I tried to get my head round if this was something St could understand but failed even after reading JD`s threads
Can Uk users get any useful info out of a smart energy meters or not
Best info i could find on my Landis+Gyr E470 was
I kinda understand Zigbee has many profiles and only 2 are used by St, does the above fall into that category ??
Sorry for not grasping the info properly and exensively from previous threads
No you can’t (for the most part).
Some UK smart energy meters do indeed use ZigBee. It it’s a different profile than what SmartThings uses. SmartThings talks to devices with the ZigBee HA profile.
Plus I should think the Smart Energy meters will be associated with their own hub (the display), so making it talk back to SmartThings would mean it would be joined to two.
That being said:
You can get an energy clamp (I personally use the MiHome one) and port it in that way
Or
If you have a supplier with a cloud dashboard, some people have written cloud-to-Cloud intergration. One I know about is OVO
Hope this helps
Kraeg
Meh… i didnt think so Kraeg, i trawled the net looking for tech info on the meter and found all sorts of stuff out of my capacity to grasp, JD`s and other threads are great but i still had hope somehow i might get lucky
Vey frustrating though, a smart meter that is as usefull as a brick or cannot be integrated into St, i actually call them arguement meters, mine is not useful as we changed supplier and Tada… the new company dont use the technology. I just dug the display out of a cupboard out of curiosity to see if i could somehow integrate it, it still reports energy consumption
Anychance of a quick overview of the Mihome, does it clamp onto the mains cable in the mains box where the meter is or do you clamp it to individual tails from the board, i cant get to my tails so it wouldnt help
shame there are no zwave MCB`s, that would be alot more usefull
You can clamp it around anything you can get too, I have it over the mains feed into the house as I want to monitor everything. I am also going to get another to put over only my electric car charger feed as I want to see what it costs to run (when I get it).
As long as its only clamped around a “Live” cable only, your fine. So basically you cant put it around a standard household wire as that has the 3 in it (live, earth and neural).
More info: https://mihome4u.co.uk/
You will need the “HiHome Gateway” (hub) and the “House Energy Monitor” (clamp) - I got both them on sale for around £50 (combined) from Amazon.
There is a SmartApp somewhere on here which will give you the code to connect cloud-to-cloud and it works really well
Oh, just a further note about the MiHome stuff…
Their App is utter rubbish, the web panel is better. Dont be put off by the iOS/Android App. Heres a basic screen cap of my energy meter (i’ve very crudely removed my readings).
One last thing Kraeg, accuracy ?? how accurate are you finding it, like you i am after whole house total to match against supplier/meter, not fussed about a watt or 2 difference but closeish in the ballpark is acceptable
I’d say - very, my energy supplier is almost spot on.
MiHome asks what you pay per KWH for energy and does the calculations for you, BUT it doesn’t have the capability to add in any standing charges you might have (as most UK energy suppliers do)
This is something I’ve raised with them, but there hasn’t been an update in some time so I’m not holding my breath.
I’ve just added like 1/2p to my KWH charge so it roughly evens out.
I’d say it’s within £5 each month of my bill…now if they only did gas monitoring (that’s a whole different conversation)
£5 !!! i would be happy with that, we have recently had a bill for electric which i wont put here but… ouch, and we are all about LED everywhere and being careful
Phoned the supplier and they said it was a catchup of the summer as they had been under estimating and i hadnt realised the reading had not been sent for 5 months, legacy from old meter which did it automaticaly, so i really am keen on having my own data to compare against meter and company from here on in
I believe all SMETS2 UK smart meters do use Zigbee and probably the majority of SMETS1. This is the protocol most IHD - In Home Displays use to talk to the meters.
See - https://www.geotogether.com/blog/choose-basic-consumer-access-device-can-smart-connected-system/
There are some bridges aka Smart Meter CAD devices which use Zigbee to talk to the meters and then bridge the data to your LAN or they might alternative upload the data to a cloud service which you could then in theory access via a smartapp in smartthings.
(Smart Meter CAD = Consumer Access Device)
Ovo Energy used to give one away but have stopped. 
However look at these.
https://rainforestautomation.com/rfa-z114-eagle-200-2/
https://presciense.com/gateways/mira
https://www.hildebrand.co.uk/our-products/hub/
(I am sure there are others as well.)
There is also an automatic energy switching provider called TheLabrador which provides a free monitoring device callled the Retriever which sends your meter readings to their website. See - https://kb.thelabrador.co.uk/troubleshooting/how-do-i-install-the-labrador-retriever-device this is also a Smart Meter CAD.
