Photovoltaic Power Systems And the 2005 National Electrical Code

Howdy, if your meter is an older one, it cant tell the difference between power originating from the grid or from solar panels it's all just power going through a meter and you will be billed for the power you produce and send to the grid. No getting around the fact that the rules are the rules and they are there for a good reason.

The PoCo has all sorts of computer tools to see what a customers usage has been and will be. When you deviate from it for more than a month, they flag your account for fraud, and the next time someone walks the meter route, they do a close inspection on the meter. If they see PV panels and no connection agreement, you are busted

If your meter is not configured for two way operation (purchase on incoming and sell on outgoing) then any power that goes through it will be considered as purchase. It will not subtract the outgoing. It will just add it to the incoming.

Also based on your past energy consumption you will have a different profile if you now generate your own power that will raise a flag at the POCO which will probably initiate a house call to see what is going on. Once they find you are now co-generating without a contract they will decide how the will penalize you up to disconnecting you until you rectify the issue.

A few years ago my UK grid utility company supplied us with a digital electricity meter (Itron ACE1000 SM0 800) for billing. It has a LED interface that outputs 800 pulses/kWh and stops pulsing whenever electricity is fed back to the utility supply. I attached to the Itron a wireless Efergy E2 IR meter so that I can see real power being consumed by the house. This issue of export never arises because I feed export energy to an an Immersun (Truesine) converter and then to a 3kW immersion heater.

There is a fixed overhead to be paid no matter what the size of the install is and this is usually recouped by having as many panels as you can afford. I took a different route - I decided to invest in reduced appliance consumption by replacing less energy efficient appliances so that the static load of the house is around 50W to 150W. This means that a micro install is sufficient to show zero on my efergy meter with excess power being fed back to the immersion heater. I don't like the principal of exporting kW to the utility because is screws with sub station transformer settings.

The sad thing is that the overhead required to save energy is not part of the building cost. I guess I'm penny wise pound foolish but when the Efergy meter reads zero I get an enormous amount of satisfaction. I sincerely believe that you should consume all that you generate and that my small install is a socially acceptable way of generating solar power. Sorry about the product naming no spamming was intended.

Bottom line financially is to use as little power as fits your lifestyle and opinions, while at the same time and thinking long term, to pay as little as possible to achieve the goals you set within the framework of the utility setup you have to work with.

this is straying way off topic from a stickie and I'm going to purge the comments, since we don't have a way to send them to a new thread.
Sorry,

Sadly it looks like the whole link/thread is dead / 404 and may need to be removed.

I've attempted to move those for you Mike to a separate thread and found a link for the sticky which might help


Also noted on the right of the page there are Resource Books, Installer Checklist
and they both come down as a pdf .

I would imagine that people in the States might benefit from this link but I have had difficulty getting anything useful out of it for me.

Because the POCO are not fools. You have to have a contract with the POCO to interconnect. The POCO uses SMART METERS. The very second your meter records power going out, the METER raises an alarm of an illegal connection and notifies the POCO. .The meter measures that power going out and charges you as power used and will keep doing so until you have a legal binding contract, or they disconnect your service.

You seem to have assumed a position of defence ?. this is a DIY site yeh? . I have a fully legal connection and wish to understand whats going on . But I must say i am tempted to try the above to test it , I tend to test wherever possible to get at the truth myself and am developing systems for future use in various electronics and electrical areas . I am also not in the states and our systems seem different in many ways to what you discuss here . It's all good knowledge though. Thanks for that

The original link is dead, so I don't think this thread should be sticky any more.