Smart Meter IHD

[Countrypaul]

We had a holiday recently in Wales and my wife saw that the cottage we stayed in had an IHD linked to the smart meter in the place. Soon as we got back she asked can we get one of those displays, how much do they cost...

Therefore we had a so called Smart Meter fitted yesteday, the engineer was good fitted the meter changed the tails an reterminated all the tails to the Henley blocks, then put a seal on everything he worked on and finally got the IHD setup and showed me it working. Great thought I, that was pretty straightforward. Our meter is under the house in what effectively is a basement, we have Beam and block floor with 120mm PUR insulation - so 2 layers of aluminium plus nearly 200mm of concrete. Result is the IHD works fine plugged into the sockets near the meter, but soon as it is inside "Connection lost" other than in my sons bedroom window almost directly above the meter.

I have since read up about these IHDs and they only expect 70% of those installed to work. This seems to be something that the suppliers keep very quiet about (obviously). For such a comon problem the suppliers seem to be doing very little about it (I wonder why?), althought one, Octopus I think is looking at supplying boosters so the signal from the meter can be used further from the meter than the current limitation.

Has anyone else had this, and found any sort of a work around?

[Galahad]

I have exactly the same problem. Our IHD only works if it is virtually next to the meter the other side of a concrete block wall.

Which means it never gets used because there is no where near there to plug it in to power it. It has rechargeable batteries but they last hours rather than weeks before needing a recharge.

[Countrypaul]

Looks like a temporary solution will be to put an ip camera to view the IHD when it is near the meter. Not very elegant, but it should mean we can view it from any PC/ipad/iphone/? in the house. Hoping I can use a camera that is usb powered from the router I have down there anyway!

Better solution stil being looked for.

[Oliver90owner]

Looks like a temporary solution will be to put an ip camera to view the IHD when it is near the meter. Not very elegant, but it should mean we can view it from any PC/ipad/iphone/? in the house. Hoping I can use a camera that is usb powered from the router I have down there anyway!

Better solution stil being looked for.

Only a very minimal partial solution, as only one screen can be viewed unless the appropriate buttons/touch screen are used to select other screens.

[patrickl]

If you are of a technical bent, you could add your own monitoring solution. In addition to the various suggestions in a recent thread here on monitoring re. EMON and similar, I've had good success with PZEM-004T modules from Aliexpress for the measurement side and ePaper displays for prevailing Octopus tariff, consumption cost display and so on. But most definitely a tinkerer thing rather than plug-and-play.

[Oldgreybeard]

Setting up an easy to use monitoring system does make a really significant difference, we've found. Initially I just knocked up a fairly simple indoor display that took data from an extra meter that had a data output (these only cost around £30) and used that to display our power consumption or export on a small 2 line LCD display. We used that for several years, until I installed the battery system, and it worked very well as something simple, yet informative, that we used to see whether it was OK to turn on things like the dishwasher or washing machine.

I've been running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi for a while now. That just serves a web page display that can be accessed by any device on our home network. It display a pretty simple dashboard, showing key information and also a 3 hour and a five day weather forecast (taken from the Met Office API) that is useful for planning ahead.

This is what my Home Assistant dashboard screen looks like (just screen shotted this a minute or two ago). It looks much the same on my wife's iMac or her iPad, so is cross platform, just needs a browser to view it:

Home Assistant.jpg (67.33 KiB) Viewed 1562 times

[patrickl]

OGB, what format did your meter output? £30 sounds like a bargain!

[Tinbum]

Eventually you run out of space and need to reorganise!!

[Oldgreybeard]

OGB, what format did your meter output? £30 sounds like a bargain!

It was a Chinese DIN rail mount meter, with an RS485 interface, so was pretty easy to connect to a cheap PIC microcontroller that just read registers in the meter and displayed a simple import/export display plus the average power over the previous 10 seconds. Just had a quick look on Aliexpress and it seems the price has come down in the past few years, they are now available for a bit over £20:https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004342879536.html

Another £12 or so gets you a WiFi one: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004633322897.html

[SafetyThird]

Eventually you run out of space and need to reorganise!!

Fancy doing a little run down of how you have everything set up? I'm currently putting together monitoring stuff on the various systems and looking to get a RPi to run home assistant for displaying everything. Not explored the HA options yet but will be soon.