[Beki]

@ALM hey there, it's Beki here 👋 This sounds like it needs to be investigated as it is over the 42 day mark. Would you be able to send a message across to us on Facebook (@eonnext) or Twitter (@eon_next) and one of our awesome Digital Energy Specialists will be in touch with you today.

Sending positive energy to you,
Beki - Digi Ops Team Leader & Sustainability Enthusiast

Everything & everyone powered by sustainable energy. 🌍

[theunknowntech]

Howdy!

I just came back after a break as I had some stuff to do elsewhere. I wish I'd seen this thread sooner.

It sounds to me as if you've got a white labelled/rebranded version of the Geo Duet II, which is a SMETS1 IHD released sometime around 2013 if memory serves. The Npower variant is pretty much identical to the vanilla one, other than a small amount of branding. Here's a couple of things that might be helpful:

Data sheet: https://assets.geotogether.com/sites...Data-sheet.pdf
User manual: https://assets.geotogether.com/sites...ser-manual.pdf

While these two documents are the generic ones direct from Geo, they're valid for all variants of this particular IHD anyway - they just don't have Npower branding. From my understanding, it's still a supported model in that Geo still provides firmware updates etc but it's also technically a legacy IHD from the S1 days, so getting hold of more now is going to be a lot more difficult than it is to get a SMETS2 capable IHD. You also can't buy random ones from elsewhere, as you won't be able to pair them I'm afraid.

It also suggests that you've all got SMETS1 meters. There's some stuff I can check with regards to those, but I need your help. Please could you post some photos of your meters and in-home displays in this thread as this would really help me out. The main thing I need to know is the make and model of your meters e.g. Secure Liberty 100 or Aclara SGM1311. That lets me check if you've got one that's being included in the DCC migration - I have known IHDs to go a bit weird during that sort of process.

I can't check exactly when individual meters will migrate or the status for a particular meter, but I can find out general info pretty easily.

[theunknowntech]

I would edit this into my existing comment, but alas one cannot even see comments that are still in the pre-moderation queue, let alone edit them. :(

After some further digging, I managed to track down the user manual for the Npower specific variant of the Geo Duet II. The Npower website may be long gone, but I'm not defeated that easily.

Apparently though, you're not the only people who've noticed the Duet II randomly stop working after switching supplier. After digging through the archives of my home forum, I came across some notes that were left a while ago. If you're seeing "Connecting to Smart Meters" it can apparently take anywhere between five minutes and one hour for it to connect and start showing data - especially for gas meters. Rebooting the device will slow this down as the timer effectively resets.

I'm also seeing indications from other forums of similar issues as well, where someone was originally with Npower and later left but were able to use the Duet II just fine with multiple suppliers in the time since until a few months ago when it randomly "died". Soooo... It could just be wear and tear? It seems to happen a bit more often on the Npower variant but I don't have enough data to know for sure - it could just be that people with that variant are more vocal than people with the vanilla one for example.

It also seems that these days, Geo only offers somewhat limited support with regards to the Geo Duet II because it's such an old model and has been superseded repeatedly over the years since. Things have changed a lot since 2013 after all. I guess you could try to have it unpaired from your meters and paired up again if you speak to customer services, but I can't even say for sure whether they'd be able to get it to pair up again, so this is something you'll only want to do if you're prepared to take that risk.

If that still doesn't work out, them I'm afraid I honestly can't think of any other solutions as I'm already scraping the bottom of the barrel here. You may just have to accept that the Geo Duet II is little more than a decorative item at this point.

[Beki]

@theunknowntech Sorry for the continued moderation!

[Beki]

@theunknowntech Oooh, and welcome back 👋

[ALM]

@theunknowntech - sorry for the delay, here are some pictures of the meter itself and the communications box - hope they are useful in identifying the issue.

