topic Re: Metre reading miss match in Energy Accounts & Plans

Metre reading miss match

Rusty_Nuts — Thu, 09 Apr 2020 01:27:22 GMT

As I have a high quality digital inverter I have the ability to view all output and feed in and production values of my solar system.

However these figures don't match the smart metre and my bills are way too excessive.

How can I get my metre inspected for correct installation and calibration

Re: Metre reading miss match

-Nam- — Thu, 09 Apr 2020 06:43:53 GMT

Hi Rusty_Nuts!

Welcome to AGL Community!

The information you receive on your solar inverter will be the information your system has generated. The information we receive and display on your AGL My Account here, is the amount of power that you've had to import from the grid and the excess solar power you've exported.

Any power that your solar system generates will go to power your property first and any excess of solar power will be exported back into the grid. You'll see this figure on your bill as your solar feed in tariff.

Kind regards,

-Nam-

Re: Metre reading miss match

Rusty_Nuts — Sun, 12 Apr 2020 06:01:36 GMT

My frronius inverter displays power generation from both strings individually and as a whole. IT ALSO displays power output to the smart meter.

The output figures from the inverter don't correspond with the input figures on the smart meter.

I have had a complete solar system health check and the inverter had no issue's

Re: Metre reading miss match

-Steve- — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 01:17:15 GMT

Hi Rusty_Nuts,

We will need to discuss this one further with you, please reach out to the Resolutions Team via messenger in My Account or the AGL App (select account, then support) they will be able to review this with you.

Kind Regards,

Steven

Re: Metre reading miss match

NeilC — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 14:09:06 GMT

Hi Rusty_Nuts,

Your solar panels convert DC to AC via your Inverter.

The inverter supplies 240 Volts back to your meter.

Your meter only registers the amount of energy (in Kw) that you supply to the grid (this is your feed-in).

The difference that you are seeing is the amount of energy you supplied to your meter (the output of your inverter) minus the power that your house consumed during this time.

So if you are producing 5kw and using 3kw your FEED-IN is only 2Kw.

Hope this makes sense.

If you like this reply, please click the LIKE button.

Cheers

Neil

Re: Metre reading miss match

AprilReyes — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 12:31:08 GMT

@-Nam- wrote:
Hi McDVOICE

Welcome to AGL Community!

The information you receive on your solar inverter will be the information your system has generated. The information we receive and display on your AGL My Account here, is the amount of power that you've had to import from the grid and the excess solar power you've exported.

Any power that your solar system generates will go to power your property first and any excess of solar power will be exported back into the grid. You'll see this figure on your bill as your solar feed in tariff.

Kind regards,

-Nam-

Thank you for posting something like this

Re: Metre reading miss match

MulgaBill — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 08:29:04 GMT

Wish to add my 2 cents worth on this topic of mismatch with readings.

As a newby to Solar am monitoring and comparing readings from the inverter with AGL's figures (taken from the smart meter).

Over the last 2 months the Export data (the Solar energy sold back into the Grid) matches closely (within 1%) however, the Import data (The Energy bought from the Grid) differs greatly (by >30%). Can anyone please explain why the huge difference between readings.?

Re: Metre reading miss match

NeilC — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 10:06:27 GMT

Hi MulgaBill,

The amount of energy you purchase is measured by the meter and has nothing to do with your solar inverter.

Your meter only reads outgoing energy from your Solar panels and incoming energy that your house consumes.

For clarification, energy that we are talking about is known as Kilowatts (abbreviation Kw).

For you to have a figure that states your EXPORT is the same as the OUTPUT from your inverter means that your house consumes NONE OF THE POWER that you generate from your solar panels.

Now your meter reads the power that you import and will change as you consume power in the house, you TURNED ON a fridge, freezer, AC, kettle or light etc.

You may have noticed I said TURNED ON, this is because if you do not consume any power from your solar panels then you are not using any power in the house.

Therefore you must get home and turn on all your devices hence your miss-match of readings.

