Good day all,
I noticed that even though my house is totally running off PV during the day and batteries during the night, I still use 2kwh units per day from my pre pay meter.
The installer mentioned something like reactive power between inverters and pre pay meter.
On the VRM (Grid side) I see values from - 60W to 30+W, up and down all the time.
PV is more than enough as well as battery capacity.
Any way of preventing the pre pay meter to use 2 units per day? Don’t want to switch off the main breaker though.
You can reduce the Grid Setpoint. If that is set to 50W, you’ll use about 24x50W = 1.2kWh from the grid per day as base. Mine is on 20W. Then if you have big intermitted loads on your non-criticals, like an oven switching on and off within a few seconds very often as it is just maintaining temp, you’ll probably end up purchasing a bit more from the grid because the inverter can only react so fast.
You’ll also notice that when there’s loadshedding and the power comes back on, for 10 minutes your inverter will not produce max power due to grid code (regulations). So if a big geyser or something is on just after loadshedding, you’ll purchase a bit of power before the inverter can take over again.
Long story short, buying 2kWh per day doesn’t mean anything is wrong. I get mine down to about 1kWh per day on average during summer.
Do keep in mind that energy meters get really noisy below a certain point (around 12W in my experience with CG meters), and that makes the control loop a little unstable. In other words, you may not see much of a difference with a setpoint below 10W or maybe even 20W. It’s almost impossible to hit 0W exactly, and since many prepaid meters bill you for feed-in, you get hit on either side.
I do not have an external meter. I rely on the Quattro/GX to do everything. My GX Grid setpoint is set to -70W. This gives me an almost 0W energy balance.
Some meters can trip (the contractor in them disconnects power), so do be careful with this setting…
If it works with negative/small setting for a while, then you should be safe but for new installs/unknown meter settings, some draw is recommended, e.g. 20-50w…
CoJ was very strict in the begging of “Smart Meter” rollout but now, with the fact that many people are going solar, they started relaxing their settings on Hexing meters.
My recommendation is 20W. It is higher than the noisy zero region, but lower than the default 50W. The small amount of grid import is in my opinion a small price to pay for the stability of a grid-tied setup. No lights flickering, large loads seamlessly pull from the grid
Got my very first warning this morning when Loadshedding started - Overload L1 Warning.
The current load at that time was around 500 - 700W
Grid set point still - 30W
Can this Grid setpoint cause Overload warning when the grid fail?
What is your MPIIs firmware version? I used to get Overloads on an old firmware, but that was fixed when I updated the firmware per instruction from those in the know.
Hmmm okay, that should be recent enough. Was it just a warning or did the overload cause the system to disconnect itself and you having to manually restart the inverter for it to connect again?
but for new installs/unknown meter settings, some draw is recommended, e.g. 20-50w…