Today is the 30th of November and it's the day both our smart meters
are replaced to hopefully resolve our phantom draw issue. Did it work though?
Hi John here. If this is your first time here and you're wondering what I'm going on
about with the phantom drawer issue and why we need our smart meters replaced.
Then feel free to check out the playlist up here, which covers the issues in more detail.
Bringing you quickly up to speed. Our current SMETS2 smart meter which is a Landis+Gyr E470
100mm model. In some installations can be incompatible with a Tesla Powerwall 2.
This results in a phantom draw or drain straight from the grid. We have found
variance of around 2kWh per day being recorded as usage by our electric meter
when we are running on battery. Fast forward 18 months from the point I raised the issue.
Tesla, Landis+Gyr, and our energy supplier Octopus Energy have replicated the problem. Confirmed
of its existence and found out what the reason. There's actually a link down below from a post by
Octopus Energy that explains it in a lot more detail and much better than I could ever do.
So if that's piqued your interest have a look down in the description down below for that.
Octopus Energy's solution is to exchange the smart meters for customers with a Tesla Powerwall who
have the L+G E470 100mm smart meter installed. As I mentioned not all installations are affected
just a few. I understand it's about 360 people in terms of Octopus Energy's customers.
There's a dedicated team of engineers that have been working solidly just on this particular
problem. Working round and swapping meters out for the past couple of weeks. Rich who was our
engineer and swapped our meter he was saying this was basically all he'd been doing for the last few
weeks. And he was actually finished on Thursday of this week which would be the 3rd of December.
And he said he's been all over the country. He's been to Wales, Aberdeen,
Ipswich and so on. So yeah he's traveled some miles and he obviously now knows
the job backwards in terms of what to expect. Which I was really thankful for.
Today is my day to say goodbye to my old smart meters and say hello to our new ones.
Rich the engineer was very helpful and very speedy. He arrived from another job which was
actually just two minutes around the corner having phone to say that he was on his way.
So obviously someone very close to me has the same setup with
Tesla Powerwall and the same smart meter or the new one now as it were.
Rich the engineer got to work straight away and replaced both meters in around 20 minutes.
He was actually very quick to do the physical swap over. I ran through my shutdown routine.
Obviously isn't as complicated as shutting down a nuclear power station. However, I like to have a
list of the sequence of steps to follow and armed with my piece of paper I shut down the Powerwall,
the pv panels and turn off all the electricity and powered down all the myenergi products as well.
We were without electricity for about, well without power gas and electricity,
for about 20 minutes while Rich swapped out the the gas and electric meters.
And once it completed I then reversed my shutdown procedure and everything bounced back into life.
It does actually take a good five minutes for everything to come back online the Tesla Powerwall
and the solar pvs and for everything to show up in all of the apps.
Previously I'd been rather nervous about shutting everything down just in case not everything came
back online again. However, I got to thinking it's really very similar to having a computer backup.
If you don't actually test that the backup for your computer can be successfully restored
then the backup is a bit of an unknown quantity and technically it could be worthless. So it
may or may not work when you try to reinstall it from the backup. The same principle with my solar,
myenergi and the Tesla Powerwall components. If you've never turned them off and back on again
you don't know that they'll all come back on again online without any hiccups. So it's
well worth testing that out. I'll put down in the description below what my sequence of steps are
for shutting off and powering back on again just in case anybody is interested.
After turning everything back on Rich did a few checks on the electrics and then did
a purge and re-light on the gas. We've got a gas fire, which we never actually use, but still needs
to be purged and relight make sure it's okay. And he checked the boiler to make sure it was up to
pressure. Actually the longest part of the job for Rich was to sync the new in-house display and link
everything up to Octopus Energy. And when he left the electricity had synced to the in-house display
and we're showing usage data but the gas didn't want to play ball. So that currently isn't showing
on the in-house display. We've got gas just not registered. So I'm not really that worried about
it to be honest from a gas perspective and I'm expecting the gas to sync up in the next few days
and Rich was saying if it doesn't then just give Octopus Energy a call
because they are aware. There's a note on the account to do it.
The blurb that comes through from Octopus Energy they sent an email to say that it can actually
take up to 14 days for the readings to get through to Octopus Energy by the time it's all linked up
and online. And you can actually check that by logging into your online account to see if
there's a reading history that is showing. Since the meters swapped I have spent quite some time
staring at the in-house display and I get rather excited now seeing 0watts import from the grid or
worst case sort of 50watts when we're running on battery. Yesterday was a very sunny day and it's
the first day I was able to check the in-house display was actually working we had a full battery
which had filled up overnight so the panels were generating. According to the Tesla Powerwall app
that we were not importing anything from the grid and thankfully that's exactly what the in-house
display was saying as well. So hurrah! That's all good news. For the first time in 18 months
the in-house display actually agrees with the Tesla Powerwall app. Previously the in-house
display would show a constant draw of 2 to 300 watts of grid draw all the time whether we were
on battery or not. But generally when we were on battery it was like a base load if you like.
The only thing I have since noticed is that the in-house display doesn't appear to show
grid export. A Twitter and YouTube friend Nigel from The EVPuzzle channel he sent me a screenshot
of his in-house display and I noticed on that that he was showing export. And his make and
model of the in-house display is exactly the same as mine. So I'm not sure why mine isn't showing
it. I know he's got a different smart meter than me but even so I would have expected it to to
show export as as my old one did. Anyway so yeah not too sure about that. I have to monitor that
so that's the only thing I don't currently understand and need to learn a bit more about
why that is. And the reason to wanting to be able to see the export is I have the in-house display
with me in the office next to where I'm working. And I'll regularly notice when we're exporting
and if we are then I go and check to make sure that the eddi has heated our hot water and then if
the car is plugged in that is actually charging. Now we don't want to be exporting without
utilising that excess energy. If I've utilised it well then fine, begrudgingly I'll export it.
But if I'm not using it like the car is not plugged in then I'll rush round and plug it in. So
that's why I like to know when we're exporting. At the moment the only way I can do that is through
the Tesla Powerwall app until I can understand why the in-house display isn't exporting. But yeah
there you go. The final piece of the jigsaw puzzle I guess will be a confirmation from Octopus Energy
on the credit to my account and I'll let you know as soon as I know what that figure is.
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And that's it. Thanks for watching. I'll see you on the next video. All right. Take care. Bye