Can I use a Zigbee HAN packet analyser to help identify my smart meter In-Home Display (IHD) issues? My current supplier can't help!

Howdy @chartman ! Welcome to the OVO Forum!

Ooohhh, that’s a seriously good question, but admittedly also a pretty tricky one to answer.

Unfortunately, there’s not really any packet capture or network diagnostics tool that you can use to diagnose ZigBee related issues easily, especially with Smart Meters (I just checked!). However, there’s a few other tricks that we can try to help with.

Please could you snap some photos of your Smart Meters, Communications Hub (usually above the electric meter) and In-Home Display and pop them in your next reply for us. If you can include wide shots that show the equipment in context of where it is, as well as close ups which clearly show the displays while they’re lit up and the make/model numbers as well, that would be great. I can use these to identify exactly what you have, which helps to guide us as to what to do next.

I’m just curious, but who is your supplier by the way?

Thanks!

Probably not relevant for pics… Hub is Itron EM425-UK2. Gas is L&G G470 and IHD is Chameleon 3. Supplied by ANO but I will tell you via pm if you need to know.... I’m a retired electronics engineer. Worked on lots of super complex stuff… IED jammers, laser designators etc. and a bit of exposure to a 3rd party IHD design. So here’s the thing. I’m certain that the smart meter systems can’t be debugged without what I have asked. It’s too complex.I’ve had 3 IHDs installe, all of which have failed after various times of working correctly. They end up ‘waiting for data’.The supplier has given up trying. If there were such a debugging tool ( from Chameleon, for example), I’m sure the problem could be identified quite quickly. My best guess is that the comms gets locked out, somehow, preventing zigbee data from the hub getting to the IHD. IHD resets do nothing. IHD is within 2M of the HUB. I don’t need to use such a tool, and even if I had one, the dual layer encryption would prevent me from going past step one yet alone getting any meaningful packets. 

Oh wow, quite a history then. I had a feeling you knew more than most about this stuff. There’s a few diagnostics we can do right now if you’re up for it.

Thanks, that’s great. If you could fill out your profile with those details, that will help us out in future if you stop by again.

You’ve got SMETS2 then, so that makes life a little easier for me. On top of the electric meter, there should be a Communications Hub manufactured by either WNC, Toshiba or EDMI. Please could you tell me:

1. Which of those three manufacturers is marked on it
2. How many lights there are (either two or five)
3. Which of those lights flash/pulse and how often each one does so (if there’s five lights, please also tell me the labels of each one that lights up)
4. Whether there’s anything like Standard 420, SKU1 Cellular, SKU2 Cellular + Mesh, SKU3 SIMCH or similar printed on the hub.

While it’s not the most advanced diagnostics, it helps me to figure out if the Comms Hub is faulty. Those lights aren’t just for show!

OK will do, but it will have to wait until Thursday morning. I’m busy all day tomorrow and tonight. Tx

Sure thing. I’m subscribed to this thread so I’ll be notified if you reply. Simply drop a comment here again when you’re ready and I’ll catch up with you.

1. Which of those three manufacturers is marked on it

WNC

1. How many lights there are (either two or five)
2. 5
3. Which of those lights flash/pulse and how often each one does so (if there’s five lights, please also tell me the labels of each one that lights up)

SW

WAN

Mesh

HAN

GAS

all except Mseh ( expected) flash green at about 5/sec

1. Whether there’s anything like Standard 420, SKU1 Cellular, SKU2 Cellular + Mesh, SKU3 SIMCH or similar printed on the hub.
2. SKU1

So here’s the thing…. I went and checked in the garage ( IHD 2M from hub) and it was working! Full functionality + history.  Went back later and display said ‘waiting for data’. This morning it’s showing full data again and is now in my lounge in front of me. Signal strength is 2 bars showing . 

Checked my online account energy data and it matches the IHD with no ‘’estimates’.

One question, how does the IHD get it’s clock data? I thought it was from the hub but I have also read that it gets it from Chameleon cloud services… IME the Chameleon should have it’s own RTC which is synchronised to the hub ,once comms is established with the hub. Thoughts?

Just for a laugh, here’s something… In my September acocunt there are some ‘estimated readings for gas. Probably a temporary WAN failure to connect to the DCC ( my guess). July/Aug/Sep gas usage every day was 40-50p. Just heating hot water twice a day. On the 25th September, there is an estimated reading of £1.05. !!!! How does that work?  I questioned my energy supplier and they haven’t answered. Too embarrasing I guess. I have to say, I am impressed with the OVO community support information here. I might just switch...

Hmm… That’s rather curious…

I know things can be unstable for the first few weeks after new Smart Meters are installed and/or you’ve switched supplier, but they should settle down within six weeks or so in most cases. Mind you, it would also help if your supplier would hand out the Chameleon IHD6 for customers with SMETS2 setups, rather than the older Chameleon IHD3 which is nowhere near as good (it’s also really more for SMETS1 setups as well).

IHDs generally get their time synchronised via the Comms Hub above the electric meter. They don’t seem to use any internet time servers that I’m aware of. I actually used tcpdump in my UniFi kit a while ago to monitor network traffic from the Kecleon Brothers over Wi-Fi and there was nothing of interest, just DNS and DHCP requests for the most part.

I’ll need to go away and think about a few more things before I can answer properly. It’s been a long week for me and I’m pretty tired! I don’t have my full strength back yet from moving 80 heavy boxes this week.

