(the original identities of the clients have been obscured to protect privacy)
Hi, I'm a landlord using PNPSCADA to bill my tenants using your Smart Prepaid feature, and they are complaining. Here is a typical complaint:
(translated from Afrikaans with Google Translate)

We have a revolt on our hands! Please help.

Oh my Goodness!
Can you imagine the pain they must be going through.
Of course I realize that the reason why you went for Smart Prepaid in the first place, is because the body corporates were losing money on the Time of Use (TOU) tariffs, as opposed to the normal Prepaid rates. So you went Smart Prepaid, so that you can ask your tenants TOU as well. This being said, it must therefore be accepted by yourself that your rates would look higher, because they are higher.
In general, politically, I think it was a bad move to move to Prepaid at the start of High Season. I don't know how to fix that now. What do you think? Probably to go forwards, rather than backwards. Just Communicate a lot. Run a lot of Provisional Bills, you could even show people on the daily breakdown graph how they have increased their power use, and also a small writeup of the tariffs being almost double, perhaps some articles you've found somewhere? Perhaps show them your bill from [your billing authority] and how much it has gone up: transfer their anger to your billing authority away from yourself. Unfortunately that would probably only be available at the end of the month?

Once again, sending a Provisional Bill for May, and one for June, and the Daily Consumption breakdown from 1 May to 11 June will be a start. Like with the last ones. Her Ledger has deducted exactly as expected from the Provisional Bill.
Once again, helping rather than fighting is probably the best thing to do: The use of sending her the Provisional Bills are also to a large extent so that she can see the physical serial number of the physical meter. If her meter is wired correctly, it should therefore show the same consumption as the check meter she is getting her electrician to install.
In her case, the power usage did go down slightly, but not by much. She is on the right track, which is to try and understand how it is possible for her to use so much electricity, and she lists a whole bunch of appliances that she is not using. She only needs convincing that the problem is not the charging of inflated rates, or that you're looking at the wrong meter, which the Provisional Bills should address.
I think she needs to be encouraged. She has shown that she is willing to save power, and in that sense she is one of the few good guys. If someone can tell her that you can see that she has tried to use less energy, that her efforts are appreciated, but that there is still something else using the electricity, and suggest ways to help her find the device that is using the power, perhaps she will become positive. Maybe it is worth it to invest some time in her to turn her into an advocate. Maybe she could help stem the tide of the revolt. You need to convince her that you are not the problem, but that the problem is out there, and that you are willing to support her to help her to find it.
First strategy to help her:
Look at her profile graph, see what is wrong. Then phone her. Discuss her usage pattern with her. If she has access to the profile graph, get her to open it while you are on the phone with her, and you're both looking at the graph, and then you can ask her the tough questions about her behavior like: "What are you doing 3am every morning?" This would make her pause and think and look at herself. Which is what you want. At the moment her efforts are directed against you. You need to change it so her efforts are directed to her own situation, so she can do some good.
If you look at her graph, you'll see that she has a lot of use 3am every morning. Sometimes that same load seems to activate at other times also, e.g. 2013-06-06 23:30 and 2013-06-03 22:00 and 2013-06-01 19:30 which was a Saturday, and 2013-05-31 06:30 which was a Friday morning during Peak, but usually it is 3am in the morning. You can even ask her about what she was doing those days, in an effort to find out what is causing this load. What does she do at this time? Is it her washing machine? Is her geyser on some kind of a timer? She seems to be pretty predictable.
My first guess is that it is her geyser. That the rest of her energy use is negligible, that she is really only paying for that geyser. To put this another way: all the effort she is spending switching off lights is rather sad, because it is relatively ineffective. She is spending a lot of effort 'doing the right thing', but blindly, which means she ends up attacking the wrong problem, and then when it doesn't work she blames you, which is unfair.
Below under 'Other strategies', I explain some ways to find the offending appliance. However, the problem with the geyser is that it switches on and off all the time, so it could be that you try its switch at a time when it was off anyway, and then you decide - in error - that it is not the problem, because you don't see a drop in energy use. So if the problem is the geyser, you'd be wasting your time walking around the house switching off things, looking for the problem. In her case, judging from her profile graph, she can only do this effectively at 3h30 in the morning.
Perhaps, if she eats at her parents, she can also bath there, for a week? Switch off her geyser totally, for a week - or even 2 days - and see the difference in her profile graph. You can judge whether she will be open to that challenge or not.
If she is willing to try that, then she will know for sure whether the problem is her geyser. If it is her geyser, she can do various strategies to handle that: wrap the geyser in some kind of isolation like pink aerolite (if it is very hot to the touch, it is radiating energy, losing energy, so wrap it up); but nowadays geysers tend to be more efficient. A Solar geyser is another option. Another option is to install a gas geyser: this will possibly be cheaper, but there will be an inconvenience factor. Or she can just set the reostat on her geyser to be a few degrees colder, or she can get a smaller geyser.
Perhaps a combination of factors: is it her washing machine that uses all that hot water so early in the morning? Get a different washing machine, use Skip for goodness sake (it washes with cold water, doesn't it?:-) )
. . .
But your job is not to fix her energy problem, your job is to get her thinking about her own energy problem constructively.
So don't be discouraged if this discussion with her seems pointless to you or going on forever: for you the discussion, the building a good relationship with her and getting her to think about her own energy use in a positive way IS the whole purpose of the exercise. To defuse the situation at [the complex in question] of people not wanting to pay their electricity. And to fix this 'soft' problem, there has to be a lot of good quality communication, with the tenants in general but also with specific tenants like Mrs [name hidden to protect privacy], with lots of facts, to help educate them to be able to make their own situation better.
Other strategies:
We could do a real time display for her in a web page while she walks around the house switching off appliances, until she finds the one that causes the biggest 'jump'. (in practice she would first switch various switches on her switchboard to find the one that takes the most power) We have a real time display page... perhaps we can make an easier to use one, or one you can easily run on your smart phone? The best update rates I could get for her energy register is every 3 minutes. For instance I could see her energy register advancing from 1532.87072kWh at 03:59 to 1533.017452kWh at 04:02. So in 3 minutes, she was using 0.146732 kWh, in the middle of the night. That is about 3kWh every hour! In the middle of the night. Perhaps her geyser was on at that moment, so it is possible. (When I looked at the profile, I saw she does tend to use a lot of energy at about 3am every morning, so this is about right) It is possible that the best thing she can do for her electricity use is to wrap her geyser in Pink Aerolite, lol.
If it is not the geyser, if it is another appliance, one can also try to use something like an OWL (http://www.theowl.co.za/); which is available at Radiant (they don't sell directly to the public, but a local dealer in Bloemfontein is

African Lighting & Electrical Wholesalers Bloemfontein Tel: 051 444 5695/6 Email: sales@africanlighting.com

The Owl would enable you to measure separate appliances and see a real time use indication in a little LCD display, on site.
Hope the above helps!