Important - Loop Energy Monitor (TL;DR - another piece of hardware will stop working after manufacturers decision to switch off the service)

Just received this email from Loop. Somehow it got into my spam folder. so I’m pasting it here in case someone else has missed it (TL;DR::

There are some important changes coming up which will affect your use of Loop. There is more detail below but, in summary, from the 13th November 2020 your current Loop Electricity monitor (and Gas monitor if fitted) will no longer work. Please take the time to read through this email for further explanation and for details on how you can get a 10% discount if you would like to upgrade to a new Loop kit.

As you know, the company behind Loop Energy Saver (the Loop product you own – referred to as our legacy product) was bought by Trust Power in 2017. Since then we have been developing a new Loop product which launched late last year. During this time, we ensured that there was no interruption to the service or support provided for your legacy product.

However, as you can imagine, this year has been particularly challenging for our small business. We’ve put all plans on hold and been forced to make some difficult decisions due to the impacts of the pandemic, the most significant being to switch off the old Loop systems that your product runs on later this year. We spent a long time trying to make the new system compatible with the old hardware, but it became clear that it’s better to move forward with newer, more secure, more reliable technology.

What does this mean for you?
To recap, unfortunately from the 13th November 2020 your Loop Electricity monitor (and Gas monitor if fitted) will no longer work.

Hopefully this isn’t the end of your journey with Loop though. We’d love to have you as part of the new Loop Community, are pleased to offer you a 10% discount on a new Loop kit.

Instructions for claiming your 10% discount and installing the new kit will be provided in a separate email in the next 24 hours

Retiring the legacy product isn’t a decision we’ve taken lightly but this focus on the new product is critical to the long-term survival of our business.

What about my gas monitor?

This has been the hardest part of planning how to move our small business forward and, unfortunately, turning off the old system means your gas monitor, if you have one, will cease to work. Monitoring gas has become increasingly problematic due to the smart meter rollout, as our gas monitor is not compatible. Frustratingly it’s being rendered obsolete by factors outside of our control. We therefore aren’t able to offer you a replacement solution for gas monitoring at the moment. Smart meter data may offer us a way forward in future but not for now.

From us to you
Lastly, a heartfelt message from all of us here at Loop. Thank you for your support so far and for being part of the Loop journey to date. We really hope you take up our discounted Loop offer and continue the next chapter of Loop with us.

We’re not a faceless corporate. We are a small group of passionate individuals who have sunk everything into this and want to make a genuine difference for our customers and [the planet]. We want to be here for the long term and have exciting new features and services in the pipeline involving solar, home batteries and electric vehicles (to name but a few). As we did during our Android app development, we’ll be offering advance access to features, and asking for your feedback in return, through our beta testing programme. Watch this space!

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch though [email protected] - we promise to reply to every message, though hopefully you understand it might take us a little longer than normal at the moment.

All the best

I’m a bit annoyed that they can’t keep the gas monitor working with the new platform. The only reason I changed from Energenie to Loop was for the gas monitoring, which works very well. Sure, they can’t support all the new smart meters but where the gas monitor is working perfectly on an old style meter I don’t see why they can’t continue to support it. If anyone knows another platform available in the UK which support both Gas and Electricity and has HomeAssistant integration please post it here. Thanks

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I’m in the same boat unfortunately.

I’ve had e-mails from Loop and they have offered me to the new electricity monitor kit for free but I have no idea if the current HA integration will continue to work or not.

Gas monitoring is also a big loss for me. I have an old style meter and I don’t have any plans on getting it swapped out, nor am I being pressed to do so. The only other option I have considered is moving to someone like Octopus Energy who allegedly have an API that you can use to pull your usage data directly from them (https://developer.octopus.energy/docs/api/).

However, I can’t see the data being any where near as reliable as Loop and i’d presume it possibly requires you to have smart meters installed (otherwise how would Octopus really know what you’re using).

As far as Loop goes it looks like I have no choice but to take their free kit and see if it works with the existing integration or not.

