PV and Smart meter issue

[Temp]

Article in todays Telegraph raises a billing issue..

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/11/09/households-solar-panels-risk-overcharged-smart-meters/

[ProDave]

Just now, Temp said:

Article in todays Telegraph raises a billing issue..

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/11/09/households-solar-panels-risk-overcharged-smart-meters/

From that article

 

"under Ofgem licencing rules energy firms must pay homes the exact amount of energy they export if they have a smart meter. "

 

So if you have a smart meter they are not supposed to pay you a deemed export figure of 50% rather they should pay actual export.  How is that going to even work if your FIT contract is with a different provider to your supply?

 

Bad news if you self use most of it. And yet another good reason to refuse a smart meter.

[Jeremy Harris]

One major problem is that some smart meters have an anti-theft measure*** which defaults to adding export energy to import energy, unless the meter is specifically programmed to allow export energy to be separately recorded.  Installers may well not be setting up smart meters properly, although this isn't a problem that is specific to smart meters, there are some standard digital meters that also have the same anti-theft measure, as there have been reports for several years now of people having increased recorded usage when  PV is installed.

 

Interestingly, practically all electricity meters installed in the past few years have the ability to measure and record export energy separately from import energy and store the value in an internal register.  This can be read out via the optical meter reading port easily enough, but there is some glitch in the legislation that stops this facility being used to accurately record export energy for repayment purposes.

 

*** The anti-theft measure is to counter one technique used by meter fiddlers, which was to make up a high current, low voltage, autotransformer, with pointed probes stuck into the meter tails from underneath.  This made older mechanical meters, that weren't fitted with a wheel ratchet, run in reverse, so reducing the recorded energy.   Meters have been redesigned with covers to try and prevent this now, as well as having the internal option of adding reverse energy to forward energy (accessible via the settings that can be accessed from the bidirectional optical port) as a deterrent to the fiddlers.

[ProDave]

In our old house, the "1000 impulses per KWh" light flashes when exporting, but I checked that the usage reading was not counting up.