I reckon SM technology is a bit out of whack with current technology and with everyone ordering EV’s they need to make a Gen 3 SM to accomodate EV charging.
Octopus upgrades, as Abercol mentioned, a SMETS1 meter to a SMETS2 meter for free (or upgrades the existing one if capable). We had it done too.
There’s no way around that if you want to take advantage of, for example, their Octopus Intelligent tariff. Which, for others that are interested, works well. We were a bit sceptical over letting Octopus decide “when to charge” our car, but it works a treat, and we get quite a bit of “free” (well, discounted) electricity over the daytime too.
So far, the car has always been charged by the point in time that we set in the app (the way it works that through the octopus app, you tell them the desired SoC, and what time you want that SoC – and they sort out a “charging plan”, charging the car on and off whenever it’s cheapest for them. You have an off-peak time (7.5p) from 11:30 to 5:30 – we had a few situations now where they charged the car outside that window, which sets your entire account back to “off-peak” while the car is charging. So every week we have a few hours of off-peak prices in daytime. We set 100% SoC at 8am in the morning, plug the car in whenever over the course of the day, and it charges as required to get to 100% at 8am.)
Prior: SEAT Ateca Xcellence Lux 1.5 TSI DSG MY19, VW Golf GTE PHEV DSG MY23
Current: Hyundai Ioniq 6 Ultimate
Next: we'll see what's available in 2028.