We had/have a Frient smart meter monitoring electric for a long time, but recently we updated our meters to smart meters. The advantage being that we could pull the gas meter data into HA via Octopus integration and their supplied dongle.
The gas meter is a distance away and the engineer that came installed a booster or range extender to make sure it connected ok to the electric meter and it worked great … for 30 days and then the gas meter went silent.
I’ve called Octopus a few times, but all they’re willing to do is remotely initiate a connection request from the electricity meter.
On the gas meter I’ve tried to force a connection by going through the menu and asking it to Join the HAN. To no avail.
So at this point I’m looking at alternative ways to read from the meter.
I know my Sonoff coordinator can reach much further than the meter from when I was testing something else. Initially I was thinking of putting a Frient meter on it, but I don’t think that the utility meter issues an LED pulse when in use. It has a feature on the faceplate of the meter that looks like it could be used to monitor, but I didn’t see any light pulse from it.
To test we ran the hot tap and went to the meter to see. The consumption increases, but I didn’t see a light pulse - unless we didn’t have the tap open long enough?
Any suggestions welcome.
Our smart meters
