Hi All, I have solar and All In One (with gateway), Having a smart meter replacement soon as the gas meter battery has died and they need to swap both the gas and electric meter.
Currently the meter tails go from the meter to the Gateway, then the gateway to the consumer unit. Does this mean when they come to replace the meters I can just turn off the grid isolator in the gateway and retain power to the house while they work?
gbleeds yes that should work
WORD OF WARNING though, take careful note of where the CT clamps go on the meter tails, and in particular the orientation of those clamps (they have an arrow on them). I’d suggest you take your own photos/video beforehand because meter men have been known to fit them wrongly.
The lovely Octopus man that came and replaced my meter took his own photos, made a lovely job of tidying up the cabling in my meter box, but then put the CT clamps on the wrong way round.
Wrong way round CT clamp means the inverter thinks that all solar export is house load so discharges the battery to meet that load. Took me a day to work out what was happening and why my load had shot up so much
Put some tipex on CT clamps with an arrow pointing to (say CU). then take a photo
I had my Smart Meters replaced two weeks ago, I had hoped to do what you suggest and treat it like a power cut but turns out my installer hadn't tightened the terminal in the block connecting the cable going to the consumer unit enough and it disconnected, cutting power to the house. So I thought best and safest to then throw the breaker in the gateway to ensure safe isolation and had no power for 45mins.
Additionally, Octopus need all 48 daily readings of the 30min slots to be eligible for IOG, miss some (which is going to happen during the cutover) and then they charge you the price cap for the day as per their T&C's apparently. I also "lost" the previous days usage so they tried to bill me for that too at the highest rate.
I raised it with Octopus and got a goodwill gesture but don't bank on and instead work on the basis that the day of (and likely day before) will be at non-IOG prices and limit your grid import.
Lastly, it turns out the gas meter doesn't have any backup/manual usage recording so they had to do a guestimate billing for the last 3 months it wasn't working, fortunately I think it just about worked out in my favour!
geoffreycoan there are no CT clamps other than what’s inside are inside the gateway which he shouldn’t need to go into.