EAC Smart Meters in Cyprus: What Solar Owners Should Know

Somewhere in Cyprus this month an EAC crew is swapping a street's electricity meters for grey Landis+Gyr smart meters. The power goes off for up to twenty minutes, a new box with a small screen appears, and the first question we get from solar customers is the same every time: where did my export reading go?

It is still there. The smart meter records import and export exactly as the old bidirectional meter did, but it shows them differently, it sends them to the EAC on its own, and it keeps a daily history you can look up without a ladder and a torch. For a home with photovoltaics, that is useful once you know which numbers to look at.

This guide covers what the EAC smart meter rollout is, how to read the meter if you have solar panels, what changes (and what does not) under net metering and Net Billing, and what to check on the day your meter is replaced.

The EAC smart meter rollout in brief

The Electricity Authority of Cyprus has been replacing conventional meters island-wide since 2025, district by district, with monthly announcements of the streets and villages scheduled next. The programme is run by the Distribution System Operator side of the EAC, the installation contract was awarded to Cyta in 2024, and it is part-funded by the EU Recovery and Resilience Facility. The published target is 400,000 meters.

A few practical points from the EAC's announcements and manual:

• The meter is a Landis+Gyr E450, in a single-phase and a three-phase version. Both have the same display and buttons.
• The swap takes a short power cut, which the EAC says should not exceed 20 minutes.
• There is no charge to the customer for the new meter.
• Nothing changes in your contract. Your tariff, your net metering or Net Billing agreement and your EAC account number stay as they were. The meter serial number on your bill will change.

What the smart meter shows a solar home

The screen has three parts that matter to a PV owner: the arrows at the top left, the big number in the middle, and the small OBIS code next to it that says what the big number is.

The direction arrows

• +P lit: the house is importing from the grid right now.
• -P lit: the house is exporting to the grid right now. On a sunny afternoon with the air conditioning off, this is the arrow you should see.
• No arrow: no energy is flowing in either direction, which at midday usually means production and consumption happen to match, or the inverter is off.

The +Q and -Q arrows refer to reactive energy. They are not billed and you can ignore them.

The two registers that end up on your bill

The default screen cycles through five readings on its own, changing every five seconds. Two of them are the ones you care about:

• 1.8.0, total incoming energy: every kWh the house has drawn from the EAC grid since the meter was installed. This is the import figure on your bill.
• 2.8.0, total outgoing energy: every kWh your PV system has pushed out to the grid. This is the export figure, and it only appears on bills for premises with a photovoltaic system.

If you were used to writing down registers like 1.8.1 and 1.8.2 from your old meter, those were the day and night registers of a dual-rate tariff. On the E450 they still exist for customers on a day/night tariff, but they live in a submenu. For most solar homes, 1.8.0 and 2.8.0 are the only two numbers you need.

The meter does not record how much your panels produced. It only sees what crossed the boundary of the house. Production lives in your inverter app, and production minus the change in 2.8.0 is what your home used directly from the roof.

The red light and the other symbols

• The red pulse LED flashes faster the more energy is flowing, in either direction. Steadily on means no flow at all. At noon on a clear day a steady red light with the inverter showing production is worth a second look.
• The PLC indicator shows the meter is talking to the EAC's central system. If no arrow appears above PLC, the meter cannot send its readings and your bill will be estimated until a crew fixes the link. The manual asks customers to submit their own readings in the meantime.
• The bell symbol means the meter has detected a critical error. Call the Network User Tele-Service Centre on 1800.
• R1 relates to PV systems that are switched on and off through the meter's own internal contacts. If your system is controlled by a separate receiver, or not controlled at all, the manual says to disregard that field.
• A wrong time or date on the display is not a fault in the energy registers. It means the meter has not yet synchronised its clock with the central system. The 1.8.0 and 2.8.0 readings are still correct.

Reading the submenus: daily import and export history

Press the green display button once and you get a digit check screen. Press again for the Std_Data submenu, which holds instantaneous voltage, current, power and grid frequency, plus the 1.8.1 and 1.8.2 registers for dual-rate customers. Press and hold to enter a submenu, then short presses step through it.

The one worth learning is PROFILE. It stores historical values of the registers, including 1.8.0 and 2.8.0 per day. That means you can stand at the meter and read how many kWh you imported and exported on any recent day, which is exactly the data you need to judge how well a Net Billing system is matched to your consumption. The display drops back to the main screen two minutes after the last press.

If you would rather not stand in the sun, the same data is free online. The EAC's Distribution System Operator portal at meterreading-dso.eac.com.cy lets you register your account and view your historical metering data and profiles. The EAC mobile app shows account details and consumption history as well. Our guide to reading your EAC bill with solar panels explains how those readings turn into euros.

