Does a smart meter cut power whilst it does an update ?

Hi ​@shetland ,

Nope. Power stays on during firmware updates and config changes - this is a safety feature that’s critical to how these things work.

Expected, but you have the cause and effect the wrong way round.

It was the power cut that triggered the IHD to reset.

When the power goes off the IHD wiill lose communication with the communications hub on top of the smart meter.
(Even if you have batteries in the IHD itself, there are none in the communications hub).

When the power comes back on the coms hub gets power again and the IHD can reconnect to it and reload everything.

Mine did it yesterday following a power cut here, and the power was off for less than a second.
It was that quick that I only knew it had happened because my house phone beeped as it started resetting itself.
My IHD was also resetting itself, - as was my boiler, and my laptop which I was using showed that the broadbancd was reconnecting so my router was resetting too.

The IHD never lost power as it is plugged into an UPS.

The UPS making a beep and seeing things that was not plugged into the UPS not working, made me notice that the power was off.

I wonder how long it takes the IHD to recover ?

Mine takes anywhere from 5 mins to an hour or two to reconnect after being disconnected.

I’m not sure just why that difference is, but suspect that it may have something to do with if the coms hub lost power or not and how long it had lost power for?

PS. It seems unnecessary to have the IHD on the UPS.
As you have found, if the power goes down then the coms hub goes down too, and there is nothing for the IHD to connect to anyway.

My hope with the IHD on the UPS is it would stop it jiggling around which wifi channel to settle on and just stick with the one it found so far to be least troublesome.

After no change in some 5 hours, I power cycled the IHD, eg. turned it off and on at the power socket, to see if that makes any difference, an hour later no change still.

I guess see how it is tomorrow !

We sometimes get some nasty power surges here, is the smart meter designed to cope with those just fine ?

Also, everything connected to the UPS goes through a large stand alone surge protector, to hopefully protect it more than just being in a standard non-UPS wall socket.
 

It should be! I’d be surprised if that sort of thing damaged them.

I’d forgotten that you were previously having problems with the Zigbee and IoT devices on the 2.4 GHz channels settling down.
Maybe that is why the IHD is now having issues reconnecting following the outage?

I don’t use any IoT devices on 2.4 GHz , (there’s just occasionaly my older laptop and the printer on my 2.4 GHz wifi, everything else uses the 5GHz),  so I don’t have that potential issue.

This morning its still not working as it should and waiting for data.

It managed fine before when I unplugged it and moved it a bit, and that was for more than 5 seconds :-)

Maybe I need to leave it off for a few minutes and see if that makes any difference.

I find almost nothing works on 5 Ghz !

Plus, amazing how many modern and rather expensive devices, only work on 2.4 Ghz, with some even wanting their own little slice from the router, forcing your Android device to pick that one.

Well, that’s MediaTek and Aquantia for you - they’re generally regarded as lower quality than other options.

Mind you, the MediaTek Wi-Fi 6 adaptor in my gaming laptop works pretty well on 5GHz… But then again, I do have Ubiquiti UniFi...

​@shetland if the IHD still continues to say ‘waiting for data’ what I’d advise is giving our Support Team and asking them to run a remote request called an ‘XJOIN’. This should hopefully get the IHD showing the data once again. This isn’t a guaranteed fix, but it takes two minutes to do. In the past I’ve been on the phone to customers who’ve advised their IHD has started working within seconds of me running an XJOIN.

Let us know how you get on.