Powerwall and split-phase metering with Octopus - want best tariffs...

rsneyd

I am a Shell customer about to be moved to Octopus. Can Octopus meter a split-phase supply (with an appropriate new smart meter) and give me access to their full range of tariffs?

Forgive a newbie question.

We currently have a single phase supply with 4kW of panels. We use a massive amount of electricity (Importing 14,900 kWh/year) and this is likely to increase.

I am about to install a second PV system with a further 16kW of panels (i.e. new total 20kW) and a Tesla Gateway and 2X 13.5 kWh Powerwall 2 batteries. National Grid have been tremendously helpful and are going to upgrade our supply to a split-phase 230-0-230V connection of 30kW (125Amps) and we will be permitted to feed in (Export) 12kW balanced across the phases. I anticipate using pretty much all the power and exporting very little.

National Grid stipulate that “Customer to arrange metering upgrade to polyphase meter configured for split phase. Customer to balance load & generation over two phases.”

There seem to be plenty of polyphase meters including ‘Smart’ (SMETs2) ones. Even if we weren’t being dumped by Shell I’d likely be moving to Octopus but the change in our spec makes it logical. Should I try to persuade Octopus to supply a new meter or should I just buy (a carefully chosen) one?

It is going to be really important that I can access the range of Octopus tariffs and I anticipate much learning about timings etc. Diagram attached for interest. Any tricks to access a human at Octopus to discuss? I don’t want to end up being told that my split-phase supply or meter cannot access the most suitable tariff...

Thanks for reading, I look forward to any advice.

 

ashe

Octopus is one of the easiest suppliers to contact. Just ring them, email them or tweet them. I find tweeting works best because they even work up until 10pm on weekends and come back to you quite quickly

ComicGeek

Your diagram doesn't reflect a balanced split phase supply. The metering is probably the easy bit, you need to make sure the rest of it works as needed.