Even if your local municipality hasn’t yet implemented the best and latest equipment and strategies in metering, they are likely to follow suit of the current development in Smart Metering at some point. When that happens, can your sub-meters stand up to the challenge of smart metering and accurate billing to match your bulk supply?

If you are still installing “old type” meters, we believe you should evaluate this strategy. The municipal metering industry is showing their efforts to move to smart metering by installing pilot installations of thousands of Smart Meters.

Smart Meters have advanced capabilities including the often spoken about tariff called Time-of-Use (ToU) whereby you will be charged different tariffs at different times.

What does this means for your sub-meters? If you are paying certain tariffs on your bulk supply your sub-meters must match that.

Let’s see a small example of who this may work:

Your bulk supply has moved to ToU tariff and you have an entire complex of 50 flats that have sub-meters. You need to make sure that all the 50 receive accurate billing otherwise you may under or over change by large amounts. Both cases can have very unpleasant consequences. So to solve this problem you will now need to read 50 meters in the exact intervals of the tariff change.

If your ToU tariff is read automatically at 05:00, 12:00 pm and 19:00 pm respectively then you need to read the exact consumption for all the 50 meters at that EXACT time so have accurate billing. It stands to reason that you will not be able to do that with human resources as you will need 50 people to sit at the meter and read the meter at that exact hour when the tariff changes over.

This means that you will need to have meters which automatically read the data correctly for you and provide the data in a manageable format. This is the same for both post paid billing and prepaid meters. Without going into the complexities we will say here that, post paid billing with the correct meters will be far easier to achieve. Prepayment on the other hand is far more complex due to the fact that the resident have paid in advance and before they use of the khw’s electricity. This means that you will need some complex algorithms to enable you to do prepayment on the new Smart Technologies.

Here at PrepaidMeters.co.za we have been working with smart prepaid meters or the applications thereof for several years now. Working with international clients and standards that were brought to our attention before the African market had considered piloting these technologies.

We recommend all managing agent, letting agents, landlords and anyone that deals with sub-metering in any way to start looking at the future as we believe the future of smart metering is here now. It will not be long before all sub-metering companies and sub-meters will need to comply with Smart Metering Standards.

If you need advice or assistance with sub-metering, software and technologies we are here to assist.