Why Your Prepaid Electricity Meter Doesn't Work With Your Inverter And What To Do About It
In South Africa, prepaid electricity meters have become somewhat of a tenuous refuge from utility monopoly price gouging. In Johannesburg, you can expect to hand over around R1000 (about US$55 at the time of writing) for a post-paid electricity connection before even using a single unit of power, a number that has steadily increased over the years. Given this fixed cost alone could purchase the equivalent of around 400 kWh of usage on the same connection, many people, especially solar users, have switched to prepaid meter connections. Prepaid connections, typically have no or much lower fixed monthly connection costs, at the expense of higher per-unit pricing, which is of course, ideal for solar users. An issue that tends to crop up fairly frequently with solar users that have existing or switch to prepaid meters is intermittent or non-functioning of the Customer Interface Unit (CIU). The CIU is the mobile /battery backed unit typically installed indoors that contains a display an...