Ok, now that I’ve had a whole weekend to rest and get my strength back, I’m ready to jump back on this one.

In some ways, I can agree with you about allowing the IHD to sync to an Internet Time Server via NTP - preferably via a secure mechanism using something like NTS because it’s 2021 and that’s a thing now - but I can also see it from the other side as to why it’s not done that way. Surprisingly, not everyone has internet in the UK and it’s also true that not everyone with a CAD enabled IHD has actually paired it to their Wi-Fi to give the IHD internet access. To make things worse, not every IHD has said capability either. Here’s a few that I know of which definitely don’t! I really need to make sure I get this right as well actually.

I know that some IHDs that don’t have built-in CAD or Wi-Fi features can get them via an optional accessory, but I’m just listing all the ones here that don’t have it built-in, either by default or as a factory option.

• SSE Smart Energy Tracker - a legacy SMETS1 IHD from the early days
• Chameleon IHD3/IHD6 base models because CAD is an optional feature.
  • The Chameleon IHD3-CAD-PPMID, IHD6-CAD-PPMID and IHD6-CAD-PPMID-S1 do feature it though (and it’s usually these ones which are given out anyway)
• IHDL SmartView, SmartView2, SmartView3, SmartView4
• Geo Duet II (including all supplier branded variants), Geo Solo II and most of Geo’s discontinued products (at the time of writing this)
• EnergySmart by British Gas - which was actually manufactured by Geo (and is apparently also known as the Geo Minim+)

And probably a few more beyond that. Given how many models that covers, there needs to be a solution that works regardless of CAD features or internet access (I think the SMETS1 and SMETS2 specifications probably considered this as well). Having the IHD sync time from the Comms Hub kind of gets around this issue, since if you have Smart Meters and you’re in the UK, you’ll have a Comms Hub of some kind as well. It would be nice if the IHD could also have a built-in RTC so that you can still use it as a clock even when it’s not talking to anything, but I guess no-one thought of that use case when these things were designed.

On the plus side, the IHD does sync time with the Comms Hub once it’s connected and maintains it for as long as the connection is still active, so that’s not the end of the world. It’s just that the IHD clock freezes up if the connection is lost…

As for those estimated readings… I honestly can’t say why your supplier did that. The only suppliers for which I have a good understanding of the billing systems/platforms are SSE (as a former SSE customer before moving to OVO) and OVO as my current supplier. I’ve never used any other supplier myself, so I’ve never had first-hand experience with their stuff.

MyOVO does sometimes backfill usage data with estimates if OVO is unable to get any kind of readings at all, but that’s a separate thing to the billing elements which are currently based purely on meter readings alone. But as long as OVO is able to get the data in every day, MyOVO will number crunch it and should generally show the correct usage data.

Glad you like the forum by the way! We’re open to helping out basically anyone regardless of supplier. This forum can’t help with everything, but we’ll always do what we can. :)

Good stuff B. An update. A few days ago, my IHD sprang into life for a short while then went ‘off’. a couple of days later, it came on again for 24 hours or so, When I say ‘on’ I mean receiving all the correct data and ‘off’ being in a state ‘waiting for data’. The IHD clock is alwasy correct although I have seen it once where it stopped. Simple logic tells me that this proves ( almost) that the isn’t a hard harware fault. It must be a software glitch/issue hence my original question ‘is there a packet sniffer for Zigbee’. I don’t see how this situation can be resolved without one other than guesswork- ‘lets swap tthis out’. OTOH, if it was a software fault, then every system would suffer in the same way so I’m stumped as to the cause. If this was a normal consumer to Business contract, I’d sue for breach of contract, claiming ‘ not fit for purpose’. I have good experience of that in the small claims court using MCOL. Smart Meters are promoted as being able to ‘save energy’. We all know that’s not true, don’t we….But it is a very useful tool for analysing energy usage and tweaking your home envirionment or being super careful for those on prepay /low incomes.

So. If the RTC is running and is correct, why don’t I get data? My only thought is that once the time is synchronised from the hub, an internal RTC takes over, maybe. I might ask Chameleon again and see if I’m still ‘black listed’….

Yup. That’s right.

I’m seeing a few other reports of issues as well with IHDs recently, so I’m just trying to see if I can find a common ground that links all of them together. You never know, it might help to solve this puzzle, or at least get somewhere towards it.

Could you do me a favour? For obvious reasons, as a forum volunteer, I can’t access your account with OVO and have no way to do anything with your Smart Meters or IHD at all. But there’s one more piece of information that I could find really useful, if that’s OK. Nothing personal of course.

If you go into the menu, there should be an option somewhere about IHD Info that will give you some technical details about the IHD (you’ve probably seen it before, by the sounds of things!). Could you grab the Firmware/Software Version and let me know what it’s running on please? I don’t have the release notes or anything, but it might still provide a clue or two.

Actually I’m with EDF :(

I’ll see what I can find out. I did once manage to find out the internal zigbee version but I can’t seem to find it again…. BBL dentist

All I get is V3 1.0 on power up. Zigbee version is 1.0.0 ( found it in settings/IHD info. 

Yes, got all that. EDF are hopeless and have ‘washed their hands’ as if to say, tough, it’s faulty, get on with it. As a result of info on here, I have requested they pair up a second ‘different’ IHD. I’ve also complained to OFGEM to see what they have to say . I beggars belief that an energy company can’t sort this issue- read the whole thred to get the jist...