Pay as you go Utiliy power meters.

[Des]

 Will a grid- tie Inverter work properly to feed excess S.P.  generated units accumulated during the day, back into the utility supply line ?

 These PAYG meters diplay the number of units to your credit digitally. Will it in fact add on the generated units to your displayed credit ?

 

 

 

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Usually one of two things happen. Either the meter cannot sense the direction of flow, and will in fact bill you for the energy you produce, or it will detect the reverse flow, assume that you're tampering with the meter and disconnect the supply.

The kind of meter that bills you is the better one to have. It means if the grid-limiter device is slow and you end up feeding back for a couple of seconds every now and then, all that happens is you pay a couple of cents for that power. The meters that trip are the difficult ones.

[Guest]

You apparently can get PAYG meters that are designed for solar systems, i.e. they never feed back. So I heard.

[Sidewinder]

I would have thought PAYG meters designed for solar systems to be able to feedback, from a user perspective, but the Muni etc obviously don't want that. 

But's this is the situation today. 

Maybe when SA is over the phobia of small scale IPP's, those with PV should be able to feedback, but the PAYG meter needs to be exchanged (again).

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11 hours ago, The Terrible Triplett said:

PAYG meters that are designed for solar systems

So-called smart meters. They have two counters, one for each direction. Some municipalities will replace your meter with a smart one, but it is usually for your own cost (and then you have to dot and cross the relevant letters). So far the only way I know of to know which kind of meter you have, is to just try it and see what happens.

There are a few meters that we know about, like the Conlog BEC23 series. The BEC23 isn't too bad, it has a 40W over 15 seconds window, and so far I know that a Victron ESS setup as well as the SolarEdge/WattNode combo works fine with that meter.