Now having said this I don't believe that you turn off all your devices when you leave the house.

Your solar panels produce Kw's, your house consumes as much of those Kw's it can before allowing it to ESCAPE your house as EXPORT Kw.

Here is the DATA for my house yesterday.

Date	Peak	Exported	Solar Gen	Used
27-Apr-20	3.974	20.192	27.50	7.31

My solar panels produced 27.5 Kw.

My house consumed 7.31 kw of that solar power (We had a roast and made cakes)

My house exported 20.192 Kw to the grid (We had a sunny part and then rain)

My house used 3.974 Kw for the day (about normal for our nighttime use)

So yesterday cost me

$0.91 for supply charges

$1.63 for electricity supplied

A total expense of $2.54

A credit of $4.04 for my export

Total cost for the day was $1.50 credit to my account.

So lets have a look at a bad day

Date	Peak	Exported	Solar Gen	Used
23-Apr-20	5.333	1.270	3.40	2.13

On the 23 Apr 20

We had 10.8 mm that day starting about Midday.

I was home by myself, partner was at work during the day

Consumed $2.20 of power plus $0.91 (supply charge) = $3.11

Exported 1.270 Kw = $0.25

Cost per Day = $2.86

So in four days I went from making $1.50 to having to pay $2.86

If you look at your MyAccount from the web you will see the data that AGL has for your account on a day to day basis.

Reading your Smart Meter Manually will never confirm with the AGL MyAccount figures as they are the figures at MIDNIGHT EST each day. (EST stands for Eastern Standard Time)

You can only confirm these figures by reading your meter at MIDNIGHT EST.

The figures I am quoting above are from my meter data supplied electronically from my meter by either AGL or my electricity supplier.

Let me assure you (I am not an AGL Employee) that I check my account on a regular basis and will be the first to jump at AGL should they get their figures wrong in either supply or demand charges.

I will let you into a secret though, if you live in SA, I do not have to pay as much as I expect because they do not understand about Daylight savings and the time difference in SA.

I save on average about $0.72 cents on my quarterly bill.

Cheers Neil

Re: Metre reading miss match

MulgaBill — Sat, 02 May 2020 09:39:56 GMT

Hi Neil,

Thank you for your prompt and detailed response. I may not have described my situation clearly as your response does not help resolve my understanding of the situation.

Appreciate that AGL only report the data received from my smart meter which reads outgoing (export) energy from the Solar panels and incoming (import) energy that my house consumes.

Am somewhat surprised that AGL only supply import & export data given that a 3rd party provider (SolarEdge Monitoring platform) provides all the data necessary to give me a full picture of my Total Solar production, including import and export data plus consumption. Apparently SolarEdge can do this by accessing the data from my Inverter, as AGL do not provide/share the smart meter data to SolarEdge.

One cannot help but compare AGL's import and export figures with SolarEdge's figures.

So, my question is:

When comparing the two sets of import and export data. The import figures vary significantly whereas the export figures effectively match. How can these two sets of figures be so different?

Hopefully the summary below highlights the issue?

AGL Figures - April 2020

Exported to Grid 377.40Kwh

Imported from Grid 245.36Kwh

SolarEdge Figures – April 2020

Exported to Grid 379.21Kwh

Imported from Grid 174.52Kwh

Total Production 493.96Kwh

Self Consumption 114.75Kwh

How can I trust the AGL figures when such a major discrepancy occurs in their import figures?

Thanks in advance.

Re: Metre reading miss match

NeilC — Sat, 02 May 2020 11:55:59 GMT

Mulga,

Ah, you ponder over unknown figures.

If you want to send me a Private Message ( @NeilC ) using the Mail Icon on the top right hand side. I will give you an email address so that you can send me a copy of your data from your My Usage page (that you can download).

I can analyse that in about two minutes and send back a SpreadSheet report of your house usage and feed-in from your meter.

Now I am not familiar with your inverter but having a quick check of their site I can see that they do not connect to your meter (nor are they allowed to) but looks like that they have an inductive coupling on your main power lead somewhere.