What changes under net metering

If you signed a net metering contract before the scheme closed to new applications in October 2025, you keep it. The smart meter does not move you to Net Billing.

What does change is how the readings are collected. The old meter was read on site every two months, and solar homes were particularly prone to estimated readings (the letter E on the bill) because the pattern of import and export is hard to guess. A smart meter that is communicating sends actual readings, so estimates should become rare. The 36-month clearing of surplus kWh credit, introduced in 2023, applies exactly as before.

One thing the smart meter makes visible is how much you export. Net metering customers rarely looked, because an exported kWh was worth an imported one. If your PROFILE data shows large daily exports in summer and large imports in winter, you are building credit that may expire under the 36-month rule. Shifting loads into daylight, or a battery, uses that energy before it is cleared. See our battery storage service for what that involves.

What changes under Net Billing

Every system connected since 1 January 2026 is on Net Billing, where imported kWh are charged at the full retail tariff and exported kWh are credited in euros at a much lower published rate. The two registers on the smart meter are the two sides of that calculation, and seeing them day by day is the fastest way to understand your bill.

A worked example from a 6 kW system in Paphos on a June day:

• Inverter app: 34 kWh produced.
• 2.8.0 change for the day: 21 kWh exported.
• 1.8.0 change for the day: 9 kWh imported, almost all after 7pm.
• Self-consumption: 34 minus 21, so 13 kWh used directly, about 38% of production.

At roughly €0.30 per imported kWh and about €0.10 per exported kWh, that household paid around €2.70 for the evening and earned about €2.10 for the surplus, on a day the roof made more than three times what the house needed. Move the water heater and the washing machine into the afternoon and the 9 kWh import drops, the export drops by the same amount, and the household keeps about €0.20 more per kWh shifted. A battery does the same job for the evening load without changing habits. Our Net Billing explainer goes through the scheme rules, and the solar savings calculator lets you test different self-consumption levels.

The smart meter does not change how Net Billing is settled. The EAC still bills on the import and export totals for the period, and the annual clearing of leftover export credit still happens in autumn. What the meter adds is the evidence: you no longer have to guess where your energy went.

Smart meters and curtailment

The E450 includes an R1 relay that the manual describes as applying to photovoltaic systems controlled through the meter's internal contacts. The manual itself says to ignore the R1 field if your system is switched by a separate receiver or not at all, and we have not seen residential systems disconnected through the meter relay. Our article on solar curtailment and battery storage explains how curtailment works today and why self-consumption protects against it.

What to do on the day your meter is replaced

• Photograph the old meter before the crew arrives, showing the import and export registers. Your final bill on the old meter is based on those readings, and a photo settles any dispute.
• Expect the inverter to shut down when the supply is cut. Grid-tied inverters must disconnect when the grid disappears, as explained in our guide to solar panels during a power cut. They restart automatically a few minutes after power returns.
• Check the inverter after the crew leaves. Confirm it is producing and that the app shows export. A tripped isolator after a power cut is the most common reason a system stays off.
• Watch for the -P arrow on a sunny afternoon within the first few days. If you only ever see +P while the inverter reports production, call your installer.
• Register on the DSO portal once the meter is communicating, and compare its daily export figure with the inverter app. The two should move together.

If you are a Smart Solar Cyprus customer and anything on the new meter looks wrong, send us a photo of the display and we will check it against your inverter data. We handle net metering and Net Billing connections daily, our maintenance and monitoring service picks up production faults before the bill does, and if you want a system designed around the readings your smart meter will record, ask for a free assessment.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the EAC smart meter change my net metering contract?

No. The meter replacement is a hardware change by the Distribution System Operator. Your net metering agreement, tariff and account continue as before, and your readings are simply transmitted automatically instead of being read on site.

How do I read my solar export on the EAC smart meter?

Wait for the main display to cycle to the reading labelled 2.8.0. That is total energy exported to the grid in kWh. The reading labelled 1.8.0 is total energy imported. The difference between two readings of 2.8.0 is your export for that period, and the PROFILE submenu shows the same figures per day.

Does the smart meter measure how much my panels produce?

No. It only records energy crossing the connection point: import on 1.8.0 and export on 2.8.0. Your production figure comes from the inverter. Production minus export is the energy your home used directly.

Can I refuse the EAC smart meter?

The rollout is island-wide and the EAC's announcements describe the replacement of all meters in each scheduled area. No opt-out procedure has been published. The replacement is free and does not alter your contract.