One of these should be possible to create a Smartthings DHT and/or Smartapp for.
See https://rainforestautomation.com/support/developer/ for information about their API. This seems to be a US originated product so we need to know if it is usable in the UK. The first step would be working out how to pair it. TheLabrador Retriever is specifically for the UK and they obviously know how to pair it with UK smart meters. Interestingly it is very similar but not identical in appearance to the RainForest Eagle-200.
UPDATE: Seems some people (presumably Americans) have successfully managed to link the RainForest Eagle-200 to Smartthings. See - SmartThings and Eagle by Rainforest (Energy Monitoring) Connection?
UPDATE: The Eagle-200 being US originated may only support US radio frequency for Zigbee. I can see they do sell to Australia as well which uses the same frequency as the US. 784 MHz in China, 868 MHz in Europe and 915 MHz in the USA and Australia
All good information and some of it looks quite good _ I havent read all your information fully yet @jelockwood as I’m at work but…
The one sticking point in most of these devices though, is the ability to start the ZigBee association process with the meter itself. I’m not sure as a consumer we have access to that ability, so even if you purchased a bridge device capable of reading ZigBee SE (Smart Energy) how would you connect that device to your meter?
I cant honestly say I’ve looked at the meter enough to know if there is a “pair” button somewhere hidden on it, but I do know if you get sent out a new monitor device, its added by speaking with them to add it (so it might be a remote ability, not something we can do).
I think thats why most Gas and Electric meters are the “Stick on” type, where they don’t directly connect to the meter itself. The electric ones are mainly clamps you put around the mains, the gas count the number of flashes from the meter itself (I believe it flashes for every KwH used - but could be wrong).
OVO used to get round this with their API, but as you said - i dont think thats working anymore.
I’m not aware of any other supplier providing both a live feed and an API to your current usage.
I don’t have a smart meter yet, I am waiting for the certainty that I will get a SMETS2 model.
Stick on readers are for being also able to support ye olde dumbe meters. 
Again not yet having a smart meter I don’t know about the pairing but you could well be right. I have tried to persuade TheLabrador to provide an API for their Retriever, no news yet. If their website uses REST or JSON then one could probably decode it fairly easily.
Since at least one of the brands I listed - Hildebrand is a UK website and sells in the UK this suggests that pairing should be possible without assistance from the energy provider. I can’t remember if the Government article I previously read described supporting CADs as being required or ‘encouraged’. The Pairing process should be the same as for installing an IHD (some CADs are both a CAD and IHD) but again this may or may not require cooperation.
In the US, You will always need the permission of the energy provider, because the smart meter is on their zigbee network. And will remain so.
You are going to get their permission to add an additional monitoring device to their zigbee network.
And then typically that device will have a Wi-Fi cloud that you can then access to get the information for yourself.
But you are not going to connect either the smart meter or the additional monitoring device to your smartthings hub directly. The additional monitoring device will appear as a cloud service, not A zigbee device.
This is how Rainforest works, for example.
I understand from @jelockwood ‘s post below that the UK government has mandated a different approach that might not require the energy providers’ permission. However, there’s still the issue that a zigbee device has to use the zigbee home automation profile in order to connect to a smartthings hub directly. (The new zigbee 3.0 profile specifically excluded the profile used by smart meters, so that doesn’t help either.)
UPDATE: The Eagle-200 being US originated may only support US radio frequency for Zigbee. I can see they do sell to Australia as well which uses the same frequency as the US. 784 MHz in China, 868 MHz in Europe and 915 MHz in the USA and Australia
Zigbee is the same frequency for home automation in the US, EU, China, and Australia (most places, really). 2,4 GHz. It is Zwave that differs by region, because it falls into the frequency bands which may be used by local mobile phone or first responder communications, which differ from country to country.
This is why you can buy the Orvibo or Xioami zigbee devices from China, for example, and use the same one in the UK or the US. 
That said, the zigbee specification does allow for “manufacturer proprietary“ profiles, including changing frequency. The UK military recently released some frequencies which are now being used for this energy project. But it’s not that it’s specific to the UK region, there isn’t anything else in the UK using that now for zigbee home automation as it was previously reserved to the military there. Standard zigbee for home automation is still 2,4 GHz in both the US and UK.
@JDRoberts
The Zigbee network is purely in the customers house, in smart meter terminology this is the HAN - Home Area Network. The Zigbee network itself does not connect to any devices outside the customers house. The Smart Meter uses a separate dedicated network to communicate back to the energy provider.