Now you ask how can you trust the figures.

What are the correct figures, you are assuming that your SolarEdge figures are correct and that a Meter registered by AEMO is incorrect.

Now AGL does not do the metering, your Calibrated Meter reads the data and then sends it via wireless technology so your Supplier and Retailer to use.

Now I suggest that you find the MANUAL for your electricity meter and work out how to read the hidden information that it can supply.

I can at any time, push a couple of buttons and read either my output to the grid or my usage from the grid on my smart meter. (It is not possible to export and import at the same time)

I can tell you that I have tested my meter by turning off all the power in my house (less the solar panels) and checking the power to the grid. It nearly matches the output of my panels perfectly.

You are making false assumptions on unknown data. You can get your meter tested if you believe that it is incorrect, in SA I believe the figure runs to about $600 for the testing. If your meter turns out to be faulty you do not have to PAY......

As I said above PM me and I will do a spread sheet for you on your data if you want.

Cheers

Neil

Re: Metre reading miss match

MulgaBill — Mon, 04 May 2020 07:39:54 GMT

Hi Neil,

Once again thanks for taking the time to explain the mysteries of the universe albeit only the Solar Energy segment.

I have downloaded AGL's figures and analysed one month (March 2020) of data. The figures matched my usage displayed online. No surprises there!

Clearly, AGL only use the data supplied by my smart meter to account for my Consumption and Export data etc.

I just can't get my head around the two sets of Export numbers matching whereas the two sets of Import numbers don't.

For what its worth will forward my data files to you by separate email, just for your confirmation that I'm not going mad!

In the mean time, will ponder the wonders of the Solar System and our position within the universe, which is far easier to understand than AGL's Solar figures!!!

Cheers Mulga Bill

Re: Metre reading miss match

NeilC — Mon, 11 May 2020 04:53:54 GMT

MulgaBill,

Thanks for the data you supplied to me.

After your supplied file caused my program to crash I went back to using a spread sheet and converted the data manually and did find that your April readings did not match the amount that AGL said they supplied you.

BUT, the AGL readings did equate to 245.357Kw as you informed me and your Report Supplied from your SolarEdge device showed 174.515.

AGL Import	SE Import	Difference
245.357	174.515	70.842

The difference being 70.842Kw less than AGL indicated.

I emailed you and asked if the AGL file, you supplied, had been modified but you did not reply.

Investigated this, late this morning, and found that you had modified the file (you removed your account number). Simply added back the missing column (with a made up number) and ran a report using my programmes to produce an hourly report for each day of April.

Now what I found was:

UNUSUALLY HIGH FIGURES

00:00>01:00	01:00>02:00	23:00>24:00	Total
39.238	22.894	29.842	91.974

Analysis of close hours showed:

Expected Figures

02:00>03:00	03:00>04:00	22:00>23:00	Total
5.893	5.414	9.863	21.17

These figures are the TOTALS for the hours in April this year.

So lets see what happens if we NORMALISE these figures.

Normalise - High figures

91.974

MINUS

21.17

= 70.804

So what happens at your house each night between 23:00 and 02:00 hours. A few things come to mind a timer that turns on to heat your hot water, a swimming pool pump etc etc.

Now the funny thing is that this 70.804 figure near exactly matches your 70.842 figure that you say you are being overcharged for.

Now your system has an inductive coupling that goes around your wiring to read current flows. I would say that whatever drives the device(s) that draw this 70 odd KW from your system is UPSTREAM of your coupler but before the meter, hence your meter sees it but your add on meter does not.

A review of the data you sent to me shows that the spike occurred over more hours in January and February.

Please investigate this and let us know what transcribes.

Cheers

Neil

Re: Metre reading miss match

MulgaBill — Sun, 31 May 2020 05:29:31 GMT

Hi Neil,

Have reviewed your response and can advise as follows.

Call me paranoid, but I did delete my Account Number as I could not see that it served any purpose in your calculations. Clearly it did mess with your program file.

