Solar panels can make an electric meter go backwards

LIKE hundreds of thousands of other people Morris Samuel has had solar panels installed.

They have been on his home in Stehousemuir since December 2011 and work fine. Morris is quite pleased with them.

There have been few small problems. He has had his inverter (the box of tricks that converts electricity to feed the national grid) replaced, and a few repairs to his feed-in tariff meter.

But no one has ever suggested he should change his mains electricity meter.

Until, that is, he switched energy suppliers.

The new supplier insisted Morris have his analogue meter changed to a digital one at a cost of £60. The reason given is that when his solar panels feed electricity back to the national grid, it makes his old meter dials run backwards.

It doesn’t equal out though. All customers with solar panels buy electricity at a different price than they sell electricity when their panels run at a surplus.

Morris didn’t know the meter ran backwards. He wrote to Raw Deal and asked if we knew and wondered why there wasn’t wider publicity and why solar panel installers didn’t mention it.

Only older, analogue meters are affected. They often date back for decades and were not designed to cope with householders generating their own electricity and selling it.

One reason installers may not mention it is that, because no one knew it would happen, an instruction to change mains meters was never part of the procedures on their Microgeneration Certification Scheme.

And, it must be said, on the quiet, a lot of people welcome the idea of their meter running backwards and have no wish to push for the extra expense of a replacement meter.

But, be warned, it could land you with an unexpected bill for the electricity you have used.

Although the supplier only has a right to charge retrospectively for a maximum of one year’s usage.