Definitely the Government was either recommending or insisting customers should be allowed to connect their own CAD or IHD devices.
I believe it maybe the case that even the Smart Meter itself is considered to be the home owners property, after all you keep the meter even if you change energy provider.
As per https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/smart-meters-unlocking-the-future/smart-meters-unlocking-the-future#fnref:16 it is intended that customers be able to connect smart home appliances to the smart meters so that energy usage can be scheduled to take advantage of off-peak tariffs, this clearly is not going to be possible or practical unless the customer can do the pairing themselves, otherwise providers will eventually be having to deal with millions of requests.
As I see it IHD and CAD devices only have read access to data provided by the Smart Meter and therefore cannot make changes and therefore are a very low security concern.
Under GDPR principles the data belongs to the home owner.
The RainForest could be connected to either RainForest’s own cloud service or Wattvision. However in the Smartthings thread I linked to people have since managed to have local non-cloud communication between the Eagle-200 and a Smartthings hub using the API. See SmartThings and Eagle by Rainforest (Energy Monitoring) Connection?
Thanks for the correction, I didn’t realize that the UK government had gone in that direction.
As far as the local rainforest connections that’s all being done with web hooks, so they have connected to the Wi-Fi API. They still aren’t connecting the device to SmartThings as a zigbee device. Which it won’t, because it’s the wrong profile.
Absolutely the whole point of these CAD gateways is to get round the fact that things like Smartthings cannot connect directly via Zigbee to the smart meter. Smartthings would communicate over Ethernet or WiFi to the CAD.
I had a reply from RainForest last night. They tell me that the Eagle-200 uses a USB power charger so on that front getting a UK power supply is easy, and on the Zigbee side they tell me that SMETS1 meters in the UK use the same 2.4GHz frequency supported by the Eagle-200 and supported legally around the world. SMETS1 meters also use the same Zigbee profile supported by the Eagle-200.
So it would seem if you have a SMETS1 meter you could get an Eagle-200, then setup the 3rd party smartapp and use it with Smartthings.
Unfortunately according to RainForest UK SMETS2 meters which have started to be rolled out in the UK since around October 2018 use 868MHz for Zigbee and also use a different Zigbee profile. On both fronts this seems to mean the current Eagle-200 could not be used with a SMETS2 meter.
I have sent them a follow up message querying their plans if any to address this but have not yet had another response from them.
Ovo says the 870 MHz Will not be standard zigbee, but a new protocol.
Thanks for that link. However I am interpreting it as confirming that SMETS2 meters are moving away from Zigbee on 2.4GHz to Zigbee (still) but on 868MHz.
All the documents I have seen suggest SMETS2 still uses Zigbee and also all the conversations I have had with Energy supplier organisations.
Note: SMETS1 used/uses GSM to talk back to the energy provider but SMETS2 uses a new special purpose network - which is nothing to do with the in home IHD and CAD connectivity.
Update: As per this from the ovoenergy link you provided.
Zigbee also links up your In-Home-Device (IHD) to the electricity Smart Meter, and SMETS2 meters can use it to handle Auxiliary Load Control Switch devices like EV Car-chargers and Smart Tumble-Driers.
Clearly a ‘smart’ tumble-dryer is only going to in this scenario use ‘standard’ Zigbee. As you will remember I previous linked to a Government document about this possible use. Hence I cannot see that they will stop using Zigbee. There is no-way the UK Government will be able to get electrical goods manufacturers to implement some new proprietary network standard.
If the dryer is using standard zigbee, it’s using 2,4 GHz. The radio at 870 MHz will not even be able to hear the message. So they have to be either providing the meter with a second “standard” zigbee radio for the HAN, which is possible, Or the compatible smart appliances have to have the bespoke 868 MHz radio. Which is not what they have today.
Both are “zigbee,” but they are not the same profile and not the same frequency, so they can’t talk to each other. There has to be a translation on one end or the other.
Remember that they have changed the SMETS 2 specification since it was first introduced in 2012. So a lot of the energy providers have the first section of the page written under the original specs And then an update for the newer version.
The zigbee specification does allow for manufacturer proprietary versions, and the UK government is obviously intending to have one with a large pool of users. So do some of the larger security companies. But the radios and the profiles still have to match on each end.
Sorry to be such a stickler about this, but as a network engineer and a member of IEEE, these protocol distinctions are a really big deal for me, even though I know that most people won’t care at all. 