Confirm the hot water system does come on each night plus on occasion we set the dishwasher to come on late at night. Other than that, there are no other items that consume high amounts of power.

Admittedly the whole basis of my question was based on just 1 month of readings (April). And the fact that there was a difference raised the obvious question: Why?

With regards to spikes occurring in Jan and Feb, I cannot explain without further investigation.

As for the possibility that a device upstream of my coupler is drawing 70 odd KW from my system, I can only guess. Surely my modem which is located downstream would not be drawing this amount?

Will need to investigate this further with the installer to see if they can shed any light on your findings.

In the interim, will continue to monitor the figures to see if the discrepancy continues.

Thanks for your detailed analysis and assistance with my request.

Mulga

Re: Metre reading miss match

NeilC — Sun, 31 May 2020 05:49:53 GMT

Thanks for the reply, I suggest that you pay for someone to fix your issue.

I have wasted too much time on this.

Re: Metre reading miss match

Cory — Thu, 20 Aug 2020 21:27:49 GMT

I’m having same issues I think the difference is coming from hot water system as it kicks in solar edge app shows shows I’m using solar to power it but in fact it’s coming from the grid and Saying I’m not exporting power when it really is exporting at the same time when hot water is importing. I have a video of old meters one going backwards EG feed in and hot water meter going forward but app says I’m importing power from grid on solar app.

Re: Metre reading miss match

NeilC — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 02:14:50 GMT

Cory,

I am not an expert on Solar Edge and in fact have never seen one in real life.

Now what I can tell you is that your Supplied Electricity Meter readings are what you will be charged on. This information you can get from the MyUsage file download.

Solar Edge installs own monitoring devices onto the existing house wiring circuit and if not installed correctly will not properly capture the correct information.

In your house circuit the power comes from the Street Supply (Grid) into your meter, (This meter reads ALL incoming and outgoing power), if you have a meter that allows you to have a Controlled load (like a hot water system), the meter itself switches on the power at the set times to the controlled load section of the meter.

The controlled load circuit must be a separate circuit to your normal house wiring and the power used by this meter is read independently from any other meter. (So you don't get charged twice).

So with a single controlled load meter (you can have two or more on some meters) you will have two active wires coming from your Power Meter.

The main circuit wire is of a larger current capacity (63amps or more) than the Controlled load wire (Normally about 30amp capacity).

With Solar Edge you must have a monitoring device on both of these lines.

Now in saying this I assume that you have a meter equipped with a controlled load meter.

Without physically seeing your wiring it is impossible to see what is occurring.

For instance you have not stated if your hot water system is on a controlled load or not.

I don't know how your Solar Edge App is saying the hot water service is using solar. If your hot water is not using a controlled load circuit then it will simply take it's power as required from the main house circuit and you will be charged peak rates.

If you have a top of the range Solar Edge install, then you will have individual monitoring devices on separate circuits after your main circuit switch board, if you do not have this then it is possible that your app is not correctly setup.

In a house with Solar Installed:

1. The solar panels are connected via one or more Direct Current feeds that the Inverter.

2. The inverter converts DC into Alternating Current at approximately 240 Volts.

3. This current is fed (via a separate Circuit Breaker) into the main circuit bus bar.

4. The house wiring will then use as much of the Solar Generate AC as it can.

5. Any EXCESS Solar power is then EXPORTED (Via your meter) into the Main Street (Grid) Circuit.

On a Single Phase Meter it is not possible to IMPORT and EXPORT power at the same time. If the amount you are generating is equal to the amount you are using then you are not using any power from the Main Street Circuit nor exporting any power back to the Street Circuit (Grid).

Otherwise any excess is Exported to the Street Circuit or you are Importing power from the Main street circuit.

