Your SmartMeter™ has two radios. The first relays your consumption and meter status back to PG&E to help us deliver your energy reliably and efficiently. The second radio is for Home and Business Area Networking, and is turned off by default. When you sign up and activate this second radio, your SmartMeter™ can take the electricity use information it already gathers and make it available to your selected compatible device securely, and in real-time. Your device depends on that information to show you how much electricity you’re using.
[…]
Other devices may be compatible on PG&E’s network. Customers can attempt to register any ZigBee SEP 1.0 or 1.1 device with their SmartMeter™, but PG&E cannot provide any guarantee that devices not included on PG&E’s list of validated devices are compatible.
That sounds a lot better than having to mess around with funky brackets and externally powered devices! If you guys can make this work I’m pretty sure you will make a lot of people happy!!
Sacramento Municipal Utility District’s (SMUD) Smart Meter Project Manager Erik Krause told us via email that all SMUD smart meters will use the ZigBee wireless communication, but that ZigBee will not be enabled during deployment. SMUD will then test ZigBee in “a limited fashion” during March 2010, but SMUD has no “specific timeline for activating/upgrading the chips with ZigBee at this time.”
For Southern California Edison (SCE), the utility won’t have ZigBee in its smart meters disabled throughout deployment, but SCE doesn’t plan to pilot any approved home energy management devices until after mid-2010 when it is doing a software upgrade for all of its smart meters. SMUD’s Krause says utilities are also waiting for ZigBee 2.0 — which has some advanced features and improved security — to be released next year.
But appart from that I couldn’t find that much, maybe you can send an email to the SMUD customer service to find out what the status is.
I had to google pretty hard to find anything about smart meters that wasn’t from the tin-hat crowd. Thank you for the snip though. Anyway, I will be contacting SMUD this week as I am turning on new service for our new place. I’m going to try to drill down and find SMUD’s smart meter geek and see if I can get hooked up with their Zigbee Carrier thermostat that they were supposedly floating to some test customers. Wish me luck.
By the way I did end up finding the Zigbee protocols for the meter very early this morning. I’ll post the link when I find it again.
I looked into this last September and got bounced around PG&E for a bit, but I did learn that most of PG&E’s SmartMeters aren’t. At least, not in the way we want them to be. From what I recall/understand most of the ones that people have right now, like the FOCUS AXR-SD pictured above, will probably never be HAN enabled even if they’re theoretically capable of it. I have the same meter and my take away was that it’s never going to be HAN enabled.
PG&E is running field tests in a few communities with different models that are HAN enabled, but who knows when they’ll ever reach the rest of us.
I just talked to SMUD and looks like the zigbee radio is turned on. They informed me that I can get an “Energy Aware Device” at a Sacramento library to see wirelessly my real-time energy use and show it in dollars as I turn on and off appliances (things). This just started a couple of weeks ago. Timing is everything. Anyone know how I can sniff the wireless between the two devices? Anyway here is a link to the news release.
Here’s the device that they are using for SMUD customers:
It looks really simplified so that anybody can run it. I google’d energyaware and got a hit with SDG&E which is also offering the devices along with other types. If you drill down into some of the vendor links you can find some pretty cool toys. Like a ZigBee sniffer for $49. The software is $999 though. Wow. Anyway here’s that link to SDG&E: http://www.sdge.com/newsroom/press-releases/2013-01-09/sdge-customers-can-connect-home-area-network-devices-smart-meters
ZigBee HA and ZigBee SEP don’t a crossover. I’ve heard rumors of developing some interplay in the future, but if that doesn’t seem likely we may have to develop a separate piece of hardware to act as a bridge. ZigBee is some interesting stuff.
I just got this message:
Dear Joris,Congratulations! You are eligible to participate in Home and BusinessArea Networking.Your Eligibility Code is: -----------NOTE: This code is required to add HAN devices to the SmartMeter" atyour premise. Please retain this code for your records. To activate thismeter, you must first add a HAN device.View a list of validated devices here: http://tinyurl.com/pgehandevicesIf you already have a HAN device:Please register your device by filling out the online registrationrequest form here: http://tinyurl.com/pgehanregisterThanks,The PG&E HAN Team
Since the SmartThing HUB is the device that would be connecting to the SmartMeter, isn’t it just a matter of implementing the SEP profile in the HUB software? As far as I can tell the hardware is the same, so I don’t think a bridge is necessary.
Gonna be 80 degrees here today. Shorts and T-Shirt kind of weather. What parka are you gonna where? Waahaa. Oops sorry dude.
Anyway, SMUD is telling me it will work with most of the HAN devices. Maybe a bridge device that will slave to both? I think there are things out there. We’ll know for sure by next week. I’m going to deep dive into it. I’m ordering the USB dongle and will sniff the com’s. Maybe figure a way.
Cool! let me know if you can get it to work. Also I’m pretty sure that there’s a more powerful micro in the SmartThings hub, so maybe they can support protocols at the same time after all (unless they’re using an ember for the zigbee stack)
@wackware grrr. It’s 30 and snowing at our office and 80 and sunny where I’m from! I think it warrants some looking into. ZigBee HA is pretty robust, but the SEP security profile is significantly different. So much so that any direct compatibility with HA is impossible. A bridge would have to be used.
As I start automating (got the new house keys today), I might need you to come out and perform field validation of a point release. Just remember, t-shirt and shorts only. Gonna be 85 this weekend.
Twack
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
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Perhaps already known to you guys, but thought I would share what I found:
Smartenit seems to sell a “clamp-on” device (“PCM Sensor”) that reads the optical (?) signals at your Smart Meter (probably various brands) and sends the data out as Zigbee…
