I must be the only person in the UK that has had an abysmal experience with Octopus, where they gave me a quote in writing, I attempted to sign up for it, couldn't due to "technical difficulties" on their end but got another email promising that the quote will be honoured once the difficulties are resolved....and of course once they finally fixed their system a month later they refused to honour it. I kept forwarding copies of emails they sent higher and higher up and finally was assigned a "senior customer agent" who basically said their decision is final and I can take them to an ombudsman if I want to. Then they couldn't bill me correctly for 6 months straight because no one knew why my smart meter wasn't sending them data, and then another time they literally provided incorrect information about my IHD when I asked why is the price for my tariff wrong. They are an absolutely useless company and I'd switch in a heartbeat if there was anyone else with a similar offering for charging EVs, no one else gets even close.
Yes, I am a landlord and have had multiple awful experiences with them on move in/out. The worst involved them referring my tenant to a debt collector for a totally incorrect bill (issued for a period after which they were not responsible for bills, and for electricity which hadn't been consumed) while we were still trying to get them to correct it. Customer service generally seems to stop responding after the first reply.
Exactly the same happened with me. Picking up the phone and responding to email (in weeks, not hours or days) didn't lower my bills. This sort of marketing is perhaps deflection.
Why does the UK have such trouble with smart meters? Everyone here, Norway, has one because they are required by the government. I haven't heard of any significant troubles and we've had them for years.
Quasi-government incompetence, mostly, though caused by government cowardace: they more or less just shouted "smart meters, do it!" at the energy industry and let them try to sort it out amongst themselves, which means they had several false starts of crap impementations (the first generation didn't think to allow them to be transferrable between providers! The issues in the North are basically because they decided to go for a low-power mesh network, which is a plan that has basically never worked), as well as the fact that the government hasn't made it a requirement for homeowners, but has made it a requirement for energy companies, so they basically just beg the current holdouts (who have little reason to want one) to let them install one.
Octopus have started doing things like connecting properties in the north to cellular type meters (not supposed to) or using Octopus Mini hubs (connects smart meters using WiFi) as a way of trying to solve the problems
