What Is Your Total Power Consumption With Net Metering?

Online Monitoring For All The Facts

This is one question that no-one knows without there being some form of electricity and solar power monitoring system installed within the home.

It is not uncommon for homes installing solar power to in fact use more power after the installation, due to the fact they are making their own power.

Prior to installing your net metered solar pv system, your total power consumption was your imported power. Now you have installed solar power, your total power consumption is now actually:

Consumption  = Generation + Import - Export

Before your solar power was installed the electricity bill clearly itemised your total electricity consumption. Now after your solar installation, it actually itemises imported power only as your daily usage. Yes this is confusing and yes we have many times explained this to the electricity retailers.

So how can you know if your using more or less power since the solar was installed? Clearly you cannot by looking at your electricity bill!

What your total power consumption now is, is usage made up of both imported power and that generated power from your roof during the sunny hours of the day. During those non-sunny hours of course, you can only be importing power from the grid. We will assume here for this article, you have no battery banks installed to store generated power during the day for use at the night.

During the sunny hours of the day, if you are not using much power under your roof, then you run the risk of it being sent back to the grid for little financial return. This is your exported power.

So there are a few issues here that clearly need to be known. What is your total power consumption and what power are you sending back to the grid. Excess power that alternatively you could be using to offset imported power costs.

All of these unknowns can easily become known facts, that you can work with to maximise your electricity savings.

What you need to do is to install a simple online electricity monitoring system, one that is taking note of your total consumption and generated power at the same time. The imported / exported power is easily worked out once these two facts are known. Thus then you will know 24/7 the following:


Consumption  = Generation + Import - Export
 
So why not take a look at our ONLINE ELECTRICITY MONITORING page.

This blog post brought to you by Aussie Home Energy, a major player in the HOME ELECTRICITY SAVING SERVICE industry in Australia.