I resisted for a few years after a very painful experience with first generation smart electric meter, which saw my bill go from £90 to £350 a month. I ended up leaving that supplier as the only way to resolve the billing issues ( to which I got a full refund after dragging the CEO into the discussion). I have solar PV installed for the last 9 yrs and was hesitant when approached by current provider to switch over to smart meters. After a lot of surfing various forums and user groups, the consensus was that the incumbent was installing 2nd Gen meters and those with Solar PV had no problems. I invested in a small monitoring computer (EmonPI a raspberry pi derivitive) which monitors both my solar output and my intake from the grid and ran this for about 6months comparing the data with that of the solar and grid meters. I found it to be remarkably accurate with only a small difference between them, not great enough to get bent out of shape.
So I bit the bullet and went ahead with the smart meters, a year later no problems and the checks between the monitors is within the same tolerances as previously observed. Solar is not interfering or being miss interpreted and I no longer get estimated readings for Gas & Electric. The solar is still a manual reading supplied by me every quarter via the website!
The bottom line is that you can check if your current supplier has any known issues with Solar installations and there smart meter offerings. Including sim coverage for their chosen network.
I have spent the last 30yrs working in IT systems and have had experience in setting up billing systems for energy companies. With this background I'm comfortable with how these systems and services work and nothing has changed from the customer perspective other than manual metering only occurs once a year as a means of checking that the systems are reporting correctly and have not been interfered with.
Rgds
Lumpy
