I have a friend who has been involved in a long saga with Alinta, and, as part of her sleuthing, seems to have uncovered (separate from her own issue) the fact that many of the smart meters installed in SA have been set to AEST time. This means that the Time of Use tariff times are out from what is advertised.
This sounds as if it could be rather a big deal. Can anyone suggest where it should go from here?
If the meters are on AEST, one would also needs to be able to confirm that the time and associated usage wasn’t adjusted to SA time for billing purposes. A time adjustment is a relatively straight forward process…shifting time to correlate to SA time.
But would it be possible to adjust billing after the fact, if it’s not known how much was used in the half hour which should be in the other part?
Ah, I think I know what you mean actually.
I wouldn’t think the clock time on the meter would be an issue. The electricity company would apply a time zone offset of 30 minutes for SA.
If they didn’t use an offset then twice a year an army of meter setters would have to go out to every place to reset the clock on every meter for daylight savings time.
Ah yes, that’s a point!
I’ll try and explain it a bit better.
The usage will be time stamped. If it is to AEST at the meter, it can be very easy to change the time stamp by 30 minutes to adjust when the usage occurred.
For example, if usage was 1kW for the period to 1pm AEST, this can automatically be changed for billing to 1kW for the period to 12.30pm.
The comment at 2:00 in states all Australian smart meters are set to AEST.
As @phb indicated, the correction to local time is done at the receiving/billing side.
