Smart meter

With electricity prices are going up will the energy companies pay more for the electricity generated by solar panels. I think not and I think the same pricing policy as vehicle fuel will apply for other energy sources in as much that when crude goes up the price at the pump reflects this immediately but when crude comes down the same doesn't happen.

I think the term "Smart meter" is typical 1984 speak and when 2G/3G gets turned off they revert to manual mode.

It'll be nice to get back to the good old days when you had to break the ice on the toilet first thing in the morning.

CS

Have a smart meter on gas and another on electric, different suppliers. Before the electric meter was fitted about ten years ago, I had an aborted fitting attempt, probably three years before that. On the first attempt two fitters turned up and spent about four hours trying to get the meter to connect with their system, numerous phone calls and resets before they refitted the old meter. Talking with the gas fitter he said the meters had changed a lot since that first attempt when they were evaluating a number of manufactures. I have no problem with the meters but don’t bother with the remote reader, why use more electric to tell me how much I am using. As has been said, I am also from the closed doors and lights off brigade, obviously unless I am in the work shop where I use kilowatts per hour with gay abandon.

In these cases, perhaps the householder should charge the energy company for doing the work the new device was meant to be doing for him.

In a bored moment I signed up for a smart meter, it has not saved me a penny yet. It would save me a fortune if I cut the plug off the tumble dryer. It has exposed what the always on standby and chargers use though, a few solar panels to just offset this constant drain of around 200W might help not too useful at night though. If electrickery prices remain high then solar panels should become more attractive even without a feed in payments.

Mike

I think it's only a matter of time before Smart Meters start offering different tariffs.

All ready happening & has been for some time.

EV owners have had the option with some suppliers of a very reduced rate between midnight & 5am - some have been paying around 4.5p per KWh in that time period. With a 7KW home connection point that would put 35 KWh into your car for around £1.60 - good for around 120 miles in a car doing 3.5 miles per KW & good enough to cover my 100 mile per day commute. Sounds a lot better than £11 or so per day for diesel that I am paying at the moment !

Sadly, such low tariffs are not available at the moment, but when they wer having a Smart meter was a condition of getting the tariff.

Nigel B.

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My daughter lives in Ontario, Canada, she has different Tarifffs at different times of the day.

Kwil

It is coming here, the busiest times of the day when you can’t dodge using electricity will be charged at very high premium rates, offset by very low charges when virtually no one is using energy. I have solar panels and batteries, during the winter when there will be very little sun to charge my batteries I set them to charge up during the economy seven period in the early hours, this means that I can use energy at off peak prices during the day, every little helps as they say. Dave W

Am I control freak, or a cynic?

Don't like the thought of a supplier being able to change tarriffs as and when they feel lik e it with no warning.

Suspect very strongly that a smart meter allows the supplier to save by not paying meter readers and supplying them with van and equipment, and the ability to change tarriff instantly, before the buyer has any chance to take any economy measures.

Although in longer terms they do anyway

The only way to save costs on energy is to use as little as possible.

With gas for cooking and heating the only way is minimise use.

We have a monitor for electricity anyway, so try to remember to switch off anything not needed Amazing how much is used by devices on standby

Needless to say, we have not got them

Howard

Dave

Bit off topic but what battery set up do you use?

I have panels and am mimbling over whether or not to add batteries. Few firms offering turnkey products now but I'm wondering if the market has matured enough yet.

Clive

I've had two dates to fit a smart meter. No one turned up for either of them but I did get a £30 credit each time as it was their failure to appear. I couldn't mind a few more appointments like that.

I've also seen news reports that before they get smart meters installed everywhere they will have to start modifying or replacing all the ones that have been fitted already as the signals they use are scheduled to be turned off by 2030.

Martin C

At least you can see where you can save energy. We have had one for 2 years now & can only say it is handy to have.

Steve.

