How do I monitor Elster "smart meters" in the UK?

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1

Hey all,

I have a smart meter for both gas and electricity which were installed sometime in 2013/14 by the previous house owner.

They run on the SMETS1 network and have not yet been upgraded to SMETS2, therefore I cannot use them with any of the “smart” energy suppliers", and even when they are upgraded I’m being told that I probably won’t get a new IHD because I “should have one already from my previous supplier”. I don’t. The previous owner took that with them for some reason. :frowning:

Neither of the meters has a P1 port, so I can’t go down that route either, so I’m wondering what my options are. The electricity meter says it has Zigbee support, but I’ve no idea how I might access that.

Looking at the meters, I can see that on the gas meter (ThemisAlpha) there’s what appears to be a port that has an IR transmitter and receiver, but no visible flashing light. The electricity meter appears to have the same.

Images of both are below, all help is appreciated!

gas
gas1120×1276 446 KB
electric
electric1078×1272 330 KB

2

If there is no P1 port you could potentially look to use something like Hildebrand CAD and replay the data via MQTT. It may be worth a look, can’t be 100% as I do not have this model.

3

Thanks, although I see from their website they have the following:

Unfortunately, the DCC hasn’t adopted my meter yet, neither meter shows up on the Smart Meter Check website, so this isn’t an option either right now :frowning:

4

Fingers crossed it can be migrated sometime in the near future and the device is back in stock. Don’t have any other suggestions, unfortunately. :frowning:

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5

Hildebrande can become a ‘DCC Other User’ and get the data from your meters themselves in some cases. I went down this route after my supplier changed my meters over then said they can’t deal with the “smart” side of them to pull reading etc and it took ages after Hildebrand started for them to sort it themselves

I had to submit some stuff for ID and they then started pulling the meter data every 30 mins to push into their app until my IHD arrived (they were on back order for a while). Once the IHD connected it started pushing realtime data to Hildebrands MQTT via wifi, and I have a it bridged to Mosquitto to read it. You can use a stick rather than a IHD if you wish.

Jane who does the support is really helpful. If it’s something you might want to pursue, have a chat with her first to see if they can help - [email protected].

6

Fantastic, thanks.

I’m chatting to Citizens Advice at the moment as well to see what’s going on with my meter (it doesn’t even show as registered for upgrade with DCC), so I’ll pursue this line of enquiry as well!

7

Hi there, the Elster AS300P has an optical bi-directional IEC 62056-21 port (source: manual) . In that case you might be able to use my project or similar one based on that protocol to read the data: [Energy] Read IEC-62056 based electricity meter (Elster, Landis&Gyr etc..) and send data using Lorawan, WebHook and Template Sensors

1 Like
8

Oh, that’s awesome, thanks, and I already have a LoRaWAN Gateway in place, so I’ve got a couple of the Heltec LoRa32 boards kicking about.

I’ll give this a look when I get a moment

9

A few years late but… did you ever get this working?

10

Not directly, no. I ended up switching supplier and they upgraded me to a SMETS2 meter, which feeds in via a plugin.