Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
As a solar owner, monitoring your solar system has huge benefits. It helps you make sure that your system is working properly, see what's using the most energy and can even show you how to save more money. Saving money is - of course - why most people get solar and it's why Solar Analytics pays careful attention to ensuring your savings are easy to understand and accurate.
Calculating savings accurately relies on having your electricity plan accurately entered into your Solar Analytics Dashboard, and making sure it's kept up to date -- tariffs inevitably change. This is where Solar Analytics' new automated tariffs feature comes in handy; it takes the hassle out of updating fiddly plan details, so you can sit back and relax while your savings grow.
Solar Analytics is the first company accredited to collect data from retail electricity meters through the CDR/Open Energy federal government initiative. By connecting directly to your electricity meter, we can retrieve your latest electricity plan details and update your Solar Analytics dashboard with that information. As your rates change over time, we’ll automatically update your Dashboard so it’s always up-to-date and accurate.
The only thing Solar Analytics customers need to do is provide consent for us to collect your data this way; everything else is completely automated.
Automatic plan updates are available for all existing and new Solar Analytics customers as long as you:
Best of all, this is included - for free - with your Solar Analytics subscription.
Being a new program, not all electricity retailers are participating yet and you do need a smart meter (which some older solar systems may not have. If your meter needs to be manually read every few months, it's a basic meter. The good news is that your electricity retailer will likely upgrade your meter for free.
All Solar Analytics customers will continue to have the option to manually update their tariffs if they prefer to do so.
It’s also fair to say that almost everyone involved in CDR/Open Energy is learning as we go (because this is brand new, groundbreaking stuff!) so there have been a few small glitches along the way, and many of the electricity retailers are still getting their data flowing properly.
If your site is eligible, you'll be able to see an option to 'Add plan automatically' on the Electricity Bill page of your Dashboard. Once you hit that button, a new tab will open and you can log in with your electricity retailer to give consent to share your data with Solar Analytics. Check out our help page for more information.
If you've already given your consent to add consumption data using CDR, your plan should be automatically updated.
