Hi @creatish ,

I’m really sorry to tell you this, but I’m afraid you won’t be able to pair that IHD6 at all. A lot of suppliers are somewhat wary about installing IHDs bought from eBay or Amazon, so my best advice would be to send it back for a refund. If the seller won’t budge, you can use eBay Buyer Protection to force a refund on the basis the goods aren’t fit for purpose.

The only way the IHD6 is known to work is if it’s sent to you by your energy supplier. However, the ivie Bud will work just fine as long as you buy it directly from https://ivie.co.uk . You’ll want to check the compatibility first though, which you can do via https://ivie.co.uk/compatibility . You’ll also be able to self-pair too without calling your supplier, simply follow the included instructions in the box and on the device and you should be up and running within a few hours.

Thankyou, I’ve opened the return, I thought it would work as kept seeing them sell for £20 lol.

if going to have to pay £50 might aswell stretch to this one, seems pretty overpriced for what it is but this one seems to ACTUALLY have the wifi workung now and not just a vague ‘’coming soon’’ in which looks to be in the works for last 3 years+ so would hold my breath them getting that working.

https://shop.glowmarkt.com/products/display-and-cad-combined-for-smart-meter-customers

This one also has ‘’homeassistant’’ integration going so might be more ‘’open source’’ in that sense.

If you have SMETS2 meters, feel free to get both the ivie Bud and the Hildebrand Glow if you want to. Not many people would do that, but it’s supported as long as you don’t have more than four IHDs active at once.

If you have S1 meters though, only the Hildebrand Glow will work at this time. They’ve informed me that they’ll have more S1 stock available within the next month or so - they just need to finalise a few details first.

And don’t get me started on those eBay sellers! XD

I personally only use 2-4kwh at the moment, barely anything, but I am bit of a geek and want to see live usage in Homeassistant,  ‘’just because’’  from looking hildebrand looks to do that.

just wondering if paying £70 is worth it lol

Well… I have two SMETS2 Chameleon IHD6-CAD-PPMID on my setup and they work brilliantly for me. Exactly how I got them is a loooooong story and not one I’d want to type up at 11pm. But the short version is that I managed to get OVO to post the first one out when I had an S1 meter (and didn’t realise it wouldn’t work!) and when OVO swapped out that meter for an S2, I managed to score a second one from the engineer and then paired up both of them.

If you do get the Hildebrand Glow though, fancy doing a review for us? I’ve already got one for the ivie Bud but due to my unique circumstances, I cannot do a review of the Hildebrand Glow!

@ArundaleP uses Home Assistant to good effect with their home, do you reckon it’s worth the IHD cost? 

@creatish how come your supplier can’t provide an IHD?

There is at least one large supplier that appears to aggressively deny requests to send out an IHD, even for customers who don’t have one at all yet. I won’t name and shame them here, but that same supplier also happens to be one that provides the absolutely terrible IHDL SmartView 2 with SMETS2 installs.

@creatish There are a lot of security restrictions with IHD’s and rightly so, which makes compatibility with third party devices a challenge.

I use the Hildebrand glow stick with home assistant and it works great. You get near real time power consumption and more importantly meter readings. With home assistance you can use the Hildebrand MQTT stream and the Node Red flow I tweaked to have visibility of electricity and gas consumption in almost real time (gas is updated 5 mins). I am with OVO and have a secure smets 1 meter so currently there is no access to the export data stream. 
 

With Home Assistant you can use this data stream to feed the new energy dashboard which is great. 
 

There are some limitations however; the cost / rates data is only showing what the supplier provides and is often slow to update with price changes (I don’t use this data anyway).

You will never get real time power data for gas consumption but the total meter data is updated far more frequently than any other method.

I personally wouldn’t bother with the IHD, just get the glow stick (cheaper and you can use Home Assistance or the Glow app to view the data).

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Hi I understand Hildebrand glow can integrate with Home Assistant. Can iVie Bud integrate with HA? If not how the user can get to the their own energy data?

Ivie bud can't now 

Ivie bud have been qoutijg integration with smart things for about 3 years from what I can see they have it working with bulb customers but that's about it 

There CS says it's coming soon but no date 

I personally wouldn't avoid ivie bud till it's actually available 

And if it's HA your after even when ST is available still won't work with HA unless someone created the integration 

The glow have a no screen option coming in next month which is same price £50

Many thanks for clarifications on Ivie Bud’s progress with HA integration. I am keen to get our own energy consumption data integrated and stored locally if possible. What about Hildebrand? How twisted / hard is to get integrated with HA and if there is a way to get data on your own sql database ?

It is quite unbelievable how far the industry is from a neat solution to empower clients.

Upto now SmartThings is probably the best we can find but looking into ldr sensor on raspberry pi asap. 

Hildebrand is what you want 

Currently £70 for the display but there coming out with the no screen usb thing for £50 in next month or so 

Not to difficult to setup and yes lot more useful to have in ha then smart things 

I detest buying a product when 50% of the selling point is to come

  @creatish Thanks for heads up on Hildebrand. I think you have mentioned integration with HA and driving HA graphs and storing data locally also. Is there any step by step guide how to do that? If yes I shall buy Hildebrand with display today! If not you would be kind to document steps of Hildebrand integration into HA and how to save our own data locally from Smets1 or 2 smart meters? Thank you in advance.