[theunknowntech]

@ALM Well... There's your problem... That's a SMETS1 Landis+Gyr E470 with the dreaded Trilliant SEAP-2001-V Comms Hub. I hate those things as they're terrible. Me and my friends have seen a few of these pop up on my home forum and there's a guide on there that helps to identify them. Lucky for me, I now know all of the variants so it takes mere seconds. To make things harder, the S1 and S2 versions are identical in their model numbers unless you dig deep, and they sometimes even look physically identical.

The black banner around the display is a dead giveaway that the one you have is an S1 version however - it's pretty much the only variant that is easy to reliably figure out at a glance. This one will of course be migrated to DCC eventually, but it could take at least another year as L+G meters have only recently started migrating. Don't get me started on the crazy mess that British Gas caused with their proprietary Centrica WAN either... The one that literally no-one else could ever touch...

Geo apparently still supports the Geo Duet II and all supplier specific variants, and I'm not aware of any that have reached End of Life as far as support goes. However, while the regular vanilla Geo Duet II plays nicely with most suppliers - assuming you have SMETS1 meters as it won't work with S2 - the supplier specific variants are a bit of an edge case. The problem with IHDs that are as old as the Geo Duet II is that documentation and other resources are pretty scarce, especially compared to newer IHDs like the Chameleon IHD6 or Geo Trio II, because not as many of them are still in use and the older models tend to get discontinued as newer models supersede them.

Also, with Npower no longer being around, that might limit your options because I wouldn't be surprised if the support contracts with Geo went down with them. I don't know the details though since that would have been behind closed doors and those things don't get made public.

The best you can do is to try to have it unpaired from your meters and paired up again. However, I don't know how to access the "secret menu" that presents the option you're after on the Duet II, so you might struggle to do even that. The unpair option is usually buried away where you can't get to it easily to avoid accidental unpairing, and it's not usually documented in the user manual for the same reason.

Other than that... I guess your only option would be to not have an IHD anymore and use alternative means to monitor your energy usage. Getting hold of a dual S1/S2 capable Chameleon IHD6-CAD-PPMID-S1 is already a challenge by itself. I can't think of any other IHD manufacturer that does one like that either - and the supply of S1 IHDs is slowly drying up as well over time.

[Phil]

I've now discovered that as well as the IHD not connecting, my Smart Meter has not been sending meter readings to EonNext. I get estimated bills now or someone comes round to try and read the meter, or I have to read it myself. Not a very Smart Meter really.

My meter is a Landis E470 and after a bit of Googling I found a match:
https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/ene...0-smart-meters
Which says my meter is a SMETS1, which as others have mentioned, are eventually being updated to SMETS2 at some time.

I then came across this useful site which allows you to check if your meter is on the Smart Meter network:
https://smartmetercheck.citizensadvice.org.uk/
Neither my electric or gas meters are found, which apparently means my meters are in the process of being migrated to the Smart Meter network. But no-one knows when that might be.

I presume that this means my meter will remain non-Smart (i.e. useless), and probably the reason why my IHD no longer works also. I will keep checking the smartmetercheck site to see if it can find my meters, or I get contacted about upgrading to SMETS2. Until that happens, I doubt the IHD will ever work again.

[theunknowntech]

Hehehe, you've discovered an enhanced version of the guide that my friend Blastoise186 wrote then. XD

The SEO on both of them is actually so powerful, that searching for pretty much any related terms brings both versions up in the top two results. :D

It is true that for now, yes. Your meter won't be smart yet. However, it should regain Smart functionality eventually as it seems as if that Comms Hub is talking to someone. I think the IHD you have might start working again eventually, but only time will tell. Thanks for that meter check site by the way, that's a new one on me. I'll make sure Blastoise knows about it, as he may well find a use for it. However, having just tried it with my S2 meter setup, I also got the result of "We can't find your meter", so perhaps the tool is just broken right now? I know my meter is definitely communicating just fine with my supplier, so yeah... Probably just a bug in the tool.

[mark]

Eon next messed up when they took on npower, they made no provision for migrating the smart meters. Lodge a complaint and they will eventually sort this out for you when they add your meter to some form of spreadsheet one of their teams looks after. Took me 2 months of complaining before my meter finally kicked into life.