As you might well know. All the new smart meters by Hydro Quebec have a Zigbee radio that can be activated.
In some countries, that radio on those smart meters is used to access live consumption and feed data to a little display you can stick anywhere in your house.
Hydro Quebec refuses to activate the radio unless you go with their limited and expensive domotic system called HILO. I think this is not fair.
A complaint to Hydro Quebec brought no good. So I’m going to file a complaint with the “regie de l’energie”. Who is with me ?
Bonjour Jean-Sébastien,
Moi aussi, depuis longtemps, je souhaite pouvoir lire la donnée instantané de mon compteur.
J’aimerais discuter de ce projet avec vous.
J’envoie la plainte demain matin. Une fois la plainte déposée, quand j’aurai le numero de plainte, tu pourras, si tu veux, envoyer un message au greffe.
I see. That’s a shame because it appears to leave Hydro-Quebec’s customers with no way to access their live data (other than with HiLo) despite the fact the equipment is able to do it.
The only way I can see it being a security concern is that they don’t have a way to provide read-only access. If the current access method offers read and write capabilities, then it’s left to the client software (such as an integration) to be the gatekeeper for what does or doesn’t get written. That means they would be entrusting third-party software to not write over the data, which is an understandable security concern.
Anyway, despite that hypothesis, I agree with you that it’s probably just their unwillingness to do it so, yeah, BS.
FWIW, I was tempted to buy the Emporia Vue product because it is reasonably priced (compared to similar devices) and has good reviews. However, the darn thing has no local access and all its data is in Emporia’s cloud.
Cloud access is currently free but should they ever need an additional revenue stream they can impose subscription fees. In addition, if they ever go out of business, the device will continue to operate properly but will be useless without cloud access.
I don’t believe anyone has reverse-engineered its communication protocol or developed new firmware for it (assuming it can be reprogrammed).
