How do I get a smart meter when I have a 3 phase supply?

Hi @Uncle K - you are definitely in the right place! Welcome to the Forum.

Looking at your overall desire to install 12kW of PV Solar Panel, you must retain all three phases to your property. The inverters used for grid connection will be certified to G98, which permits export of no more than 16A per phase (~4kW).

I anticipate OVO having 3-phase Smart meters available sometime before Christmas. There are three aspects to this

• the availability of the physical meter. (No problem - already done)
• the training of OVO staff, both for installation and for diagnostics in-house. Constrained somewhat by Covid-19, but achievable.
• ensuring compatibility with the in-house Billing System

This last one is totally within OVO’s control because they have their own programming team. Have a look at the “prompt” posted just this morning to one of the Moderators who is looking into this for us.

Hold fire on the matter of Storage Radiators. If OVO are prepared to offer a genuine Time Of Use tariff, then these could prove to be useful to take excess renewable generation at very low cost.

We are discussing this scenario on another Topic about TOU tariffs.

Please complete your Forum Profile page. Whereabouts you are in the UK will affect some of our suggestions. Thanks

UFH eh?!

So have you noticed that I’m writing an introductory series on UFH here on the Forum?

If you’re going to combine GSHP and UFH, I presume you’ll have a thermal store. An immersion heater in that would be another way to take electricity at very low rates if you migrate to a Time Of Use tariff.

I wish I’d bought my thermal store with two positions for immersion-heaters. The one position it has is presently used with a 30v immersion, acting as a dump-load for a small wind-turbine. So I’ll have a tricky decision to make if TOU tariffs become available.

Even so, don’t ditch the bricks from the storage radiators. I have a load here ready to install as a heat-dump below the central path in a greenhouse

Sure @Tim_OVO - He wants 12kW of solar.

You can only attach 4kW (max) to a single-phase.

3 x 4Kw = 12kW 

It means that they can’t yet do so, @Uncle K.

@Tim_OVO  seems to be re-quoting an answer from a technical source within OVO. They are still evaluating the technology required to run 3-phase SMETS2 Smart Meters on their new Billing System.

It is the Billing Software which sends the SMETS_Read commands to the customer sites and receives the responses. It must then calculate the payment due based on the net import/export figures (what we’re calling “vector sum metering”). Simply adding together the totals for each phase doesn’t work!

If you have a look at this other Topic, it announces that a rival Energy Supplier has installed a 3-phase Smart Meter. That doesn’t mean that it was successful of course. It has to be integrated into the Billing system in such a way that the customer could still choose to switch to another Supplier in future. There’s a lot more to this than simply installing the meter.

Thanks @Tim_OVO . Although we indeed have a three phase supply to our house, only two of the phases are connected. We have three old-style meters as one of the phases also has a low tariff meter for a few storage heaters (which we don’t use). So we don't have "your 3-phase non smart meter" - and I thought the Feed in tariff scheme was closed to new applications? That was the basis of my original question about two single phase meters - which doesn't seem to be possible.
I understand I have to wait until the three-phase smart meter becomes available but the conundrum is what to do in the interim - not only are we fitting solar panels but also remodelling and need to move the meters anyway - I was hoping to put new meter(s) in the new location rather than two steps of moving existing meters and then replace them with a new meter.
Nothing is simple!
But your help continues to be appreciated.
Cheers
K

My solar panels are currently directed to off-grid storage @Tim_OVO so I’m not the right person to ask.

Check with your team running the Sonnen Home Battery Storage in Lincoln area. There’s still an obligation for the Panels to be installed by an MCS Accredited company because OVO requires the Renewable Obligation Certificate in order to balance the tariff being applied.

Someone else will know more about this than I do. Feel free to correct what I’ve just written.

Do you actually have 12kW of PV Panels, @PeterR1947 ?

Or did I misunderstand what @Tim_OVO wrote above?

This is the predicament @Uncle K finds himself in:

If we can’t find any community support, I’ll be digging around internally next week on your behalf, @Uncle K - it’s a tricky one for sure this! 

Do we have any meter engineers in this community? I’d very much like to meet you if you are/were…. these situations are likely to be a simple and enjoyable puzzle for you. For me, it’s a lot more tricky…..

As I don’t work for OVO, @Uncle K - I can suggest a cheeky way of getting a 3-phase SMETS2 meter faster:

The first real-life installation of a 3-phase meter for a domestic customer is Good Energy.

Looking at the official response from within OVO that Tim has quoted above, it reads “… we won't be able to fully support these meters from other suppliers until that work is done, but we would still be able to communicate with them to get readings”

That means you could ditch your existing OVO contract, switch to Good Energy on condition that they install your preferred meter, and then switch back to OVO.

I’ve now got 2 days grace before @Tim_OVO arrives back on Monday morning and finds what I’ve just posted!

Some unbiased community support there, that’s why a forum like this is best for customer service! I could never advise such a thing, and won’t comment on it here. 

@PeterR1947  I gave Transparent the heads up on Friday that I was ‘offline’ this weekend (for once) as I had my 9 day old nephew to hang out with. So he knew he had a decent time window to work with. What a pro

What do we think, @Uncle K - and whatever you choose, please keep us update here! 

This is an industry-wide issue @Uncle K and therefore needs airing here regardless of which Energy Supplier each of us has.

Let’s note that we’ve heard nothing more from Good Energy’s media staff since that first announcement of a 3-phase meter installation. That makes me wonder if the software support is really yet functional to provide accurate invoices. Remember that the “customer” for the initial installation is a senior manager at Good Energy!

I’d still like @Tim_OVO to confirm that I’m correct in my assumption that OVO only accepts new Solar Panel arrays that have been installed by a MCPS-registered company because they require the ROC (Renewables Obligation Certificate) in order to recover the annual income.

This affects my technical input to the Topic. I can conjecture some interim solutions which might help in the short term whilst the metering and billing gets resolved. But those are to no avail if @Uncle K has to recall an MCPS-certified installer to site every time he wants to make a change.

I’d also like to know if the OVO customers in the Woodhall Spa are who are on the Kaluza/Sonnen Battery Storage Trial are using SMETS2 meters and OVO’s new Billing System. Or have they had to be down-graded to SMETS1 meters, as has happened to the 400-odd sites on the V2G charger Trial?

All these pieces of information are needed if sites like @Uncle K ‘s are wanting to start installing renewable micro-generation hardware without getting their fingers burnt.

Back with an update on this one - Are you a single rate 3 phase OVO member interested in upgrading to a Smart meter? 

If so we’re interested to hear from you - Send a PM to myself or @Tim_OVO for more details...

I’m unsure if @Jess_OVO can answer that @Blastoise186 although I may be doing her a disservice.

It was a year ago when we poured over this problem on the Forum.

The issue wasn’t just that OVO needed to test out a 3-phase SMETS2  Smart Meter and train engineers to install them. The much bigger problem was the software required within the Billing System to accommodate polyphase operation.

If a domestic site has 3-phases operational it’s much more likely that they are simply splitting their loads between those phases rather than driving 3-phase equipment (as occurs in industry). They are also more likely to have storage and generation equipment. Dividing the export across the phases circumvents a couple of issues regarding the G99 certification with the DNO.