Smart Meter Installation & Review

You can read my research on smart meters and you will see that I'm not a fan of them but, in order to progress our smart home solar energy project I had to get one installed. It is the only way we can get paid for our exported energy.

Arranging The Installation

One of the first things I tried to progress with our smart home solar energy project was the installation of a smart meter with Octopus. This was initially frustrating, as they sent me a link to book my installation and it always told me I couldn't have one. Eventually, I phoned them and was told there was a technical issue and there was no installation company assigned to my area or home. Octopus said they would fix this and would get back to me in a few days. They didn't though.

14/07/2022: Octopus have since got in touch and asked me to contact them on the 18^th July, to book a smart meter installation.
18/07/2022: I contacted Octopus by phone and a smart meter is booked for installation on 25^th July.
18/07/2022: It was bought to my attention (via the 'Solar & Battery UK' Facebook group that there is a potential issue with the Landis+Gyr E470 100mm smart meter when using a Tesla Powerwall 2. I messaged Octopus, to see if I can avoid this issue by having a different smart meter installed.
20/07/2022: Octopus got in touch to tell me: "they are unable to provide/not provide a particular type of model meter. It really will depend on what stock the engineer has available to him." This doesn't inspire me with confidence.

The Installation

I was given an 8am to 12 noon appointment window on 25^th July 2022 and the engineer turned up shortly after 8am. The first thing I did was ask my engineer which meter he was planning to install. Fortunately it was a Kaifa MA120 (made by Toshiba). He then used a plug-in mains tester to check the house was wired as expected, before continuing the install.

He also asked me if I needed to shut any computers down, which was good. This installation was a great, real-world test of my smart home's 12V DC Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), which performed as expected :-) The electricity meter was changed quite quickly and we had power back on after just over an hour without it.

The gas meter change was a longer job as it involved removing an ancient meter and moving some of the gas pipework.

25/07/2022: Smart meters installed.
28/07/2022: Electricity data started showing up in the Octopus app. Octopus have not connected to the gas meter yet.
02/08/2022: Octopus still haven't connected to the gas meter.
04/08/2022: Messaged Octopus about the connection to the gas meter.
08/08/2022: Octopus still haven't connected to the gas meter.
09/08/2022: Octopus emailed me asking for more information about my smart meters and some photos of the installation.
10/08/2022: It's working. My gas meter is now connected.

In-Home Display (IHD)

As part of the smart meter installation, we get this In-Home Display (IHD). This connects wirelessly, using ZigBee technology. Range is not really an issue in our home, as this IHD is in the kitchen, close to the smart meters.

In normal operation our home seems to use between 145W and 290W. The variations are down to things like the fridge/freezer. This includes all my smart home stuff too, including 300+ sensors and all my devices.

The IHD gets energy usage data about every 30 minutes for gas and about every 10 seconds for electricity. This means it isn't very responsive to short duration, high loads. For example, I have boiled the kettle and the display has failed to notice and reflect this 3kW load on the display.

Once I had migrated our tariff to Octopus Go, the IHD started to show me when the cheap rate was going to apply.

On the 18^th October 2022 our smart home solar installation project went live and I saw my home export energy for the first time. At one point we were exporting over 5kW into the grid. Until our SEG payments are set up we don't get paid for this exported energy.

Octopus Energy App

I've had the Octopus Energy app for a while now but it doesn't really do much. I could submit meter readings and see how much I pay monthly and also how much I'm in credit.

With a smart meter installed, I will no longer need to submit monthly meter readings. It should also be able to provide real-time statistics such as current energy usage. It can take a while for smart meters to commission with the DCC and start having data available for you and energy firms to access. Octopus Energy's app should show data two days after the meter is connected to the DCC and it updates at 7am or noon the day after the meter readings have been sent.

Note: The day after my smart meter installation, I got an email from Octopus Energy saying it could take up to 14 days for them to connect to it.

Insight

I wasn't expecting to get a lot more insight from our smart meter and I really haven't. The things I have noted are:

My son's ganming PC is noticable when it's on. It's a high-spec gaming machine using over 400W and it goes a long way to heating his bedroom!
We generally don't switch on loads of appliances at once, so our peak electricity usage very rarely over 4kW and never over 5kW. This is good because the Tesla Powerwall can deliver up to 5kW.

Summary

It's very easy to get hung up on the numbers coming from your smart meter and IHD but, the real challenge is in taking meaningful action to reduce your energy usage and in ensuring that everyone in your home does this too. A big part of this is already enabled by my contextual smart home, which does many things to reduce our energy usage, automatically controlling lights being just one example. We are already aware of what devices and appliances are using energy and how much they use too, so the IHD is not really going to change much in our home.

One of the key objectives of our smart home solar energy project is to go to the next level and generate much of our energy locally, whilst also adding another level of smartness to our energy management.

If you are considering moving to Octopus, you can use this referral link and Octopus will give us both £50.