The UK energy consumers minister, Martin McCluskey, said this week that he can "say with confidence the switchover has worked", speaking a little over two weeks after the Radio Teleswitch Service (RTS) signal was switched off for good on 30 June. He acknowledged that a "small number" of RTS meters remain in homes across the UK, but said the remaining meters "are largely in places where they have not been reliant on RTS for a number of years". As he put it: "All the people who have RTS meters have been contacted, in some cases a dozen times."
That last point is the line worth pausing on. If yours is one of the remaining meters, you will want to be sure it is true in your house, not just true on average.
First, what RTS actually did
The Radio Teleswitch Service was a longwave radio signal that told older electricity meters when to switch between peak and off-peak rates. If you are on a tariff like Economy 7, Economy 10 or Total Heat Total Control, that signal was very likely the thing quietly deciding when your storage heaters charged overnight and when your hot water tank heated up.
Think of it as a conductor for your meter. The orchestra is still there: the meter, the heaters, the tank. The conductor has left the building.
Why the deadline moved, and why that matters now
The switch-off was originally due in June 2025. The Government delayed it by twelve months amid concerns that hundreds of thousands of households were not ready, a delay that, in fairness, is a large part of why the final numbers look as good as they do.
At the time, the regulator Ofgem set out plainly what a household left on a dead RTS meter could face.
Stuck heating and hot water
Your heating and hot water can be left continually on, or continually off.
Charging at the wrong time
Storage heaters may charge during the day, so you pay peak prices for what should be cheap overnight electricity.
Bills built on guesswork
Your supplier may be unable to confirm whether you used electricity at peak or off-peak times, which is how the bill is worked out.
None of those risks disappeared when the minister declared success. They simply now apply to a smaller group of homes. The question is whether yours is one of them.
The two-minute check
You may still have an RTS meter if any of these apply.
A labelled switch box
There is a separate box near your electricity meter with a "Radio Teleswitch" label on it.
Electric heating
Your home is heated by electricity. Storage heaters are the classic sign.
No mains gas
There is no gas supply to your area, which is common in rural areas, on the islands and in high-rise flats.
How to confirm it
Open the cupboard housing your electricity meter and check for the switch box described above. If none of the three signs is present and your home runs on mains gas, no action is needed. If a Radio Teleswitch box is present, or your heating is electric, treat the steps below as your checklist and contact your supplier.
If you do still have one: what your supplier owes you
Under the arrangements Ofgem set out for the phase-out, your supplier must make sure you have a suitable replacement meter installed and that your service is not disrupted. The obligation sits with them, not with you. In practice that means a smart meter appointment, and if your heating or hot water is already misbehaving, that appointment should be treated as urgent, not routine.
If that describes your home, contact your supplier now rather than waiting for them to reach you, keep a note of when you called, and say clearly that you have an RTS meter affected by the switch-off.
The minister was clear about escalation, too. "If there are people who continue to face issues we want to hear about that and they should contact their energy supplier in the first instance," Mr McCluskey said, "but should also reach out to their Member of Parliament as well."
What it can cost: a worked example
How we worked this out
Illustrative figures, anchored to the Ofgem price cap for 1 July to 30 September 2026 (single-rate electricity at 26.11p per kWh) and the typical day and night rates on a 2026 Economy 7 tariff. Actual rates vary by supplier and region, so read the numbers as the shape of the problem, not a quote for your home.
Picture a flat with storage heaters on Economy 7. A typical Economy 7 tariff in 2026 charges roughly 30p per kWh in the day and around 13p per kWh overnight, so night electricity costs well under half the daytime rate. That gap is the entire point of the tariff, and the RTS signal was the mechanism that made sure the heaters charged on the cheap side of it, in the small hours when power is cheapest.
With the signal gone and the meter frozen in the wrong pattern, those same heaters could now draw their power in the afternoon at the full daytime rate. Every kilowatt-hour that charges at the peak rate instead of the off-peak rate costs about 17p more. A storage-heater flat drawing around 15 kWh of charge on a cold night would therefore pay roughly £2.50 a day extra, or about £75 across a cold month, for exactly the same warmth, before the rest of the home's usage is counted.
That is the scenario the replacement programme exists to prevent. The fix is not a clever tariff trick; it is simply getting a working meter installed before the pattern quietly costs you a winter's worth of peak-rate heating.
Check your Economy 7 tariff while you are at it
If you are on an electric-heating tariff, the gap between your day and night unit rates is where the money is. Compare today's live electricity deals for your postcode to see whether your rate still stacks up.
Cheapest live rate now: British Gas at 23.85p/kWh, about 9% below the 26.11p cap.
The honest scorecard
Two things are true at once. Getting from hundreds of thousands of at-risk households to a "small number" within the extended deadline is genuinely the successful outcome the minister claims: the disruption many feared did not materialise at scale. And for each household still on a dead meter, the national success rate is beside the point. Your meter either works or it does not.
The job that is left is smaller but simple to state: nobody should discover their meter did not make it by way of a strange bill in the autumn. Check the meter cupboard today. It takes about two minutes, and it is the difference between reading about this story and starring in it.
