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Would my new Deco mesh wifi cause issues with my smart meter and In Home Display (IHD) connectivity?

  • 29 November 2020
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  • NoelR
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I've recently upgraded my WiFi to a Mesh based Deco M9 Plus. Since then my Smart meters have stopped sending readings. Could these two things be related ?

 

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Best answer by Blastoise186 29 November 2020, 22:16

Updated on 01/12/20: See the info below for advice on frequencies for WiFi, Zigbee and smart connectivity. 

If your S2 (Aclara and others) smart meters have connection issues, see this health check guide to diagnose. 

If your Secure Liberty smart meter has connection issues, see this health check guide to diagnose. 

 

Hi there @NoelR ,

Yes, this is possible in some cases. The good news however is that there are ways to help fix this. I’m actually also an expert with this stuff as I’m currently upgrading my own network to Ubiquiti UniFi kit.

One of the first things you can try would be restricting the 2.4 GHz usage on your Deco kit to 20MHz channel width rather than 40MHz. This allows a lot more free space on the 2.4GHz band for everything else, including ZigBee based smart meters and IHDs. The Home Area Network (HAN) can be affected by Wi-Fi, but the WAN shouldn’t be affected at all as it’s on a different frequency.

If that doesn’t work, I can help you out with a few other solutions too. Alternatively, if you know you don’t need 2.4GHz Wi-Fi at all, you could also disable that completely and just use 5GHz since this would completely dodge ZigBee altogether.

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Blastoise186
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Updated on 01/12/20: See the info below for advice on frequencies for WiFi, Zigbee and smart connectivity. 

If your S2 (Aclara and others) smart meters have connection issues, see this health check guide to diagnose. 

If your Secure Liberty smart meter has connection issues, see this health check guide to diagnose. 

 

Hi there @NoelR ,

Yes, this is possible in some cases. The good news however is that there are ways to help fix this. I’m actually also an expert with this stuff as I’m currently upgrading my own network to Ubiquiti UniFi kit.

One of the first things you can try would be restricting the 2.4 GHz usage on your Deco kit to 20MHz channel width rather than 40MHz. This allows a lot more free space on the 2.4GHz band for everything else, including ZigBee based smart meters and IHDs. The Home Area Network (HAN) can be affected by Wi-Fi, but the WAN shouldn’t be affected at all as it’s on a different frequency.

If that doesn’t work, I can help you out with a few other solutions too. Alternatively, if you know you don’t need 2.4GHz Wi-Fi at all, you could also disable that completely and just use 5GHz since this would completely dodge ZigBee altogether.

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Hi Blastoise186

 

Thanks for that. I've just seen that the last date that the smart meters sent a reading was November 20 but only turned on the new WiFi on the 27th. So looks like they couldn't be related. 

 

Thanks for your help anyway, take care. 

Blastoise186
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No worries. Just a thought though @NoelR , do you have your meters set to Monthly? We’ll be more than happy to help you out if you’re having trouble

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They're set to daily. I need to take a look at the lights on the modem on top of the electricity  meter to see if that helps figure out what's wrong. 

 

Blastoise186
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It would indeed. Could you also snap some photos of all your meters and In-Home Display please? Photos of them can help me a lot with diagnostics.

If you could also fill out your profile too, that can be especially useful

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Blastoise186
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Ah ha! I think I’ve solved this mystery for you.

It looks like your IHD isn’t paired up with your meters for some reason. If you have a chat with the Support Team, they’ll get it paired up again for you. Please let me know if you see any progress after that.

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Hi. I've attached photos above. The lights on the modem are flashing approx every 8 secs, all of the green LEDs except the MESH. 

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Thanks I'll contact the Support team. Would that stop the readings being sent to OVO ? 

Blastoise186
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Nope, that shouldn’t affect the readings at all. However, you’re welcome to ask the team to double check that too while you’re talking to them. They’ll be happy to make sure the meters are communicating properly and you can also change the settings if you’d like to.

Please let them know you’ve spoken to me on the forum and provide a link to this thread. It helps the team get up to speed much faster.

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Thank you. 

 

They've given me a checklist to fill out and send back to them. 

 

Thanks for your help. 

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An update. It all works now. Readings are sent to OVO and appear in my account and the IHD is also working. 

 

As far as I'm concerned I didn't do anything to make this happen. I'd not got around to sending in the form that was requested. 

 

Happy its working but would be nice to 

A) Know it wasn't working before and 

B) that it started working again 

 

I don't believe there's a way to get a notification of these events   

 

 

 

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@NoelR  There are great many customers who would agree with you that the lack of a feedback loop to us customers is causing difficulties.

Since Feb’20 we have been seeing an increasing occurrence of missing data from sites with Smart Meters. I gave an overview of the situation here on another Topic last month.

It’s very difficult for us to track these software faults when we don’t know if they are occasionally correcting themselves, or whether Customer Services are sending a SMETS_reset command to each site that reports a problem.

Worse still, simply resetting something doesn’t help to diagnose what’s going wrong in the first place. It just removes the symptoms which might have helped with that diagnosis.

 

Returning to your original enquiry about the 2.4GHz WiFi transmissions and the ZigBee signals used by the Communications Hub of your Smart Meter installation:

I published a frequency diagram about this phenomenon on the general Topic about SMETS2 Meter Installation last year. Have a look at the advice there about which channels to use.

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