On Thu, 2 Jul 2015 04:29:19 -0700 (PDT), whisky-dave
wrote:

On Wednesday, 1 July 2015 22:51:25 UTC+1, Bill Stewart wrote:
On Wed, 1 Jul 2015 22:27:42 +0100, F news@nowhere wrote:

On 01/07/2015 21:34, alan_m wrote:

I was under the impression the difficulty in changing was that the
company you may want to switch to wouldn't accept you as a customer
under any circumstances because of incompatible smart meters. They don't
necessarily want the hassle or expense of changing a meter for someone
who may have a 12 contract before changing supplier again.

I've had it suggested that I change to a smart meter a few times now but
it isn't going to happen until they can provide a meter that every
supplier can work with. Until then, any swap will have to be for a
mechanical meter, something you can insist on.

I am unsure why anyone would want to insist on such; unless they were just
being bloody minded.

Just suppose company X said use our meter .... and then you found that the company X were the most expensive option and then you found that you couldn't change suppliers because of yuor special box that only your supplier X can use.

The pnly way of changing supplier would be to have yuor meter changed which you have to pay for, and return the old meter. Hopefully they won;t be any small print requireing you to pay a termination fee as 'their' engineer and ONLY their engineer could disconnect you.



I doubt if any electricity company is fitting meters which will not provide
basic meter reading capability which would be accepted by all other suppliers.

Do you have any evidence that this is the case?

I accept that you may get a Smart Meter - which a new supplier would not be
able to use as a Smart Meter: but I see no reason why it could not be used in
the conventional way.