Understanding Hildebrand Smart Meter Glow CAD

Third party integrations
1

I have a Hildebrand Glow CAD for display of energy use from a smart meter and have been setting up my Home Assistant system off site (away from the smart meter).

Today I was setting up integration on HA using Mosquito MQTT broker and switched on the Glow for the first time. To my delight everything worked, except of course connection to the smart meter. Fine, that will happen when I move it all to the property - after setting up secure remote access.

About four hours later I got an email from Hildebrand support which included a report from my Glow (identified by it’s ID/Mac address). The Glow reported a failure to connect to my meter, and support were asking if I could move the Glow closer to the meter, and if I could let them know so they could enable connection because this requires their intervention.

I’m curious:

  • how they received the information which they acted upon. From the Glow and by what route? Presumably via my internet connection - which seems problematic (phoning home).
  • what access and control they will have once the system is set up, and what I could do to control or filter this.

Obviously they have access to the smart meter data, but if they have access to a device on my network I would like to understand this.

Can anyone with knowledge of what going on here shed some light (no speculation please - I can do that myself :laughing:)

2

Apparently hildebrand website has a detailed description of their API. And there is a dedicated forum. Historically Jane from Hilderbrand has been very informative on that forum but not sure she hangs out on this forum. I access the meter by both MQTT and remotely also with the app. Fundamentally this is a web enabled device. That is as far as my knowledge goes.

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3

Here is Jane’s description of what happens when you first switch on your Glow CAD:

The notification is triggered (eventually) by your new Glow Display CAD - when it first connects to the internet it is basically telling us it is now active, and that triggers our servers sending the instruction, via the DCC Infrastructure, to ask the Communications Hub to initiate the Open/Join HAN instruction. We try that six times and then back off - when it fails we get an alert so we had six for you.

So when I’m ready they’ll trigger this again to get the meter to connect to the Glow CAD. I conclude that once this is done I could block outside access for the Glow, but we will see! It depends what traffic I see once it’s working.