3 phase planning

[joth]

46 minutes ago, Steve J said:

Sorry to post in an old thread.

 

I was wondering if any of the good folks here had any updates on 3 phase meter availability/behaviour from any of the UK suppliers.  I'm looking to get a 3 phase meter installed if I can, and having read a lot on various forums about the setup of 3 phase meters, i'm still unsure about what I might be getting into.  I'm interested to know the experience of anyone who has a 3 phase meter (smart or old school) installed in a domestic setting with PV only on 1 phase with regard to vector summation.  Has anyone got a meter where any power being exported on 1 phase nets off against any imports on the other phases so if my PV is exporting 2KW on one phase, but i'm importing 1KW on each of the other two phases, am I still charged for the imports, or does the meter look at the total summed across all three phases and record 2 -1 -1 =0 as my usage?

The quick summary answer to your last question is, if you have a SMETS2 smart meter, the net import/export metering is guaranteed to work across phases as you would like it to, both by the SMETS specification and numerous people on here have now confirmed it working in practice. "Polyphase" is the magic search term to find previous discussions on this.

 

If you have a non-smart meter, it's anybody's guess. Probably depends on the supplier, the specific person installing it, day of the week....

 

 

To the former question, at the start of the year people were 3ph getting meters installed by Octopus quite reliably but the last update I saw was that even they (octopus) are recommending you go to a "big supplier" (e.g. British Gas or EDF  IIRC) to get it installed then do a supplier transfer to them.  A benefit of this approach is you'll have the big suppliers own engineers do the install (certainly will with BG) rather than the sms-plc who contract to most the smaller suppliers and are, frankly, terrible to deal with.

 

 

[AliG]

My three-phase smart meter works fine. I appear to use a very similar amount of electricity to what I was using with my non smart meter before so have mo reason to believe that either had any issue netting off my PV. If I look at my half hourly consumption data I can see it going down to almost nothing when the sun comes out.

 

Mine was installed by SMS. For some reason they forgot to send someone to instal the gas meter. I don't know about other suppliers but for them the people who install normal meters can do both, but three-phase are installed by specialists who don't do gas. I then had to wait 6 weeks for the gas meter and they couldn't set it up fully until that was installed. TBF the guy tried very hard whilst he was here to find someone available to come at short notice and install the gas meter.

 

I would note that my electricity meter is inside the house and gas meter outside and there are two cavity block walls with PIR inside them between the meters. As I suspected the gas meter does not connect to the electricity meter so I do not have smart functions for gas.

 

[Dan F]

@Steve J  I see someone recorded a video on this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTfOYlboarw

 

 

Of course, you battery system also needs to support this and have the necesary CT clamps.  AFAIK the following systems support this:

- Tesla Powerwall

- Victron ESS

- Sonnen

 

I'm trying to find out if LuxPower, PureDrive (Soils inverter) support this. Given the crazy lead times on Powerwall I'm looking at other options.