Good day, I want to install a system soon. I want to be of the grid for electricity. I have a pre-paid meter from George Municipality in Uniondale. 

Is this a farfetched idea of mine? 

Actually the property has 3 buildings on it. The main house is on one meter and the other to buildings on another. (no idea why) 

Will it be possible to put a huge switch (or a medium one) between the pre-paid and the solar. I. E. You're either solar or pre-paid or is that how it works anyway? 

Pardon my ignorance. 

On 2023/11/20 at 10:50 AM, de Wet Vorster said:

Good day, I want to install a system soon. I want to be of the grid for electricity. I have a pre-paid meter from George Municipality in Uniondale. 

Is this a farfetched idea of mine? 

Actually the property has 3 buildings on it. The main house is on one meter and the other to buildings on another. (no idea why) 

Will it be possible to put a huge switch (or a medium one) between the pre-paid and the solar. I. E. You're either solar or pre-paid or is that how it works anyway? 

Pardon my ignorance. 

I think most people didn't understand what you want to know. Yes you can supply both from one system or 2 separate ones. The inverter automatically switches between grid feed, solar and battery depending of the size of each and settings.

Yes part of the installation will be a transfer switch to allow you to work on the system while your property is supplied by another source.

On 2021/01/13 at 3:49 PM, Bobster. said:

Exactly. They have a tariff that allows selling back, but it will cost me the required meter and a flat monthly fee and there is no way that I would even break even on that. So I don't resell. 

The municipality have tried two years running to introduce a flat monthly fee for pre-paid meters.

In 2019 plans for the flat fee were revealed by the press who had read the document detailing the new tariff structures. The idea was to add R200 a month to the rates bill for properties with pre-paid meters. The then management went into panic mode and told us that somebody had snuck this into the budget after they had signed off (yeah right). 

in 2020 they announced the flat fee (R200 again) but then waived it as part of the Covid relief package.

I expect it to reappear soon.

They still bear the cost of providing and maintaining a feed to my property, so I can sort of see their point. I will grumble, but I will still be saving so I will just grumble.

My meter is the Itron. On the hand-held display it has a count of units used since installation at the top.

Towards the bottom it has a balance of pre-paid credits loaded on the meter.

If you just have prepaid and no solar then the top number will increase and the bottom number will decrease and they do so at the same rate.

My system is set to not export, but it uses a little grid each day and so tries to zero the meter each day and feeds a small amount back into the grid. What I now find is that my pre-paid credit drops faster than the total used increases. It's a small discrepancy, and I am assuming that when power is fed back it decreases the total usage but has no affect on the pre-paid balance. It's a few rand each month and it's not nearly enough to justify going over to the reseller's tariff. 

Also when I have a lot of solar the hand-held unit keeps on rebooting, but as far as I can tell the actual meter (in the municipal box on the wall) is unaffected.

This may be peculiar to the Itron meter. 

Jumping in here very late...

So the details are similar here... JHB, city power, ITRON meter... but post paid...

Now since moving in to the house I could not be bothered to power on the display unit (heck I get a bill at the end of the month). Since adding solar panels to the mix I was curious... now The inverter is not set to feed back... we have the sunsynk default of 20w coming from the grid. Today I powered up the display for the first time... and it wasn't on for a full hour before I got a "feed back detected" alarm. It doesn't trip, shows the contactor as closed... and just keeps on going anyway.

So now the question... I get it doesn't work on the credits... but are you saying the total usage does actually roll back? Has anyone else had these feed back alarms and did city power do anything about them? Curious as I often have excess solar in the afternoon and wouldn't mind off-setting a couple of R's extra on the bill...

1 hour ago, Bobbenoster said:

Jumping in here very late...

So the details are similar here... JHB, city power, ITRON meter... but post paid...

Now since moving in to the house I could not be bothered to power on the display unit (heck I get a bill at the end of the month). Since adding solar panels to the mix I was curious... now The inverter is not set to feed back... we have the sunsynk default of 20w coming from the grid. Today I powered up the display for the first time... and it wasn't on for a full hour before I got a "feed back detected" alarm. It doesn't trip, shows the contactor as closed... and just keeps on going anyway.

So now the question... I get it doesn't work on the credits... but are you saying the total usage does actually roll back? Has anyone else had these feed back alarms and did city power do anything about them? Curious as I often have excess solar in the afternoon and wouldn't mind off-setting a couple of R's extra on the bill...

It's my observation that a lot of meters don't do well with power fed back into the grid. They can sense the current, but they don't know which way it is flowing. They weren't designed to deal with a situation where power can be flowing from the property to the grid. 

This is a problem in COJ. People get solar, they set their inverter to feedback, then they find out that the meter doesn't behave as they expected. 

So I don't think we can just set the inverter to export and expect to automatically get a credit. This may depend on the specific meter that you have. 

There is a reseller's tariff. I don't find it very attractive, because I'm on pre-paid. If you're on the post-paid tariff then it may be a better deal. 

I am in the process of registering my system with the City (they did the technical inspection yesterday), so I hope to have a chat with them soon about tariffs.

Edited March 7, 20242 yr by Bobster.

1 hour ago, Bobster. said:

It's my observation that a lot of meters don't do well with power fed back into the grid. They can sense the current, but they don't know which way it is flowing. They weren't designed to deal with a situation where power can be flowing from the property to the grid. 

This is a problem in COJ. People get solar, they set their inverter to feedback, then they find out that the meter doesn't behave as they expected. 
 

The problem is not that the meter does not handle it well. It is designed to trip during export but only when the power supplier has activated the setting. This setting can be enabled/disabled with a token. 

I think it's we as consumers that don't handle the meters operation well when trying to export illegally without a bi-directional meter. Even those meters that don't trip have a register where is keeps score of the power that was exported. This can be read via a data cable. 

13 minutes ago, Scorp007 said:

The problem is not that the meter does not handle it well. It is designed to trip during export but only when the power supplier has activated the setting. This setting can be enabled/disabled with a token. 

Thanks. But there is something going on here. There's too many complaints about the meter showing more useage than the amount drawn from the grid. I had this problem - the prepaid credit would run down faster than the total used went up. But I didn't complain about it because it was costing me a couple of rand a month and I calculated this was cheaper than being on the feed-in tariff. With this meter (Itron) the hand held unit that we use for loading purchases would be tripping almost constantly if plugged into a backed up socket. If it stayed up long enough you could capture that long number representing the purchase or get accurate (IE corresponds with the main meter) readings from it. 

The new meter I got a couple of months ago after the Itron went pop does not show this behaviour. The total use moves by the same amount as the pre-paid credit.