All this talk about solar panels can not apply to all houses, mine is a listed building and there is no way I would want anything installed on a 170 year old roof. Guess I will just have to dig deeper in the pockets to pay the bills. We are all able to restrict our usage with common sense.

Chris

you don’t only have to fit solar panels to a roof, plenty of people have ground level installations. Dave W

I have smart meters for gas and electricity. My supplier is (after Peoples Energy went bust), British Gas.

To be honest I cant see any downside. I can see a graphical representation of how much energy I'm using at any given time. This can help if you save money by prompting you to check what you have left switched on inadvertently. We had an electric heater in our conservatory that our cleaner had switched on by mistake. It was apparent that something was amiss and, as we don't use the conservatory in winter, could have been left on for weeks!

With reference to the energy companies using variable tariffs, I'm not sure that the meters are 'Smart' enough. On the British Gas meter, the sampling rate can be set to 30 mins, daily or monthly. This, I think, makes it a pretty blunt tool from a monitoring point of view.

Chris

My panels are on my workshop roof.

OK big workshop so room for the the full 4 kW set so it was a no-brainer really. No way was I letting the panel fitters loose on my new roof after having an extension made. None of the companies I talked to seemed to have any idea of how to handle a properly tiled roof using old style Marley tiles with full overlap where the upper tile has a small overlap relative to the next +1 tile down with one tile in between.

Clive

Clive

The solar batteries that I purchased are made by Sofar Solar Technology, Chinese of course, I fitted three batteries that give me 7.4 kWh storage capacity, you need an inverter with them as the batteries are DC, my PV panels are fitted with individual microinverters so their output is AC but they feed into the distribution board so any energy fed to the batteries will need an inverter. The Sofar Technology Inverter is rated highly in tests and is one of the most efficient with an efficiency rating of 98.7%. The most efficient solar battery systems are made by Tesla but the prices are very high, I researched before buying mine and my criteria was a balance between price and effiency, there are so many to choose from and some of the cheaper ones you need to steer clear of. I only have the three batteries at the moment until I can afford to expand, I started with two and added another one after 12 months, ideally I would like to expand to five. With electricity costs rising there isn’t much prospect of it ever coming down in the future so any power that you can store rather than sending it to the grid is a definite bonus. Dave W

Dave

Thanks for the information on your battery system. I've copied the text and popped it into my mulling over file.

Great to have information from real users.

The Solar Sofar prices are very attractive when compared to Tesla. Order of £3,000 against £8,000. So payback time is getting into the region where it makes sense.

But the Tesla Energy plan is an attractive concept if it actually works to ensure I can use all my solar panel output.

Back to mulling!

Clive

Interesting topic, thank you to Gray62 for his factual input.

We have had solar panels for about 5 years now and they are close to paying for themselves. They came with a small display that has a "free power" light so we tend to use electricity when what is on, it came as part of the installation.

We have always been very conscious of not wasting energy as we have no mains gas here and use LPG for haot water and background heating to support a log burner. I was chatting to our plumber about the possibility of going for a ground source system when he came to service our LPG boiler last month and he felt that there would be no advantage for us, mainly due to the fact that the warmest water it would provide would be around 50 degrees, the top up to the 63 degrees the boiler is set at would have to be made by using an electric heater. So, despite the claims that method isn't viable in a well insulated mid 1960's bungalow.

Our electricity supplier only checks our meter once a year for both usage and generation, I have chosen to submit my usage monthly and the generation quarterly, I can't really see any advantage to us having a smart meter. We were asked if we'd like one but have declined. Our electricity dealer is Green Energy (UK) plc.

I'm not sure why people appear to be so resistant to the fitting of a smart meter given that they are not that smart but only allows more detailed information about your energy usage and the more good information you have the better you are able to make good decisions. The user can use the info to reduce their bills, if they have a mind to, and the supplier gets a better understanding of domestic usage. They could provide more flexible charging providing finer granularity and hopefully persuade people to spread the load more evenly which helps both user and supplier.

CS