I haven't done it myself but it doesn't look much different then most guides I've read it's a third party integration so have to do little bit of work on setting up something called "hacs" a third party app store essentially

https://github.com/unlobito/ha-hildebrandglow

Hi 

I shall have to look into this now. It looks like you need to ask Hildebrand for ‘ MQTT access be enabled for your account.’ and the Github you have mentioned needs a bit more support as it looks now. I probably need more encouragement to spend 70£ for something I eventually realise ‘it still doesn't do the job’. It is quite a simple request: store locally smart meters consumption data. Believe it or not RPI’s LDR sensor it the best I can see for now. 

Do I miss anything from the picture? It is quite sad in 2022 seeing all of us quite frankly struggling to get hold of our energy data we OWN. Let’s hope solutions are coming soon. 

Hi, before getting the IHD we shall try the Bright App. and our data graphs. This should connect  and read our smart meter data @DCC level. We are having SmartThings/Loop and a local sensor from GEO (monitor hub on LED sensor). I gave up on getting proper understanding on costs as none of these are capable to handle tariffs properly (peak/offpeak). I am focused on kWh but some are displaying Week graph starting from Sun some starting from Monday. Incredible. Let’s see what Brigh App can do. I shall keep you posted.

The £50 usb glow stick works fine (it’s what I use), a very simple node red flow (available from the Hildebrand forum) and Home Assistant work great together. I have been using this setup for 2 years with great success.

Hi @ArundaleP Thank you I shall have a look next week on this.

@ArundaleP is this what you were referring to above? https://shop.glowmarkt.com/products/glow-stick

This one is only SMETS1 

Correct I've emailed and they should have smets2 one available for £50 in next few weeks 

Add yourself to the Smets2 Glowstick waiting list. I have been really impressed with the Smets1 glow stick and thankfully my meter is still smets 1 for now. 
 

If the node red flow link I posted on the Hildebrand forum doesn’t work, let me know and I’ll send it to you.

@stefmari  - I agree with sentiment, I have the ivie bud at the moment but going to send back as I don’t see the ST coming for years, will get the glow stick when thats ready for sale for smets2 aswell.

the evie bud works fine when no wifi is on the only reasoning local control is not possible is because there is no ‘’syncing method’’ built into the smets2 meters themself to pair to zigbee controllers.

Currently OTA grid has to send signals to the meter to tell it to pair to home IHD’s, which is a backwards approach.

they could design meters in a way they pair just like a phillps hue lightbulb or switch where the grid doesn;t need to get involved.

This wouldn;t do things like showing your tariff and bills automatically like the home ihd do but there do what most people want, how much wattage is my home using.

Out of intrest, how much Wattage is youe house using when nothing is happening?

mine seems to be 40-70watt range when nothing is on.

Hi All,

As I have said we shall give it a try to Bright App (a Hildebrand?). Well, we have started with Smartthings, followed by Loop (only app) and Geo Home with Energy Hub Monitor (include real time based on led sensor).

From far, Bright stands out for at least the followings which we think as fundamental requirements for a mature approach to the topic:

• correct identification of the tariff (some let you define or just present pre-defined lists (silly) of outdated hundreds of tariffs - see Loop)!!! We are at the second generation of smart meters and some app cannot identify the tariff?!
• capability to handle time-of-use tarriffs peak / off-peak (only Geo let you define 2 tariffs)
• simplicity and robustness of visualisations - displays values kWh and £ for each bar graph - Smarthings and Loop do this, GEO don’t);
• shall not forget about gas meter data. Only Loop and Bright can deliver this.

Many apps pretending to do stuff but very very few deliver something useful. There are many things to say however choosing the visualisation provider its a personal choice.

When you get to ask for more from these apps I have to stick to the ones which can deliver. I trust this shall not change in time for Bright App. Only time will prove it.

Quite impressed and Thank you.

PS: I couldn’t contain myself to get an Raspberry PI Zero with LDR sensor to have data stored locally on SD (thanks to instructions on https://mdbind.com/blog/2021/01/power-monitoring-using-a-raspberry-pi/#post-53) 

Out of intrest, how much Wattage is youe house using when nothing is happening?

 

mine seems to be 40-70watt range when nothing is on.

It looks that we may have a ‘base-load’ around 300W. I am getting into this now as we have an EV and peak/off-peak tariff so we start slowly to use delayed start functions and optimise the consumption rather waste.

The evie bud is good for picking up octopus go tariff details and tell me exactly how much money i’ve spent today, yesterday correctly for both gas and electric.

Just dissapointed and don’t trust them with there smart things intergration

as there is another company doing it its seem silly not to have this ready.

Just something to note that the £20 diffrence for screen vs stick might need to be rethought.

I like the idea of it but something that won’t work is seeing the usage when wifi is down.

the screen is local and works with no wifi, so far as I can tell if your troublshooting electric and you turn of the router circuit you ain’t seeing the wattage.

something I like to do if trying ti understand my home usage to reduce it