It is not news that analog meters are gradually being replaced by digital meters and smart meters. What is even more disturbing is that tens of thousands of electronic meters from the manufacturer Holley now have to be replaced due to a defect.
Tens of thousands of meters now need to be replaced – are you affected?
The time it took to replace Holley’s faulty electricity meters could have been used to replace more meters. In many places, people are still waiting to have their meters replaced so they can connect to balcony power plants or larger photovoltaic systems. Especially in large cities, it can be months before the required meter replacement is made.
Tens of thousands of electricity meters are faulty: Holly no longer calculates electricity consumption
An electricity meter has one basic job: measuring a home’s electricity consumption. Unfortunately, this is precisely the flaw in Holley’s affected models. It means that customers’ consumption can only be estimated rather than precisely measured. It’s not uncommon for these estimates to be far off from actual consumption. Especially in households that have made a lot of changes to their consumption behavior in the past few months. Anyone who has been particularly frugal is likely to come up empty-handed as a result of this effect. For PV system owners, the system’s output can only be estimated based on the hours of sunshine.
As reported by the Nordwest-Zeitung, the affected meters are DTZ541-ZEBA devices. After only a short period of operation, the display on the models is supposed to fail, meaning that the meter reading can no longer be read. In the region of the network operator EWE alone, 25,000 meters of this type from the Chinese manufacturer Holley have already been installed. In Germany as a whole, there are likely to be more people affected, as other network operators, including network operator Süwag, have also reported outages. As a precaution, the affected providers are planning to replace all meters of this type free of charge, and the network operators are already in correspondence with affected customers to coordinate appointments.
How to protect yourself from electricity meter error?
Unfortunately, there aren’t many steps you can take to protect yourself if your electricity meter fails. If a smart meter transmits data regularly, your network operator will probably have data at least up to the point where the failure occurred. But so far, smart meters only make up a small percentage of all electricity meters in Germany. To get your own overview, it might make sense to take a photo of your meter reading every few months. This means that you don’t just have proof for your energy supplier of how high the meter reading is at any given time. If you have several such photos, you can get a more accurate estimate of your actual energy consumption. At the very least, you don’t run the risk of ending up empty-handed despite your extensive saving measures. In addition, a regular look at your electricity meter can serve as a self-monitoring tool. For example, whether you’re actually saving electricity by investing in new appliances or have fallen victim to the so-called rebound effect.
