Metered load

A consumer with a meter on it, next to the unmetered remainder. The base load stops being the whole house and becomes what is left after the metered draw — including when the meters disagree and there is nothing left.

What this case shows

• A metered consumer gets its own provenance row; the remainder is the home base load.
• A metered draw larger than what the sources supply is balanced by meeting in the middle: the sources move up, the load moves down, and the base load is exactly zero.
• A zeroed base load still publishes a share row, of zeros.

Each snapshot below is one set of readings on this wiring, drawn as a flow chart — how to read it.

Load and base load

Metered load · snapshot 01

cons1 draws 500 W of the 1400 W entering the house; the other 900 W is unmetered.

Reading	W	Of gross	Share	Made of
Gross power	1400 W	1		grid 800 W · pv1 600 W
Grid import	800 W	4/7		grid 800 W
Grid export	0 W	0		nothing exported
PV production	600 W	3/7		pv1 600 W
Charging power	0 W	0		no battery charging
Discharging power	0 W	0		no battery discharging
Standby power	0 W	0		no standby draw
Self-consumption	1400 W	1		grid 800 W · pv1 600 W
Metering imbalanceok	0 W	0		readings reconcile exactly
Home base load	900 W	9/14		unmetered remainder of consumption

Ribbon widths are watts in every view. Hover, focus or tap a ribbon to see the sensor behind it.

Over-metered

Metered load · snapshot 02

cons1 reads 400 W while the sources supply 300 W — the meters were sampled at different moments. No meter is trusted over another: the grid and pv1 move up by 8/7 and cons1 down by 6/7, to about 343 W on both sides, and the 100 W gap is the metering imbalance.

Reading	W	Of gross	Share	Made of
Gross power	342.9 W	1		grid 100 W · pv1 200 W
Grid import	100 W	7/24		grid 100 W
Grid export	0 W	0		nothing exported
PV production	200 W	7/12		pv1 200 W
Charging power	0 W	0		no battery charging
Discharging power	0 W	0		no battery discharging
Standby power	0 W	0		no standby draw
Self-consumption	342.9 W	1		grid 114.3 W · pv1 228.6 W
Metering imbalanceunexplained	100 W	7/24		metered sinks drew more than the sources supplied; the engine balances the readings
Home base load	0 W	0		unmetered remainder of consumption

100 W of the readings is not explained by the other meters (hatched); the ribbons follow the engine's balanced flows.Ribbon widths are watts in every view. Hover, focus or tap a ribbon to see the sensor behind it.

Why this case exists

Up to this rung the home base load was the house. Putting a meter on one device splits it in two, and the interesting half is the one nobody measured: the base load is not read from anything, it is what is left when the metered draw is taken off the total.

Being derived is what makes it fragile, and the second snapshot is where it breaks. cons1 reports drawing 400 W while the sources between them supply only 300 W. No arrangement of real electrons does that — it is two sensors disagreeing, a scaling factor set wrong, or readings from different instants — and the engine has to publish something. It clamps: the base load floors at zero rather than going negative, and still publishes a share row, of zeros.

Whether a zero row is the right answer there, as against publishing nothing at all the way an unavailable sensor does, is a fair thing to disagree with. It is recorded here so the disagreement has somewhere to point.