WARNING SOLAR PANELS & some Siemens S2AS-100/ Siemens S1AS-100 Meters

furndire

That was exactly what I felt like - I was being in effect blackmailed!!! I really did not want to risk the money, but eventually decided to bite the bullet & do it. This is the time of year to do it - the amount of difference is at its highest in summer - as you found out, not as noticeable in winter.
When eventually we get some bright sunny days, try turning everything off, for a few hours - not the mains, but all appliances lights, ect - & see if it the meter still adds on units. Its got to be when your inverter is really working well.

When I eventually said right, go ahead, put a check meter in, they dropped the gamble down to £30 - which I did not have to pay, & ended up with another £100 for all the inconvienience I had had (apparently this is the maximum they can legally pay out - or so they said - for compensation (the £3000 was for % overcharged on past electricity bills)).

If you want to read just my posts on this saga, scroll to the top, on to Search This thread, & put furndire in the search box - that will find just my posts on in this thread, maybe a bit easier to read.

(Happened to someone else on #post 220 Hobo as well also, Paulreed post #30 & #153 makes interesting reading)


Just a thought, will Eclipse finance the gamble of a check meter for you ? Evo Energy offered me help - even financial, luckily I didn't need it.

Another thing, when the meter was installed seemed to come into the equation, as someone had the same meter installed about 5 years after ours and his was working ok. Ours was installed about 1999/2000 when we built our house.

John_Pierpoint

Hi jkpaul,

http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnston-knight/7507590116/

For some reason I don't understand flicker/mse won't seem to allow me to display the picture on MSE automatically (bandwidth "theft"? Not a signed up member of flicker?)

What is the kit ?
What is the orientation?

[My peak day this year was 25 kWh ("units") from a 3.6 kWp inverter]

On the face of it you have never managed to get the meter to self evidently "double up" on the supposed import - it sort of looks more like the generated electricity is being poured down some mythical un-metered drain.
Am I making a stark staring obvious comment, but could the export electricity be getting into the mains on the wrong side of the import meter (ie not going through the import meter at all) ?

If you turn everything off at the sockets at noon on a sunny day your inverter should be churning out at least 2kw (does it have a display? - mine scrolls through about 20 different parameter values) and your importing meter should be stationary - unless you have something stupid like an immersion heater (*) that is constantly on.

For example here in drizzly Essex it is 11:00. I am supposedly generating 450 watts and my importing meter is still importing, the obvious load being one light bulb, two computers, a printer/scanner and an old fridge in the kitchen plus an old freezer out in the shed, both running.
So I turned off the freezer and the importing meter promptly stopped (It displays a constant red light when having electricity passed the "wrong" way through it).

[My installation was done in a rush between the government losing the court case and the 3rd of March. The team of three, who bunged it up on my roof between 11:00 and 16:30, misunderstood my existing wiring thus producing a "fuse box" cupboard full of smoke a few days later (long story)]

(*) If you have a sufficiently powerful inverter (ie 3.5 - 4.0) there will be days when you have to look out of the window and choose how to heat your water. In my case it is a matter of checking the weather forecast at 06:00, looking out of the window and choosing between PV (potentially "free" between (say) 11:00 & 13:00) and less than half price "Economy 7" at 06:00.

John.

PS I notice that you have a theoretical 4kWp system.
I have a theoretical 3.6 kWp system and the highest output it has (supposedly) ever produced is 3.589 kW [a 4kWp in theory requires advanced notification for non objection to the District Network Operator "DNO". As it is, my modest efforts are coming near to overloading my local network :rotfl:]

jkpaul

That's interesting - they charge the fee not only to cover their costs (!) but also to avoid too many people chancing their arm to see whether their meter can be proved faulty. So I'll see whether I can persuade them to levy the fee on an "I win / no fee" basis - i.e. if the meter is correct (!) then I'll pay the charge. If, as I am convinced, it is inaccurate (either due to PV or a simple bug or fault) then there should be no charge to me.

Asking Eclipse to take part in the gamble is another option I'll try too, thanks for that idea.

