When you say recently, how recently. Because didn’t Bulb went in Administration a year ago?
I ask because I was with Bulb and I have a been left with one of their IHD6 Smart Meters. Guide to that meter here:
I can’t get this device connected to Home Assistant. It appears to go via Smartthings but it doesn’t work. I contacted Samsung and they noted the following:
“Due to technical reasons, we’re not currently able to provide this data on the actual device card and this is what is stopping you being able to connect it to Home Assistant. We understand that it is something that is being worked on, but we don’t have any information as to when it might be available.”
Bulb are still operating normally (even since the announcement that Octopus have bought us). I had the same smart meter fitted by bulb about three months ago. You can get readings from it into HA using the “Hildebrand Glow” method and linking the IHD6 to your home wifi.
AIUI, the IHD collects stats from the smart meter using a closed-access Zigbee network. If connected to Wifi it will then phone the stats home to Bulb. Hildebrand Glow are a trusted partner and can connect to that information source and gather your power details, and an Integration in HA can then collect the stats from them.
The documentation was pretty clear and I don’t recall many issues setting it up - and as you can see, it’s still working away now. That might change after Octopus’ migration, but they have their own integrations so I imagine something similar will be available then. Good luck.
Hi UK folks.
All the above info and solutions are great. But are n’t we all missing something?
This energy use data is OURS. It originates in our gas/electricity meters and is passed locally to our IHD.
We should not be needing to pull it from any 3rd party - DCC, Hildebrand Glow, Chameleon, etc.
It ought to be available to us directly (e.g. by a WiFi or Zigbee feed) from a local device (meter/IHD/etc.).
Should n’t we in UK be pressing our politicians and OFGEM for this right and insisting it was standard. In principle, the original Smart Metering Act etc, envisaged customers having exactly that. And promised us the ability to monitor our energy usage. But the government + the energy industry failed to implement that local data facility.
You can get the information directly, BUT you need to upgrade you IHD to device that allows this.
For 99% of consumers, the IHD provided gives them the ability to observe their energy usage, and monitor it.
The Gas/Electric meters that you refer to as ‘ours’ are in fact the property of your energy supplier, and they’ve chosen the cheapest product (I would say viable) to give those 99% of consumers the information they need. Whilst you could argue that adding WIFI to the IHD costs pence, over millions of customers that turns into ££ which affects their bottom line.
Personally I’ve been using smart metering since 2009, it’s only been in the last 5 years that I’ve decided to retrieve the information to process it. More recently moving to an capable IHD that does provide the information locally, and integrates easily into HA.
If you want to access the data locally, then grab one of these
It’s definitely disappointing to see the ZigBee logo on my smart meters, but for this to only allow communication with a supplier determined IHD.
Currently I am using a Geotogether IHD bought through Drayton Wiser Insights+ - Geotogether is able to get the electric companies to allow it’s devices to receive data from the smart meters. I can then get my data into Home Assistant via Geotogethers API (i.e. indirectly after the IHD has sent the data to Geotogether). The other option I have is to get the data from Octopus via there API. It is disappointing that I can’t just get the data directly via Zigbee communication between HA and the meters, and using a single ZigBee channel.
It’s as if “smart” meters were never designed to have any benefit for end users. It’s all for the electric companies to have a closer to live view of demand/usage, maybe some export features, and to reduce the number of staff manually visiting and reading meters. Any benefit to consumers feels incidental.
I wonder if it would be possible to spoof an IHD identifier or find some other way to have my ZigBee dongle talk to the smart meters. Does anyone know how the ZigBee network works for smart meters and IHDs? Do they use coordinators, routers and end devices, or is it completely different?
