Why does my Chameleon In Home Display (IHD) only display 'Waiting for Current Data' ?

Hi @Cmhammer69 and welcome to the Forum.

We could do with a bit more information about when your Smart Meters were installed. There’s quite a lot of off-site commissioning which goes on after the engineer leaves site. During this time all sorts of changes will occur on your meters. It doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s any fault.

Please complete your Forum Profile page too. Thanks.

A: Your gas meter has an internal battery which must last 10 years+. To conserve energy the display is normally blanked. You can wake it up by pressing any of the three red buttons.

B: Having no flash patterns on any of the Comms Hub indicators suggests a failure of the internal processor. (Nothing working in an electronic device of any type is generally a power-supply problem). Did you see the flash patterns operating when the Installer was working on-site?

What do you see if you go to your My OVO page online and click the button to show your Usage?

There’s a whole load more information over here in a topic about SMETS2 Meter Installation.

Let’s not jump to conclusions yet @Cmhammer69. Just because the processor doesn’t appear to be running, doesn’t mean it’s broken. It’s possible that the problem is merely the lack of power being fed from the electricity meter below it.

As you can see from this photo, the electricity meter has two connectors which will mate with the Comms Hub that gets bolted above it.

Two pins on the right-hand connector supply 12v DC to operate the Comms Hub electronics.

It’s entirely possible that the Comms Hub just needs re-seating and it’ll be fine.

Did you check the Usage on My OVO? Has this been receiving data from your Smart Meter?

What about the SMETS2 Gas Meter? Do the buttons wake up the display?

@Transparent, thank you for waking me up to the fact that I am paying to provide my meter readings. What a wonderful innovation! For whoever is billing me for gas and electricity.

As far as I can determine, the Comms Hub is correctly seated and, since it worked fine until Saturday, I feel it is entirely reasonable to conclude that there is a fault, which was your suggestion. Perhaps I missed an earthquake here overnight Friday into Saturday?

Kindly advise me when Ovo propose to remedy this situation.

Yep, this forum isn’t best placed for concrete remedy implementation promises, @Cmhammer69 - but there’s decent customer generated advice if you know where to find it. 

If you think your IHD has a fault needed CS support (such as those listed in @Transparent’s ‘Beat answer’ (at the top), please reach out to our support teams: we’re on Facebook, Twitter and our Help Centre has online chat!

Amazing work with this diagnosing, @csty - this is really helpful for us to make sure we’re not wasting your time suggesting things that aren’t relevant!

It seems to have WAN, it seems to have HAN, it seems to be paired….. maybe this is a firmware update delay? Similar to the topic here

As you mentioned, there’s nothing ‘on the ground’ that is telling us the issue, we need to get our Support team to check things behind the scenes. You won’t lose your self service reward for this, as it’s not something you can do yourself (you’ve already tried, very hard as outlined above).

Can you let us know how it’s left when you reach out?

@Tim_OVO , I spoke to the support twice in the last few days, but they were not able to fix it. Apparently  sometimes IHD can unpair and refuse to pair back to the smart meter. It seems that the only option is to replace the IHD. Apparently there is a backlog so it might take some time to get one. 

@Transparent , I recognise the security aspect, but I believe it is possible to provide a limited access to the system without compromising on  it. I hope that this will one day be possible as it would open a host of new services around home automation. Online banking used to be very limited in features because of security risks, I hope that SMETS will also evolve this way.

It was working fine yesterday. Today the WiFi symbol is flashing and it won’t connect to the WiFi. Every few minutes it reboots and shows a welcome message before it goes back to saying waiting for data and the WiFi symbol flashing

ive tried turning it off and on again. I’ve unplugged it and tried to reconnect it to the WiFi but nothing works. 

Any ideas before fore I throw it up the garden?

I’ve updated my profile  

Perfect! Thanks for these photos. This helps a lot. 

I see you’ve got a SMETS2 capable Aclara SGM1412-B Smart Energy Meter, which actually helps me even more. You’ll notice you’ve got two buttons on the front, the blue one is A and the orange one is B.

With your IHD powered up and sat near the meter, could you wake up your meter by pressing the orange B button, then press B a couple of times until you get a screen about signal strengths - this screen will scroll through various readings, similar to the meter readings in sleep mode. The one I’m looking for is IHD Signal Strength here and the numbers will have dBm on the end. Could you tell me what it says please?

Sorry was supposed to attach a photo 

it wont attach a photo  Reading is -28dBm

Thanks.

That confirms the signal is definitely strong enough then. The check I had you do was to see whether the In-Home Display was talking to your Smart Meter at all, since it would only show something if it was connected and communicating.

Don’t worry about the meter being stuck on that technical menu. After about 30 seconds of inactivity, it will go back to sleep and return to the usual meter reading screen cycles. It’s one of the features I really love about my Aclara SGM1311.

As for your In-Home Display, I get the feeling that it’s either attempting to do a firmware update or it’s somehow managed to brick itself. Since the office is closed right now, I can offer a temporary fix here.

Would you be OK to leave the In-Home Display turned on, plugged into a power socket and kept close to your smart electricity meter overnight? Sometimes that might do the trick. But please let us know how things are looking in the morning.

If that works, you should be good to go. But if it doesn’t, we’ve got some other solutions and options we can try with you. I can also get help from Tim if needed.