Smart meter sending Solar generation as consumption?

@hydrosam may have experience of this??

Smart meters shouldn't need to be updated to handle exports. I wonder if your solar PV has been connected to the wrong side of the meter.

Follow the cable out of your inverter. Does it go to your main consumer unit or do you have a separate consumer unit just for the solar PV?

You can also check that the meter is recording exports. If you post a picture of the meter someone will tell you how to get it to display the export figure.

Not entirely sure of the process but unless you have a very big solar array I doubt you’ll notice much difference in your daily consumption at this time of the year. Solar PV yield (amount elec produced) is very low in the winter months. 

Have you registered for your smart export guarantee? https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-guides/smart-export-guarantee
 

This will ensure you get paid for what you export to the grid, which again will be peanuts at this time of year but could be worthwhile in spring, autumn and summer depending on how big your solar array is, whether you have a battery to store what you generate, how much elec you use daily and finally who you have your SEG with. OVO pay about 4p/kWh I think @Tim_OVO can clarify. Octopus pay up to 15p/kWh. Your import and export do not have to be with the same supplier. 
 

If you haven’t registered for the SEG, you won’t get paid anything. Solar installers really should be passing this info on to the home owners. 
 

Sorry didn’t read your original post properly. You have a battery. 

Is it set up for self-consumption mode, standby or export to grid? You probably want self-consumption as exporting to grid doesn’t pay 4-15p export vs 34p for importing. 

But the above is still valid, are you generating sufficient that you’d notice it against daily consumption? If you have some solar generation vs daily consumption figures that would help understand the scale. 

Thanks for all the replies. To clarify - I’m not taking about exports to the grid as we’re not generating enough solar at the minute to be exporting much at all.

We’re generating between 6 and 9 kWh a day at the moment from solar. Most is consumed by the house and the rest is charging the battery for use when the solar isn’t generating. But our OVO grid consumption is showing as unchanged from before we had solar, exactly the same sort of figures, despite us importing far less from the grid because of the solar.

The solar installer has looked at the system and agrees something is wrong and, as I say, seemed very confident that an ‘update’ needed sending to the smart meter to enable it to stop seeing solar use by the house as consumption. But this does seem odd to me, hence asking here!

Attached is a picture of the meter setup. Picture was taken a few days ago so I realise doesn’t include the Solar PV box. I can take another tomorrow including this if needed.

Please show me a close up of the meter display while exports are in progress - that’s the display on the meter itself, NOT your In-Home Display. Make sure it’s lit up as well!

I can use that to figure out whether it’s set up properly.

What do you mean while exports are in progress? Do you mean exports of solar generated power to the grid? If so, that’s not what I’m talking about - we’re hardly exporting anything at the moment. I’m talking about OVO thinking that solar generated power is in fact grid consumption and counting it towards our usage from the grid.

Any amount of exports of any size would be enough for what I need. :)

Then I shall hope for enough sunshine to do a bit of exporting and that I happen to catch it! Thanks