Exactly. Also, ive been told that replacing a gas meter with a smart one will require moving the meter from inside of my house to the outside, as the new building regs forbid putting a new meter on the inside. A lot of structural work with the house and also I simply don’t have enough space in front of my house :frowning:

Typical. They make it sound like they couldn’t just keep the “legacy” services running as a separate entity.

I may be overly cynical here, but I think the sole reason for the change is to charge their customers for second time (third one for some, as the ribbon cable on gas sensor breaks really easily) at the lowest cost (hence no gas sensor which would be more expensive to develop and manufacture). The only new feature on the new version is support for solar panels (how many households have them?), and the migration to smart meters is blst anyway - a whole lot of Brits still has analogue meters - the smart meter deadline has been pushed back by 5 years and nothing indicates that all analogue meters will be replaced by then. Especially with households like mine where a smart gas meter cannot be retrofitted.
I reckon that their sales were not great lately - whoever needed Loop has already got one. Unfortunately, they haven’t learned the lesson and the new service will also be cloud based, creating recurring costs for the company and the potential userbase will be even smaller than previously.

I saw this in my emails a couple of days ago and also disappointed but my current energy fixed rate also expires this week and many new fixes insist on a smart meter being fitted. Probably going to need one eventually but the Hildebrand Glow with its API that can access smart meter data looks like a good replacement for Home Assistant integration, has anyone tried it?

Same boat here. I took up the option of the free upgrade though I haven’t yet opened the box. I also by coincidence took up the offer of a smart meter from Bulb, which though works brilliantly with Smartthings wont bring the complete data set through to HA.
The real issue for me is the Gas, like many I have an old style meter which I had specifically fitted to my LPG system for Bulb to read it and it worked surprisingly well. If anyone knows a work around i’d be very interested to know.

My pyloopenergy library and HA code have now stopped working - a shame since I think it was a good service.

Like @Peter_West I’m interested in the octopus energy api.

It does require their smart meters - so I’ve requested them to install - and I’ll then take a look at the api…

From what I can see in the documentation the Octopus API only gives you your consumption in half hour chunks, not in real time like we used to have with loop.

Very true for electricity. I loop’s gas was every 15 minutes, so it’s not much worse.

It should be possible to use another electricity monitor for the real-time electricity readings. Ideally one that doesn’t require a cloud service that might be withdrawn!

Yeah, real time energy consumption was an amazing feature and potentially could even be used to prevent electrical fires at home. A couple of times in the past the fuse in my home blew up and used Loop to troubleshoot that (check how big was the current spike).
Im wondering if it would be possible to hack the old Loop device with a NodeMCU or a similar device

I’ve just discovered this (Glow SMETS2 Display) which can connect to any SMETS2 smart meter and outputs MQTT. Now I just need to find a provider to move to who will install me some SMETS2 meters.

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I got my free kit but only got around to fitting it tonight.

There is no chance it will work with the current integration because they’ve also pulled the website which was effectively the route in for the integration. Without that we have no means to pull the data.

Loop is now of very limited use to me. Time to look for alternatives I guess. I don’t know why companys insist on shooting themselves in the foot like this.

It’s certainly a real shame. I have LPG gas and had an analogue meter fitted to it to get the loop gas readings, it was incredibly accurate and I was thoroughly pleased. The Electricity readings also seemed accurate.
As an aside I also had an eferge energy system which stopped working and their support couldn’t be bothered to resolve it so that went in the bin after six months!
I’ll probably get the Smet2 integration that @pcb1962 refers to (I’ve got a Bulb energy meter) but yet again that will be reliant on the supplier supporting it. In reality one off fee is no business model.

Loop monitoring has started working again for me, but will it stay?

I’ve taken it all out now! Hopefully they’ll leave it on. Keep us informed,

Thanks pcb1962, this looks like the perfect solution to a problem I’ve been trying to deal with for almost a year - long boring story!

I’ve emailed Glow and I hope it’s good news in reply.

Thanks again!!!

Mine has been working again for the past few days also. Strange… Seems they turned the old service back on?

I’ve just reconnected my receiver, in the app I’m seeing electricity but not gas. Anyone still seeing gas?