Time

08:00

08:30

09:00

09:30

10:00

10:30

11:00

11:30

12:00

12:30

13:00

13:30

14:00

Solar

0.111

0.235

0.906

1.335

0.907

0.794

0.978

0.840

0.215

0.856

1.148

0.525

Grid

0.066

0.005

0.062

0.002

0.065

0.004

Above you can see my actual meter data for yesterday (20 Aug) which I downloaded from my meter readings today (21 Aug). I have not shown all of the day but simply enough to give a comparison.

Readings are in kW (Kilo Watts), the time is shown in Black, Solar Exported Grid is shown in Green and power used from the grid in RED.

Yesterday I exported 12.028 kW to the grid and imported 4.771 kW from the grid. I self consumed 4.97 kW.

Yesterday was a mainly overcast day with rain periods, also I have a heat pump hot water service that is set to heat between 10:00 and 19:00 each day. (This normally only takes 2.5 to 3.5 hours per day).

These figures are what I will be charged or profit from.

So yesterday cost me:

12.028	$ 2.41
4.771	-$ 1.96
Supply	-$ 0.91
Total	-$ 0.46

As you can see it cost $-0.46, but this is not true as I also got $0.99 benefit from the 4.97 kW that I self consumed.

All this from the meter readings that I will be charged for.

I would suggest that you contact Solar Edge and get them to investigate your installation.

If you want you can PM me and I will send you an Email Address that you can contact me on and send a copy of your usage file from AGL and I can analyse it for you.

You can of course look at Your Web Account then after logging in click on Usage or View Usage and see how you are going up to the last date shown on the bar graph. You can also pick on an individual day to see how you performed that day.

Now if you really want to test your system, on a day that is scheduled to be overcast, turn off your solar system altogether (before sunrise IE no solar for the whole day) and see what AGL says you use compared to what your Solar Edge says you use for the day.

Don't forget to turn the solar back on after Sunset...!

Right now I am producing 2200 Kw of Solar (at the inverter) and my Smart Meter says that I am putting 6 amps (or 1500 kW) to the grid. This I know, because I can use the hidden menu of my smart meter to read the instantaneous figures.

Hope this all helps, when you have a bunch of unknowns it is often difficult to know what the true facts are.

I know that after 18 months of having Solar installed that my Supplied Electricity Meter is accurate to to what I can read on the meter.

(I did the opposite to what I have suggested to you and turned off all of my power for two hours and left my solar on, I could then check using the Web interface for my solar, the meter readings on my actual meter and the instantaneous readings on the hidden menu of my meter.)

Cheers

Neil

Re: Metre reading miss match

JOEM — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 11:10:29 GMT

Hi all, I have a similar issue! My import readings say I have used 6,612 Kwh hours, the same meters gives me historical usage and says I have used 5,839 Kwh and my solar pv and battery system says I have used 4103.2 Kwh. Surely the import readings from my meter and the historical usage of my meter should match? My issue is the increase in my bills since my solar and battery installation. Previous year my total usage was 5,041.7 Kwh. I do believe my meters are faulty but the check meter installed matched but the meter is still gicing two different outputs. How is this possible? Any help will be greatly appreciated!

Re: Metre reading miss match

NeilC — Sat, 25 Sep 2021 21:32:04 GMT

@JOEM,

I have read and re-read your post.

Cannot make any sense out of what you are trying to say.

Could you possibly re-post giving a better description.

Cheers Neil

Re: Metre reading miss match

JOEM — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 14:23:52 GMT

Apologies Neil, I am struggling to understand it my self.

My energy bills where relatively cheap but I was renovating my home and wanted to future proof my property so I installed a 4kw Solar system with storage battery. Since the installation my bills have went up dramatically! I have some questions:

1. Should my import readings match the historical data of usage taken from my Smart 1 meter?

2. Should the usage recorded by Solis Inverter match the import readings from my meter?

As things stands my meter historical data matches closely to the information held on my inverter.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks

Joseph

Re: Metre reading miss match

Hammond123 — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 09:13:12 GMT

We have been away from the 4th August

I've not used any gas since, but my bill is increasing daily, at least 15.00 in the last day

Can you please explain why ?