Setting up an IHD3 electrisity monitor

Grrr! For IDH read IHD!

Most IHDs need explicit pairing with the smart meter by the energy supplier

- this isn't something you can DIY. The account holder will need to contact them and ask if they can pair it - if they can do it, they will want the MAC address written on the IHD so make sure the caller has it to hand.

Not sure what the wifi is doing here - most IHDs aren't on wifi because they are just for local display of the information sent from the meter.

(third party displays which download data from the DCC via the internet exist, from the likes of Hildegard. But I don't think you have one of those)

Theo

About a year after we had smart meters installed our IHD started to display the waiting for data message, at the same time our utilities provider kept asking me to read the gas meter as they had difficulty reading it and It took several software upgrades including an engineer visit and me complaining about constantly reaching into an awkward cupboard before they decided to change the meter. The engineer who eventually changed the meter found the battery powering the communication with the electric meter was dead. Since fitting the new gas meter we have had no further problems except I sometimes think when I look at the IHD that I was better off not knowing how much we use.

IHDs are paired with your meters at the time of installation. I don’t think you have any chance of pairing them with another meter.

Tim

Hmm. When my smart meter was installed, a few years ago now, I was given a Chameleon smart meter IHD that displayed electricity use only (i.e. excluding gas). Fast forward a year or so, and my gas meter was changed to send data to my smart meter as well, but the installer said that my electricity-only IHD would no longer work. I subsequently bought a Chameleon IHD that would display both, and set it up myself. It works OK.

I don't remember the details of setting it up, but I have recently re-set-up the earlier IHD as well, and it sits next to the later one and the electricity numbers are the same on both meters.

But I don't know where either meter is getting its data from. I know that I had to press the 'pair device' WPS button on the side of my BT smart Hub6 to get the older one to work. Does that mean both of my IHDs are getting their data from the BT smart hub rather than directly from the smart meter?

Does any of that sound sensible?

Short version: you need to talk to the energy supplier.

Long version:

There are two devices which may look the same but work differently:

An 'In Home Display' is something that talks to the meter via Zigbee and shows your live consumption, plus some historical information (current spend this day/week/month/etc). IHDs only come from your energy supplier and don't talk to the internet.

A 'Consumer Access Device' (CAD) is a third party device that pairs with your meter via Zigbee and does 'something' with the live meter data. Often that involves some kind of internet connection and may involve their own display. These devices are provided outside of the smart metering contractual relationship (customer - supplier - DCC) and are just indicative: they aren't used for billing[*].

What you bought is a Chameleon CAD that also includes the IHD functions. The internet part means it can also send your meter reads to the Chameleon server and/or fetch your metering history from the DCC (via their server).

Chameleon confusingly make IHDs (the IHD3 is an example) and IHDs with integrated CAD (eg the IHD6 and IHD7).

So when you take a supplier-provided IHD from one place to another, there is no internet connection to set up because it is not a CAD. But it won't work unless the supplier pairs it with the meter, which they probably won't. You should ask the supplier for a new IHD instead.

It appears the CAD part of a purchased IHD6 can talk to the Chameleon and/or supplier's servers via the internet, but it's a closed ecosystem driven by the supplier. ie it seems you can't use the IHD6 outside of an existing relationship with a supplier - it doesn't look like you can port an IHD6 from one installation to another, which you can with other brands of CAD.

Theo

Thanks for all that. I need to study it carefully to fully understand it, but I do get the 'short version'!

PS: is there any way in determining from where an IHM is getting its signal, the meter or the router?

IHDs only get data from the meter - they don't talk to the router.

CADs get their data from the meter but may have an additional internet connection to upload the data to their vendor's servers.

While it is possible to make a device that doesn't talk to the meter at all but fetches historical metering data from the internet (yesterday, last week, etc, but not from right now), these are more commonly implemented as mobile apps.

Theo

I had been under the impression that only one IHD could be connected to my smart meter, but a bit of research has revealed that that only applies to earlier meters, pre 2018 SMETS1 types. Recent SMETS2 meters are able to support up to four IHD's which is why both my IHD's can be used at the same time.

Thanks for sticking with me and your answers.

I bought a used IHD7 last week on ebay, and the seller supplied the GPUID- it has yet to be delivered. I emailed Octopus on Friday, quoting the GPUID, explaining I had bought a used IHD7, and they replied this morning, suggesting they will enable it to work with my meters.