I'm not sure when the meter was installed - we moved her in 2002 and I believe it was here then.

Do you or does anyone here *know* whose responsibility it is to ensure that the meter measuring incoming electricity is accurate?

I've called to try and ask Ofgem this morning and their phoneline was interesting ... no way at all to leave a message or ask a question directly as a consumer, so I ended up leaving one for the Renewables Team and we'll see whether they bother calling me back. Ofgem's general line just says "contact your supplier and then the Citizen's Advice Bureau" .... not what I expected from the energy watchdog, supposed to be protecting consumers.

I know for a fact (well, I am 99.999% convinced) that the Siemens is incorrectly programmed (sadly since I found all your posts last Sunday we haven't had a sunny day when I've been able to switch everything off ... just lots of rain and a couple of sunny days at work I will give it a go when I can but this rain looks more like we need to worry about an absence of Noah instead of excess generation this weekend!

So, yes, I have read all your posts in this thread - thank you so much for publicising & documenting your situation, I just wish I'd read them before installing last November, but then even after installation it's taken 8+ months to realise there was a problem, so I don't suppose it woud have helped if I had.

The other positive thing is that Eclipse have just called me back and they're being extremely helpful. They've contacted Ovo, our current energy supplier and hope to have a solution / plan of action agreed by Monday (sounds unlikely but constructive at least) in order to:

1 correct the meter:
a) replace the Siemens
b) reprogram the Siemens

2 analyse the extent of the overcharging:
a) analysis of Siemens
b) installation of check meter
c) recording the coming months & taking as a historical average

3 ensure that we are not out of pocket as a result of this situation.

Phew!
I'm sure this isn't the end of it, but I'm reassured, at least for now!

P.S. Thank John for posting that link to my electricity usage / generation chart!

John_Pierpoint

jkpaul wrote: »

Do you or does anyone here *know* whose responsibility it is to ensure that the meter measuring incoming electricity is accurate?

I assumed it was the DNO [The Hong Kong Electricity company in my case] but it is not, it is your current electricity supplier. Most unfair, but I suppose it is a bit like getting subsidence on your house and claiming off the current insurance company.

furndire

Its good to know that you feel as though you are getting somewhere - you will eventually get sorted - but I know how you felt it will get sorted in the end (shame about the weather spoiling things). I got to the stage where I was going out to my meters several times a day to check & record exactly what the readings were - everyone thought I was going mad, but I felt that was what I had to do, as I hadn't seen any other reports.


I'm pleased that you found this thread as well. This was what I hoped for. I am still not convinced there are only a few faulty meters out there. After all, if you have been paying electric because of them for a long while, you have nothing else to compare them with - just think oh well the bills have gone up! This applies especially where a family are working & not really taking much notice of the readings on meters - I know that we didn't, a couple of pounds a week wasn't noticeable on the bills - direct debits come out of bank each month, they average out the amount you spend, so you really don't know a week to week amount.
One of my main concerns was for the people who have got the "free" panels - they could find their bills going up in summer - & put it down to prices having gone up.

Sorry, I am like a dog with a bone on this subject.

Just as an extra we have had our panels on for 2 years 28 June, & we had produced 7286 KWh in 2 years, so averaged 3643 per year on 3.96 system

jkpaul

thanks again John

The kit is:

• 16 x 250w JA Solar panels
• Fronius inverter (thankfully visible & accessible in the back porch not hidden away in the loft where they suggested)
• south-facing
• 30 deg slope
• no shade

The (geek) stats are:

• installed 22nd Nov 2012
• total generation 2245 kWh
• max. output power 3875 W
• operating duration 2457 hrs / 227 days = 10.8hr/day
• best (known) day of operation 24 kWh - 26th March 2012
• best week of operation 141 kWh - 25th-31st March 2012
• best month of operation 487 kWh - May 2012

I understand your question regarding the absence of "doubling up" to mean that you might expect, if the import meter was faulty as suspected, that on some bright days, with little active effort to use all the generated power, we might use little, export most and therefore pay for our normal level and for 100% more by way of the exported energy.

