SMETS2 Meter Installed

After being on the Octopus Energy smart meter installation waiting list for 3 months (not helped by Covid-19 working restrictions) the old ‘dumb’ meter was replaced with a SMETS2 smart meter today. A very neat and tidy installation by Privodor who are recruiting and training new installers to help with the backlog. (I don’t know why those meter tails with coloured sheathing, originally installed by SSE, aren’t more widely available / used.)

As expected it had no issues with getting a Telefonica (O2) signal and it commissioned straight away. Once it registers with Octopus I’ll be switched to their Agile tariff.

SMETS2 Meter installed in the outdoor Meter Cabinet

A pleasant surprise is that the supplied Chameleon IHD6 in-home display had no issues with range (the cabinet is about 15m from the house) and it’s (mostly) picking up a signal in the middle of the house. After enabling WiFi on the IHD6 it’s evident it’s publishing readings using MQTT-in-TLS – but it only seems to be configured to send these direct to Chameleon.

Revised immerSUN Monitoring

I have re-worked the monitoring solution for the immerSUN solar PV diverter which is responsible for measuring the house’s electricity consumption, the import of electricity from the grid, the solar PV generation and any diversion of excess solar generation to the domestic hot water cylinder’s immersion heater.

Previously the monitoring was done by extracting data from the live.myimmersun.com webpage every minute and storing it in InfluxDB for visualization using Grafana. This worked OK but missed a lot of the details of how the readings change on a more dynamic basis. The immerSUN unit actually sends data in the form of a 56-byte UDP Datagram every 5 seconds and since this data is traversing the local network anyway it seems a shame not to extract the readings “on the way past”. While not trivial, since the format of the 56-byte Datagram is not published, it’s not that hard to reverse engineer where the different readings are.

There’s a (draft) write-up of the solution under the Technical Articles here.