Not so Smart Meter?

When Octopus installed both an electric 'smart' meter and a gas 'smart' meter for my flat, they could not get a local in-house display to work. The distance from the meters to the flat was maybe 15 feet.

Ask for an Octopus mini

https://octopus.energy/blog/octopus-home-mini/

I specifically wanted an IHD that read the signals going to the Mother Ship, not one that used my non-existent 'smart' 'phone.

I can see my Octopus smart meter on my network. That's about it. It resists attempts to sneak in :)

I can sign in to my Octopus account on the internet on my PC and view usage, but that is not the same as the IHD that was promised, but could not be made to work, with no believable explanation. But I don't need it, it was just that I had asked for it, but it didn't work.

It's no consolation, but our gas meter is about 15ft from the electricity meter, but both read fine on the IHD.

Since having it fitted I have yet to locate the mythical device(s) that are stealing power when I'm not looking. But as the fitter casually remarked they were never intended to save people money.

The mini can act as a “signal booster” thanks to its mesh capabilities improving reception from both gas and electricity meters.

Tim

Odd. Having a smart meter has saved me an enormous amount of money. Without one I wouldn’t have access to anything like the same range of tariffs with low off peak rates.

Tim

The big problem with Octopus's smart meter - and maybe all smart meters

- is that the IHD doesn't give a detailed graph or usage figures, *with a scale*, to show how your usage varies throughout the day. There is a bar chart of usage for each day of the last week, but they only show a numerical value for the highest bar, and you have to interpolate all the other days' usages. A table as well as a bar chart would be so much better.

And the daily (midnight to midnight) figures take forever to be reported on the Octopus app and website - well into the following day, and sometimes into the day afterwards.

I found an app called geoHome which can talk to my IHD and give me current usage, graph of usage throughout the day and midnight-to-midnight usage shortly after midnight (when on GMT) or after

So during the winter, geoHome doesn't show me gas usage any earlier than the very delayed figures from Octopus themselves. I tend to read the cumulative reading at about 1000 each day and subtract those to give an estimate of daily usage, and then correct that figure in my spreadsheet once the Octopus figures finally get reported.

I'm not sure what Octopus do with the data between midnight which is the cutoff for the previous day's usage and maybe 1200-1800 when they finally report that day's usage.

My previous one was better than the current one, something like 5 minute bars for current day (reduced to half hour for gas), daily bars for current week, weekly bars for current quarter and monthly bars for previous year.

EDF's website does give similar functionality after the event, though it never agrees with the actual smartmeter display.

Which is why I always put 'smart', not just: smart.

My house's water meter suffers from almost every other day not having a connection to Basecamp, so half of the readings are estimated. And the website reports only calculated use, not actual readings. No IHD was offered, if there are any for water supplies. Every home that I lived in in the US had a remote readout somewhere outdoors. As far as I know, the counter was activated by some piezo or something trigger in the actual meter itself. They have probably all been replaced by something more technological but also more complex and less reliable.

Once a metering scheme is defined here, it doesn't usually change.

There is still a remote readout for the water. There is no need to change a scheme if "it works". A truck drives down the road once a month, and "radio-pings" the remote on the side of the house, and collects the reading. The cable between the mechanical meter and the remote box, has a "pulse" interface. It's just a switch closure or so. The "register" on the face of the water meter in the basement, is the "authoritative" reading so gaming the external device doesn't help you. The remote on the side of the house, has a "ten year battery" in it. Which is currently a lot more than ten years old.

Paul

I didn't need a smart meter to gauge the correct tariff.

And the cost of switching to a variable tariff would outweigh any savings. We have no load I can timeshift. All of which the fitter noted - hence his remark.

If you feel happy with linux and bash you can pull your data back from Octopus

curl -u "YOUR_API_KEY:" "https://api.octopus.energy/v1/electricity-meter-points/1234567890123/meters/19P1234567/consumption/"

or something like that - this is something ChatGPT can manage :)

Back in the mid 80s and later, trucks didn't drive down the road and radio-ping the remote readouts. They were read by folks hopping from property to property using the chain-link fences as springboards. The electric and gas meters were read in the same way, they were usually outdoors. The remote water meter readouts might have had batteries, but they looked purely mechanical, just like old-style electric meters were. They certainly did not have electric displays, LCD or anything similar.

It’s not about “gauging”, it’s about having access to.

Maybe you don’t, but many other people do, so your fitter is wrong.

Tim

curl is widely available, even on Windows. Or use powershell.

The device on the side of the house, is just a radio unit, a radio unit that does not run continuously. The radio sleeps until a powerful enough ping hits it, so the receiver is unlikely to be amplified. There is no LCD readout on it.

The gas meter, the reader still leaps over snowbanks to get to it. That one is mechanical.

Only the Lekky has a smart meter, and it has just the one "register" on the front, suited to taking manual readings if there was a reason to do so. The radio works continuously on that (claimed to operate every 15 minutes, but the radio interface is more alive than that). The radio scheme would not work, if you were on a 160 acre farm and the farm house was in the center of the plot. Works for everyone in towns. (Uses Store and Forward protocol, to an edge collector.) Has a two year memory and a readout port on the front (optical).

The only complaints on the electric meters, are coming from rural people who have trouble getting the meter reader person, to come out and take a reading. Using a lot of "estimates" for bills, sucks as a method. You cannot phone in a front-register reading, as it is TOD usage and consists of many readings to be collected via the optical interface, with a hand-held readout box.

Overall, things have not advanced all that much.

Paul

The last place I lived in, for 15 years until 2010, was in Michigan. The wired water external readout was read by a person, as were all others that I ever knew. The electric was a bog-standard unit, a mechanical whirling disc behind a plastic window, that was identical to every other one I had ever seen in the US. The ancient gas meter was physically inside the house, in the basement, and was read by a man who came to visit once a month. In 2010, nobody talked about 'smart' meters.

In one place we lived, rented, in 1991, the electric meter didn't work. It took several months before, one evening, there was a knock at the door, and there was a man there holding a new meter, and he warned us that the power would be off for a few minutes while he removed the old one and installed the one in his hand. He put a new seal on the meter housing. That meter was, as usual, on the rear outside wall of the house, usually read by fence-jumping men.