Ovo Energy’s units mix-up tripled couple’s energy bill

A couple were overcharged more than £10,000 on their energy bill over a period of six years when their energy supplier Ovo Energy mistook their metric readings as imperial. As a result of the mix-up between metric and imperial units, the couple were charged three times as much as they should have been charged for their energy.

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Imperial Red Meat policy won’t save the Conservatives

The Government’s imperial measurement proposals seem to be part of their Operation Red Meat proposals to get Conservative MPs and supporters back on side. They were initially used to try to save former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and then used by the final two candidates in the Conservative leadership contest, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, to gain support from Conservative Party members to win the Conservative leadership contest and become the next Prime Minister.

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Energy units – muddle in the making?

It was decided early in the 1990s that the unit for pricing of domestic gas should change from the therm to the kilowatt hour, which is a metric unit but not SI. We ask if this made ‘metric sense’.
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Smart meters, or not?

Readers may have seen a recent TV programme that was highly critical of the energy smart meter “roll out”. Some of you may now be wondering why a nation that made a mess of the simple task of adopting a modern measurement system is now embarking on a complex and expensive technology project of questionable value.

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The curse of conversion factors

In this article, Ronnie Cohen looks at lists of plausible conversions in both directions between imperial units still in use in the UK and metric units.

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Cabinet Office gets its kilowatts in a twist

Visitors to the Cabinet Office website will see that this branch of the Government is measuring its energy use in “kilowatt-hours per hour”.  It is a sad reflection on the quality of civil service support given to this crucial part of the Government machine that such an incongruous and scientifically illiterate measure should be published.

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Two enduring controversies are highlighted by a food labelling consultation

A recent consultation by the UK Department of Health about food labelling has drawn attention to two long-standing issues, both relating to food energy and the calorie.

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