[despairingcustomer]

Well that turned into a farce and half!

I was expecting a quick job as the comms hub sits on top of the elec meter. The same installer turned up, he did not know what the job was about and so had to ring the office. I said it's all working fine both meters are sending readings back to EON (as recently confirmed by a remote manual reading) the only issue is that meters are too far away from the IHD and so a dual band comms hub is needed fitting. That is what EON themselves had told me they would do. Having spoken to the office he said that the gas meter isn't sending data.

Sometime later he said he put a new gas meter on, a new electricity meter and had tried 4 new dual band comms hubs. None of which would communicate with the DCC. I can't believe that - 4 DOAs is unheard of!

It looks like I now have a smart meter setup that can't send data to the EON system nor communicate with the IHD!

Just escalated by resolver.

I will now look at the photos of the new kit and work out what's been fitted.

[meldrewreborn]

@despairingcustomer

I thought that purpose of he dual band hub was to improve WAN communication with the DCC and E.On Next, not to improve Data transmission to the IHD, although I could be wrong.

[meldrewreborn]

It is astonishing that the installer didn't know the nature of the problem before being in the home.

[meldrewreborn]

I'm surprised you got an engineer to visit..

[retrotecchie]

@meldrewreborn

The dual-band hub uses either the traditional 2.4GHz Zigbee protocol or an 868MHz frequency to communicate with the IHD. It has nothing to do with connecting to DCC. The hub in question can either use Cellular which connects directly to the 2g/3g networks, or where signal is poor, can connect by a peer to peer mesh protocol between adjacent meters until one can see the comms network in which case that meter acts as the hub for all the others that cannot connect directly. This necessarily requires all the meters in between to be mesh capable.

In this case, an 868MHz IHD may stand a better chance of seeing the meters than a 2.4GHz unit. I say may....if the walls the signal has to pass through contain any foil backed plasterboard or insulation, all bets are off and the only solution is AltHAN.

[meldrewreborn]

@retrotecchie

Thanks for enlightening me, still lots to learn.

[retrotecchie]

@meldrewreborn

Why the meters don't have an RJ45 to connect to a hardwired HAN with a length of cheap CAT5 cable is a total mystery to me.

[meldrewreborn]

@retrotecchie

Security I presume - somebody might want to hack into the meter or the comms unit. Why the DCC can't come up with a link to home broadband surprises me - probably fails for the same reason.

[retrotecchie]

@meldrewreborn

Just as easy to hack them wirelessly if you have the right kit...and a firewalled single direction 'data out' link to just output signals to a display isn't exactly a security problem.

[despairingcustomer]

@retrotecchie

I agree - though they'd probably use an out of the box website to do that with all the subsequent issues !

Suffice to say when they come back to fit a dual band comms hub they also fit a new electricity meter and a new gas meter which is dual band enabled! I've got an EDMI ES-10B and a GS-68B.