I'm not sure why this isn't the case, however I do believe the meter is inaccurate as otherwise what could explain the anomalies we've seen?

For example, in the 2 months pre-Solar (24th Sept - 22nd Nov) we imported 13-19 kWh/day (average 16, 1 week at 19 kWh/day). In the 32 weeks since installation, we've imported 15-23 kWh/day (average 18, 1 week at 23, 1 week at 22, 2 at 21). So much for Solar PV enabling us to use "free" generated electricity ... we're importing more since the installation. (I realise that 2 months and 8 months cannot be directly compared, however I wouldn't imagine that Sep / Oct / Nov would necessarily be the lowest usage on average.)

Additionally, perhaps the reason for the lack of a doubling up day, is that we might be "better at using the generated electricity" (or more wasteful of energy) than we actually realise.

Does that make sense?

I'll keep an eye out for a sunny day to experiment on, however we don't have a constantly on immersion heater, only really using gas for heating, hot water & cooking (bar the jet-box).

Cheers!

Terrylw1

Without going through all the detail, if you took a standard meter fault, the steps from a supplier point of view would be:

- do the internal billing, data, consumer appliance checks to rule them out leaving a meter issue.
- perform a Standard Load Test (SLT) to determine the meters speed tolerance. It has to be within a set % parameter.
- if the SLT does nothing and you are still adamant its faulty, install a check meter and monitor if if becomes out of synch.
- if all of the above fails and you are still adamant its faulty, an independent Meter Examiner authorised by Ofgem will take the case over. His decision is final and he will attend court if required. He has the authorisation to break the meter seals to test the meter and its components, a check your supplier is not allowed to perform.

You are in the realms of the unknown with your microgen meter being faulty and call centres will definitely struggle with it.

However, the issue is really the same...how is the energy moving the meter dials. So, the energy can do the checks but the outcome could be different since one returns an out of tolerance figure, whereas one returns a kwh missing value.

Doing SLT's ultimately means a % based calculation. The check meter can be monitored by you as you could take the reading many times whilst installed to determine a more accurate average kwh per year missing.

This is why I agree a check meter is the best solution because it not only determines the difference but the incoming level of feed per day which will vary. The SLT is geared towards multiplying the out of tolerance % by the annual bill with seasonal factors applied. Generating is going to be different seasonally than your usage since the factors are weather based as opposed to looking at a larger seasonal value such as a calendar month.

I also reckon that no one has really thought about this as microgen was and still is an industry mess. So, I wouldn't feel comfortable letting a supplier with no understanding of generation values per day, creating my back bills/credits.

In terms of responsibility, the DNO upgrades the site and informs your supplier its enabled. You enable your FIT contract. The supplier monitors the readings to ensure no backwards issues, and if they spot them, they install a backstop meter to prevent.

The supplier is entitled to estimate where they don't have readings, so be careful with this part.

jkpaul

John_Pierpoint wrote: »

http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnston-knight/7507590116/

For some reason I don't understand flicker/mse won't seem to allow me to display the picture on MSE automatically (bandwidth "theft"? Not a signed up member of flicker?)

Thanks again for posting the link above John, I've updated the chart this morning with the figures from this week and again it shows a sharp dip in our solar PV generation, accompanied by a sharp fall in our apparent electricity usage coming through the meter from the grid.

John_Pierpoint

It is looking more than a coincidence.
I've just checked our consumption over the last 8 days and it has been roughly 4 units by day and 4 units by Economy 7 per day. The latter being mainly water heating plus evening cooking lighting & TV. The last 8 days have not been wonderful for PV production so I resorted to overnight dishwasher last night, in our all electric home. Your daily consumption is roughly double mine - do you have a bevy of teenage daughters taking two power showers each per day?

jkpaul

Well not quite a bevy of teenage daughters but there are 6 of us (boys 22 & 19, girls 12 & 9) and we all enjoy our [STRIKE]power[/STRIKE] hot shower, though no electricity is used I don't think!

Sadly we often only get the dishwasher going overnight, washing machine is easier during the day.

Glad it's not just me that thinks this is looking like more than paranoia!