Whats up with my electricity bill?
Yesterday I received my monthly electricity bill, with some annoyance I noticed again that it was roughly one third of the previous month! You would think that is good right? Well it turns out that the electricity supplier only read the meter every three months, and use and an 'estimate' for the intervening months. Typically the estimate is far less than what we are actually using, this has happened before.
So last night I stumbled upon a page in my suppliers website that would allow me to enter my own readings! Aha, problem solved? Lets see....
This is not so easy to find if you are an AGL customer, so here is how to get there:
- logon to your AGL account
- navigate to the "Manage Account" page (not the billing page)
- select "Billing"
- select "Meter readings"
- select the account (may not have this option if you only have one account)
This is what I see:
Ok, so how does the meter read above match with what is on the "Time of Use" meter?
Well reading the meter is a challenge all in itself! About 14 screens scroll past, stopping on each one for about 5 seconds. So which number on each screen corresponds to the 5 meter readings above? The meter number is listed - thankfully that corresponds to what is in my meter box, reading the old analogue meter is easy, no confusion there, so that leaves the 4 'smart' meter readings.
The meter is one of these, Sprint Secure EM5100 Polyphase electronic meter and the manual is available here
https://www.essentialenergy.com.au/asset/cms/pdf/contestableWorks/CEOM8014_50.pdf:
So down to the nitty gritty!
Without the previous bill in hand there would be no way to know which reading corresponds to which data entry point! So it was a process of elimination to work out which went where.
Matching the readings with the form:
and here is the explanation of each from the manual:
Once I had worked this out, I entered the relevant readings and hit the 'validate' button, and it all seemed to work! Will give an update when I get my next bill to see if it has worked.
Ok enough for today.
Next up: to understand how the solar connects to the "Time of Use" meter and how much benefit am I really getting from the sun?
And yet to come, why am I being charged "Peak" rates for my "Off peak" electricity? Only discovered this while going through the exercise above!
Cheers
Footnote: I have updated this post, originally I had incorrectly labeled the "Time of use" meter as a "Smart" meter, however I have been informed that the difference is the ability to be read remotely. My original assumption was that any meter with a digital readout was somewhat smarter than the old analogue one! Sorry for anyconfusion.
