Going Solar - Post-installation

Part VI - Post-installation

My service provider was and is AGL. I had trouble getting them to do anything before the installation. But after, getting on to the account portal, I got a pleasant surprise. Plenty of details on my usage!

The long wait for installation was getting a bit dull so I thought I would get things started with my service provider. I started with picking a tariff and calling a rep. No luck. They will not talk to me about a solar tariff till it has been registered as a new connection. That's OK, I called new connections and told them about my imminent installation. No luck again. I need to have it installed and operational before they would call it a new connection or lift a finger about it.

So once the installation was complete, I gave them a call. Looks like it will take them a week to 'enable' my meter and it will cost me $165. This is bit of a pain - I can see it is a net meter and they probably just need to click on a button on a screen to make it work. A week later it happened - same meter, if someone came in to do something I wouldn't know. Once that was done, I moved over to a solar tariff. A few days later, I logged on to my web portal to check my tariff. etc and selected Usage. And instead of the usual screen, I got this strange orange screen that was not there the last time I logged in.

Clicked through and there was a whole bunch of page that were not there when I did not have a solar panel. One of the pages is a summary of my usage, the costs, the bill and a comparison with similar homes.

There is also a screen that shows the weekly usage graph. It shows the power drawn from the grid and the power fed back into the grid for each day. There is a summary of the figures for the week alongside the same stats for the previous week.

Usage in KWh is useful but not a good predictor of your bill. The energy you feed back is credited at a flat (and low) rate. Your consumption, on the other hand (if you are on a time-of-day tariff), is charged depending on the time you are consuming it. But the interface also shows you your position in terms of dollars charged.

There is a monthly and a daily version.

Besides the usage charges, don't forget the daily charge that is a fixed amount. This is not included in the graph as the small print below will explain.

Kudos to AGL for providing an insight into my daily usage both in terms of KWh and $s. I suspect this was first put out for their business customers and then rolled out to their retail customers like me. How do I know? The session times out pretty quickly and it then throws you into a login screen for business customers! Go back to the account login page where it does not remember your user id and you have to type it in and soon you are back in. The opening page also gives you the bill you have racked up so far - not sure how accurate that is. The graph is also a bit delayed - with me it is well past noon before I can access the data for the previous day.