How Tariffs Work in Smart Meters

Smart Meters store tariffs in quite a complex arrangement and have a series of limitations. But before I start there's a number of things you'll need to know

1. Tariffs can only be set and changed by your current energy supplier, no other organisation can make changes to your tariff. So if they're wrong, you know who to call.
2. Some tariffs do not 'fit' into the smart meter and there is no industry standard way of indicating if the tariff within the meter is valid, correct or accurate (other than the legal obligation on your supplier to ensure it is correct).
3. Some Energy Suppliers have created tariffs that seem to work within some meters but not others, or tariffs that do not fully comply within the tariff format standards defined within the Smart Energy Code (see 6)
4. Tariffs within your smart meter are not used to create your bill. Your Energy Suppliers billing system calculates your bill using what it believes your tariff is. The smart meter tariff might not be 100% accurate (but your energy supplier is still legally obligated to store the correct tariff in your meter).
5. Your smart meter can not store historic tariffs, when you consent to n3rgy (or our customer) we start collecting tariffs on a weekly basis. Therefore we can detect and retain an historic view on when and how your tariff has changed; but we can't do that for changes that happened before you signed up or changes to tariff after you withdraw consent.
6. Tariffs can be complicated (see the appropriate sections of SEC Appendix AD - DCC User Interface Specification and SEC Appendix AF - Message Mapping Catalogue; both accessible here under SEC Subsidiary Documents)

The n3rgy platform tariff data output has been structure to better represent all the possibilities smart meters could support. A more detailed explanation of this format is available within the Customer Services API Developer's Guide (accessible from the Business Portal). In high level, the format supports the more complex scenarios of SpecialDays, SwitchingTables, ThresholdMatrix and other Daily/Weekly/Season profiles and similar. It also supports both processed tariff output (json) and the raw tariff that comes directly from the meter (raw). As indicated per bullet 3 above, we provide the raw incase the tariff within the meter is not compliant with the standards and therefore fails to be converted to json.