Smart Meter In-Home-Display IHD6 Stripdown

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What does it display? How does it connect to the smart meter? What's inside?

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[elesjuan]

This was a rather interesting overview of this neat little display! My power company upgraded my meter to a "smart" one from the same manufacture (in the States here.) and I noted the zigbee logo on mine as well. Did a fair amount of research coming up with nothing, so I rang up the power people and got basically nowhere. I wanted to see if it were possible to monitor my usage via zigbee from the meter and inject that data into my home assistant server for collection graphing and monitoring. Anyone I could reach with electric company had no clue.

The old meter used the ISM 900mhz band, and while I never successfully found my power meter, I was able to find the gas meter in the 433mhz ISM band, and successfully sniff its data out of the air.

My solution for power monitoring was to build my own system with some CT clamps inside the electrical panel, which plug into an esp32 and run data into esphome addin within home assistant. Pretty neat.

[aaronmdjones]

Hello again Julian. The third wire on the battery is almost certainly the other end of a grounded negative temperature coefficient thermistor. This allows the charging circuitry to detect the battery temperature and cease charging when outside a specified range, usually between 0'C and 45'C.

[tonyfrewin]

Very interesting video. I love the fact that you are scaring the family into switching things off😂. Also loving the thrupence and tuppence, just don’t get enough of that these days 😂.

[EsotericArctos]

Although these may be Zigbee often the profile is the SE profile which is not compatible with the usual profiles we use for home automation, which generally follows the Zigbee HA profile. Just wanted to mention that as a lot of people think Zigbee and that it could be put easily into home automation systems and they may not be so easy to integrate as people think.
The Anti-Tamper switch can be setup to be silent to notify the utility company when you have opened it as often these devices are rented and not owned by the customer.

[smoothjamie]

Lithium Thionyl Chloride cells are primary cells I.e. non rechargeable. They are used for sensors with long term applications. Have a look at SAFT LS cells on RS. AA cells with 3.6V each.

[markflack]

It is nice to see yours working, my in home display has never worked, some issue with my meter setup.
I have asked my supplier several times to fix it and they never do.

[rbeartoe]

Great video. This was the only video I could find on these display. Purchased one off the back of it. However it appears the only do plug in now (I was unaware) so have to leave it plugged in at all times. I noticed the newer ones do not have the battery symbol. It does show a wheather reading instead.

[vince_martyn]

The gas meter does talk Zigbee (which is 2.4G) and they wake up every 30 minutes for a short period, which makes firmware updates fun. The anti-tamper switch will have sent an alert to the DCC (middleman) who may have sent it to your provider who might not even notice 😀

[BuyitFixit]

I think the version I bought off ebay to mess about with, might be the updated IHD7, as it has a slightly different PCB layout and also has a room temperature sensor near the bottom. I also has an ESP32S2 Processor along with the FT800 display / sound / touch screen chip. I've uploaded a picture of the PCB but for some reason it won't let me put the link to it.

[MontyVideo]

Thanks for your time and efforts on this intriguing video. I have a question for you and your subscribers :-
"Would an IHD function correctly when paired with a S.M.A.R.T meter that is operating in *dumb* mode?"
Presumably, this would preclude the "benefit" to the energy companies knowing when you use energy but it would give homeowners the tools to manage their energy usage (the primary reason energy companies give for the use of SMART meters in the first place).

[RyanMcGuinness]

The various numbers your showed on screen can actually be used by anyone who has them to pull your electricity usage stats. E.g there's a third party sites called Hildebrand that I used to get my Octopus readings into home assistant. Pretty sure I only needed those numbers.

[markburton]

Octopus has a useful API for grabbing various bits of info. We don’t have solar panels yet, but we do have a plug-in hybrid car. I was going to use the agile pricing to optimise for cost charging the car. However, we now have a deal with cheaper electricity in the early hours, so I just run the charger then

[jlucasound]

Wow! I never knew your wife was from Hong Kong! Chinese women are Beautiful! I love their culture and intelligence. Thanks again for another awesome video, Julian! I have a job interview coming up with an electronics manufacturing co. in CT, USA. Wish me luck! 😀

[RockinJohnny]

I am with Utilita and for the past few months had constant signal problems, the engineer came out and said that gas meter not communicating with electric so got no display from my gas and now waiting again to see if they can fix it their end. Got told that if you use a Wi-Fi connection you risk hackers and people switching on your power etc not sure if that's the case but if you dont have a firewall setup that could happen in theory.

[UpLateGeek]

It looks like there's a track going from the switch to R40 which is unpopulated, the other side of which goes down towards the voltage regulator at U2. That suggests it might be a pull-up resistor, and the fact that it's not fitted suggests it's floating, hence it may not be active.

[yrkiebar]

My IHD went pop a few weeks back, noticed it rebooting and then saw smoke coming out of the back! Unplugged sharp-ish. Received a replacement but haven't got around to getting it paired to the meter yet.

[keikoimazu]

Many thanks fir very useful information.

[UpLateGeek]

My parents have been considering getting solar since before they built their house in 2020. They couldn't do it when the house was built because of the increased cost of materials and labour during the pandemic.

I was speaking to my colleagues at work, one of them has a 10kW system and the other a 15kW system, and surprisingly the one with the 10kW system paid back the cost in just under 3 years, and the one with the 15kW system paid his back in only 2 years. Both of them have batteries and generate a large excess of energy, they basically end up with negative bills over the year, so they're effectively being paid to generate electricity instead of paying to use it.

The latter uses a lot more electricity, so that's why his pay back time was quicker. When you're spending thousands of Aussie dollary doos on electricity every year, installing an excessively large system that reduces your bill to zero or negative makes the pay back quicker, obviously at the expense of higher up-front costs.

[TheEmbeddedHobbyist]

I now have 9.6kWh of batteries waiting for panels on the roof, I did ask how 18 panels stacked up on there sides in the garage is going to reduce my bills. funny they had no answer for that. 🙂

[piconano]

Very interesting.
I wonder when are they going to start charging for apparent power as well?!