Smart meter for electricity

[Ratman]

I’m paying £110 a month on dual fuel tariff, 3 bed semi, but i’m £700 in credit at the mo! Always pay a bit extra then i’m ahead for winter months if i need.

[kevinjohnsonmbe]

4 minutes ago, openspaceman said:

Yearly, we generate about 3MWh with the vast bulk of that being in May to October. My direct debit for electricity and gas is £53/month.

 

What with the drive to electric cars and loss of revenue from petrol and oil plus the big difference in VAT something has to give to keep the simple serpents and their masters in the comfort to which they are accustomed so it's either road charging or more expensive electricity on fixed tariffs or both.

 

Also the drive to get people to give up gas boilers in favour of insulation and (very expensive) heat pumps means gas will be getting expensive, I'm paying 1/3 more than last year.

That’s an impressively low leccy bill - quite jealous!  
 

Note to self - be stricter on wife / nipper!

[kevinjohnsonmbe]

7 minutes ago, openspaceman said:

Yearly, we generate about 3MWh with the vast bulk of that being in May to October. My direct debit for electricity and gas is £53/month.

 

What with the drive to electric cars and loss of revenue from petrol and oil plus the big difference in VAT something has to give to keep the simple serpents and their masters in the comfort to which they are accustomed so it's either road charging or more expensive electricity on fixed tariffs or both.

 

Also the drive to get people to give up gas boilers in favour of insulation and (very expensive) heat pumps means gas will be getting expensive, I'm paying 1/3 more than last year.

I need to look more closely at MWh production (and when / how much is used.)

 

Have you looked at battery storage (cost/benefit/payback term) yet?

[openspaceman]

4 minutes ago, kevinjohnsonmbe said:

I’m doing £70/month for leccy but drawing down about about £166/month across the year in PV tariff. 
 

Im quite keen to explore battery storage now the tech has advanced a bit. 

There are so many different systems to choose, puredrive, givenergy, victron, huawei etc, and they all obfuscate what is actually happening in the PV-battery system to some extent. Installation costs are about the same as wholesale hardware costs. Only Givenergy and Huawei seem to have the ability to import and export with "agile" tariffs.

 

Personally I'm only interested in maximising my own use of what I generate but the ROI may dictate being a bit cleverer.

 

One thing is clear that is the latency of the systems are not able to deal well with cloud cover passing on a sunny day.

[openspaceman]

5 minutes ago, kevinjohnsonmbe said:

That’s an impressively low leccy bill - quite jealous!  
 

Note to self - be stricter on wife / nipper!

Only two near septuagenarians here, LED lights, TV does 150W in evenings, this PC the same when I am home and as I said the refrigeration seems to be a lot when it is hot.

 

I'm being quoted £2400 to add the battery but that involves removing a perfectly good inverter for a new battery-inverter package and that is for a 2kWh LiPo battery which I think is inadequate and a 5-8kWh is probably needed.

 

Once that investment is committed and given the PV is next to useless in winter then you see why importing cheap (sometimes negative) electricity at night and then selling it between 1630 and 1830 may help with the finance. With pension fund stagnating and the possibility of rampant inflation increasing...

 

Also our FIT has only 8 years to run.

 

To set against that this house will be ripped apart and trebled in size when we are ash so payback is...

 

The plan was for younger daughter to take the place on but mousey mousey...

[djbobbins]

Only two near septuagenarians here, LED lights, TV does 150W in evenings, this PC the same when I am home and as I said the refrigeration seems to be a lot when it is hot.
 
I'm being quoted £2400 to add the battery but that involves removing a perfectly good inverter for a new battery-inverter package and that is for a 2kWh LiPo battery which I think is inadequate and a 5-8kWh is probably needed.
 
Once that investment is committed and given the PV is next to useless in winter then you see why importing cheap (sometimes negative) electricity at night and then selling it between 1630 and 1830 may help with the finance. With pension fund stagnating and the possibility of rampant inflation increasing...
 
Also our FIT has only 8 years to run.
 
To set against that this house will be ripped apart and trebled in size when we are ash so payback is...
 
The plan was for younger daughter to take the place on but mousey mousey...

Be careful with the idea of importing at low wholesale price and exporting later. Unless your billing set-up is done properly, you could well end up getting charged add-on costs for the gross import, but not getting them credited on the export. As they are about 5p/kWh it’ll take quite big swings in the wholesale price to cover that off.

[openspaceman]

11 minutes ago, djbobbins said:

 

Be careful with the idea of importing at low wholesale price and exporting later. Unless your billing set-up is done properly, you could well end up getting charged add-on costs for the gross import, but not getting them credited on the export. As they are about 5p/kWh it’ll take quite big swings in the wholesale price to cover that off.

AFAICS only two suppliers offer it atm and  most PV systems are limited to exporting 3.6kW after that the DNO gets involved.

 

for the last 10 years I have been paid on "deemed" export of 50% of my generation @3p/kWh now I have the smart meter they can measure what actually goes out but as I say I do not believe their sampling rate is fast enough for this to be accurate, of course that may just be the reporting software in the smart meter and the electricity company may have finer granularity of measurement.

[daveatdave]

i got notification last month of a price change electricity is going up about 2 pence but gas is coming down 2 pence but the daily standing charge is going up about 3 pence on each 

as for smart meters they only benefit the supplier  if you continue as before it costs you more as the meters are powered by electricity which you are paying for and the WIFI power and they are not secure they could get hacked and shut down your supply or even programed to pay for someone fuel god knows what some of these hacker can do     

[john87]

3 hours ago, djbobbins said:

 

Actually, it depends - it’s the suppliers who are obligated to install the meters. They may then get external money in to do that. Alternatively, if you move supplier (e.g. from E.ON to Octopus) the meter that E.ON installed remains owned by them.

The government and Ofgem screwed up on this one - they should have set it up so that the distribution companies were mandated to install smart meters, as an add-on to owning and operating the wires into each property. The DNOs could have done them street by street, which would have made the roll-out a lot quicker, cheaper overall and would have solved the problem about a legacy supplier needing to bill a new supplier for the smart metering service that is left behind when the customer switches.

 

Nobody is obligated to do anything. They would LOVE you to believe that you HAD to have one, but go on any of the electricians forums, you will not find many of them that want one..

 

john..

[trigger_andy]

Nobody is obligated to do anything. They would LOVE you to believe that you HAD to have one, but go on any of the electricians forums, you will not find many of them that want one..
 
john..

I’ve never been keen on getting a Smart Meter. Currently I have a digital readout meter and the missus updates the supplier periodically. If we wished to change our tariff, even with the same supplier I’m told we have to have a Smart Meter installed. I’m now getting letters saying my digital Meter is going out of calibration and I should get a Smart Meter installed. [emoji849]

Any idea what my options are here?