Smartmeter battery finally dead

It's not necessarily "their" meters.

Possibly watch

Thanks, I think I watched half of that a few months ago ...

"unfortunately we are unable to replace the battery on the smart meter"

More e-waste ...

Looking at my meter, it seems more like a "do it on the bench" job, rather than an on-site one,

It could be an unsubtle way of enforcing regular meter changes, which undoubtedly will be good for company profits gained at yet another cost to the Poor Bloody Consumer.

Is there anything at all in the electricity supply industry that doesn’t go through half-a-dozen companies (if not countries) before landing in the PBC’s letter/in box by way of an increased bill??

I believe the mini and the smart meter need to be paired by Octopus before they’re sent out.

Tim

I think I'll let EDF replace the meters first (removes the complication of changing supplier while no readings are available) and consider Octopus later ...

Back in the day, they wouldn't recalibrate analogue meters. They'd do a meter swap, take the old one back to base and recalibrate it there. Then it was ready for a meter swap for the next customer. Maybe the same happens with batteries?

Although with SMETS1 they might want to retire it so they don't need to support the SMETS1 network indefinitely.

Theo

They should speak to any.

Are you north or south of the Great Divide? ;-)

I don't usually watch Panorama, but tonight's programme might be interesting.

Yes, saw that article, I'm in the Central region (which is grouped with South region) didn't have any comms issues while my meter was still smart, but it's been dumb for about a decade now.

Today was the allotted day, bloke phones up 30 mins before arriving, does a decent job, tests everything before after, supposedly the comms hub (fitted to top of elec meter) was speaking to the mothership at the time he left

But the IHD (2ft from gas meter and 12ft from elec) was only scanning/pairing, waiting, rinse/repeat, he got bored waiting after about 20 mins. After he left I took the IHD out to the garage (2 ft from elec and 12ft from gas) rebooted it and it connected within a couple of minutes.

I have various other zigbee devices dotted around, some of which are repeaters, do devices only benefit from repeaters on the same PAN, or do repeaters work between PANs?

Bloke says current models can have battery replaced in-situ, we'll see in 14 years time!

Meanwhile the IHD displays ridiculous levels of precision, current gas usage showing at 1.021 p/hr

The precision is probably spurious, just created by the current gas price and the smallest “quantum” amount gas consumption your meter is capable of registering.

Tim

I /think/ in Zigbee you need to be joined onto the network to act as a repeater, but don't quote me on that.

I think if you have another device on the HAN, like an Octopus Mini, then it can act as repeater - eg put it halfway between electric meter and IHD and it'll relay.

Theo

As I mentioned, the IHD struggled to join the HAN when it was positioned in the house near the gas meter, you could see it flipping between two channels, you could see the PAN ID, not sure whether that is fixed, or picks a random value?

I rebooted the IHD a couple of times, but it still didn't join, so I moved it near to the electric meter in the garage, which I'd expect to be the co-ordinator node? It did soon join the HAN, with the same ID I'd seen before.

At that time, the IHD stopped showing the scanning/pairing screen, but it only showed data from the gas meter, at which point I brought it back into the house. I left it alone and next time I checked it was showing data from both meters (but it didn't know the MPRN numbers of them) each meter received a "welcome to EDF" message

Overnight it did learn the MPRNs (not sure if over zigbee, or over O2)

No readings from the new meters have arrived in their webpage yet, for now I've changed it from 30 days to 30 minutes readings.

Signal strength within the home shows as a good number of bars on the IHD, it has a battery so I could wander round with it.

Still deciding whether to move to Octopus, changing supplier while unable to provide a final gas reading seemed like a bad idea, still don't know whether EDF are going to do anything about the "gap" from the manual reading I gave on 30th Sept and when they could book the meter change, so far they've charged less for gas in oct/nov/part-dec than for jul/aug/sep

I suspect they'll just leave it at that, the history of manual readings is all good, but the amounts charged is a hot mess due to them migrating from their own system to kraken, some amounts have been reversed, re-reversed and re-re-reversed three times!

Apparently I get free electricity on Sundays if I stay with EDF.

I don't think the gas meter does Zigbee, it's doing something lower power to send readings every 30 mins to the electric meter (868MHz?) and then the radio sleeps the rest of time. So the IHD is simply 'far from the HAN node' when it's near the gas meter.

It can take a while for the provisioning info to filter through. It seems like it only goes out in batches and, since the DCC network is fairly low bandwidth, it can take a while. It's possible the IHD needed a firmware update or something which needs bandwidth on the DCC.

The Octopus Tracker rates have gone up a fair bit - the last couple of weeks have been above the price cap if you're on the current (October 2024 v1) tariff, and there have been a few days it's been over on the old tariff (December 2023 v1) - ~40p/kWh on Thursday. So I think its usefulness depends on your usage patterns through the year. Other tariffs may suit your needs better.

The 'free electric for N hours on Sundays' sounds like a bit of a gimmick, ie just a part of the tariff, although it could fit some people's usage patterns. Octopus give us free electric for a few hours a week when it's sunny or windy locally (we have wind and solar farms nearby) - that's still a trial but they've started doing that nationally when it is very windy.

Theo

Given that the IHD receives two readings/hour, it is noticeable when the heating is off (pilot light on) the gas meter only registers 134, 146,

Using the usual fudge factor of 38 x 1.02264 / 3.6, 11Wh corresponds to

And finally the readings have begun appearing within EDF's system, but the correspondence between the IHD daily costs and the website daily costs is poor

meters were fitted on thurs, so ignore that partial day

fri £1.76 vs £4.30 sat £4.30 vs £2.73 sun £3.50 vs £3.50 mon £3.50 vs £3.09

A common issue. If you’re on a flat rate your IHD stands a reasonable chance of reasonably accurately showing your actual spend. If you’re on a dual rate or half-variable rate you might as well stick the IHD in a drawer and forget about it.

Tim