave, another interesting video, thanks :) Just something to annoy you ... around the 6 min mark you have on screen that 1 of the mains 50 Hz cycles = 0.02 sec and that 5 cycles = 1 second. I agree with the former, but not the latter :) And in the voiceover you say that 50 of the incoming cycles would equate to 0.02 sec, but actually 50 cycles = 1 sec. It's clear what you meant to say, so not a big deal, but at least you know I was paying attention to your video!
Yeah, I spotted that slip after publishing. Too much red wine when editing it seems!
@@dsesuk Too much red wine??? No such thing surely!
The clock syncing is crystal clear lol 😂
Dave, I have a question.
Is that system a ‘turn on’ ‘turn off’ or does it continually broadcast a ‘turn on’ signal at the appropriate time and go quiet causing the switch to drop back to day rate?
That's an excellent question. I don't know if it receives an OFF signal or if it has an in-built 7-hour timer that clicks it off based on when the ON signal was received.
@@dsesuk It's a phase modulated signal to switch on and off when required. It can be randomly switched on at various times during the day too. Interestingly you could do all of this with a mere 50kw signal on 198LW but they're choosing to decommission them all instead
@@2Sorts I often wonder the same too, 1 way to test would be to wait for the off peak to kick in then wrap up the Teleswitch in some sort of Faraday cage or foil and see if it goes off or just says on low rate forever. Bit dodgy, so only in a "controlled environment" I suppose.
as far as i know reading about radio teleswitches a while back they work in 2 ways. there is always a on signal which sends the teleswitch a program which could be on 7 hours. but if required they can interupt the program with another message due to grid requirements and turn it off. they can then send another on signal to contiune the program. its quite fascinating
@@TheChipmunk2008 its all about the money. just look what happened to the analouge tv frequencys the govenment sold them off to the mobile phone comapneys for 10s of billions of pounds suspect the same with the radio freqencys.
A DaveSave! My day got 10 times better.
If you watch this, it'll get much worse.
Force everybody to go to a smart meter, then hike the price for home Internet services/broadband which is needed to connect the meter to the power companies servers (the mother ship)
Smart meters use their own sim card, not the home owners internet.
@@0liver0verson9or not, if you're in the area where instead of using the o2 2g network it uses the dcc network. Either way, doesn't use your home service at all
@@0liver0verson9 2G is to be shortly made redundant too , so goodbye smart meter reading.
@@Arachnoid_of_the_underverse now that's the true plan, a year from now the 2g service gets shut down you'll have to get a new meter...... then 3g
@@Arachnoid_of_the_underverse Yes for the original Smets1 meters, which were rushed out thanks to British Gas. They will all have to be replaced with Smets2 (or even Smets3 by that point) in the next few years. It's not great planning is it lol
You can buy The in home display from a company called ivie that a lot of electricity companies use and they are very easy to set up i had to buy a new one when mine got stolen lol
Storage heaters, as well as being rubbish, are full of asbestos insulation if old enough.
I'm glad that it's not just me who is amused by all of those miracle products that you get on youtube adverts. I only see them when I'm on the iPad because all of my PC's and laptops are adblocked to high heaven xD
Wasn't Economy 7 something to do with encouraging people to use electricity overnight because it give all of the big nuclear power stations something to do because they don't like being throttled down?
Never used that system, always had mostly gas powered heating.
Mum would always put the tumble dryer on economy 7 circuit
It's a hard habit to break. We still run the dishwasher at night despite switching to a flat-rate.
Pretty much the same on Octopus Agile, run things overnight and after lunch when it's cheaper. These off peak tariffs are likely to become more important as we have a increasing mix of renewables in our energy supply that cannot be varied on demand like the fossil fuels they replace.
Why did you get rid of your milk-float then David ?
Oh, one daughter went off to uni in Leeds and the other to Falmouth! My cack Leaf wasn't fit to travel to either!
Let's go back to the beginning of the video.
Many of the promises made by marketers are the words of people who skipped physics lessons at school, I suppose. There is also the promise of home heating with appliances that consume almost no energy. The Laws of Conservation don't exist for them to think about...
It's those damnable laws of physics that keeps me from having a warm home at a low cost Yury!
Dave is mad and hilarious!
Pretty sure Octopis are a better company than National Frig.
Octopiss are an accident waiting to happen with their sling-it-in-quick-and-cheap EV and heat pump gash.
Option 5: Use switch gear that is operated by ripples injected into the power lines........ Dumb, efficient, reliable.
The UK doesn't do efficient or reliable.
First visit to the channel, shame the need to sware! Won't be coming back.
My question is: if you learn how to spell simple English words in your absence; will you return so that we can all tell you to f*** off?
Then you don't know this channel and shouldn't be on this channel. You'll be far more offended by pretty much every video except this one.
Welcome to the channel Baz, it's good to see you here and... oh... he's gone.