UK Smart Metering & Tracker Energy Use

Posted on
Sat Jun 06, 2020 4:43 am
neilk offline
Posts: 714
Joined: Jul 13, 2015
Location: Reading, UK

UK Smart Metering & Tracker Energy Use

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Screenshot 2020-06-06 at 10.14.36.png (310.19 KiB) Viewed 1521 times


I thought it worth stripping back some of the jargon and complexity, and try to explain some of the capability that exists for the UK users. with Indigo Integration. I have no affiliation with Glowmarkt/Hildebrand or Octopus Energy other than using both. They are both innovative organisations that are offering something outside of the norm.

Smart Metering

I like many did not see much value in switching to a smart meter, especially when the roll out was badly managed, and the lack of standardisation for the early meters. Having made the switch to an EV, it became more interesting. I had the meter installed and played with the "In Home Display" that the energy company "gives" you, and found it extremely limited and any hopes I had of gaining any insight and usable data were soon dashed. not even a smart phone app. Even though the meters use Zigbee, not unsprisingly you cannot pair your own hardware to the meter. It also appears that even though the drive to smart meters was to manage demand, the centralised organisation that collects the meter data only makes it available for the previous day. This is when the Glowmarkt platform came to my attention from Hildebrand (some users had mentioned it on here previously). They provide access to the billing data via an App and a free account that gets you the historical data if your energy provider does not provide an API. They will also sell you an "In Home Display" that does something useful, you pair it to your home network, and it will connect via Zigbee to your meter, and send that data to Hildebrand, who will then send it back to you via MQTT or their API. (If you have an earlier SMETS1 Meter you need to use their Headless Glowstick hardware). Once you get over the fact that the data has to go to the cloud and back (due to licensing limitations from the people who manage the meter infrastructure) this works really well and turns your smart meter into an effective real time energy monitor. You do this completely independently of your energy supplier, so if you switch suppliers everything keeps working.

So what does it give you ....

- An app you can access from anywhere that tells you real time usage and actual energy costs (including variable rate tariffs like Octopus Agile)

In Indigo (with the pre-release plugin)
- real time electricity consumption in W, daily, monthly, weekly total consumption summaries and actual meter reads without braving the spiders in the cupboard
- Consumption or cost devices that show cumulative energy cost and consumption every 30 mins for gas and electricity through the day
- Cost and consumption broken out every 30 minutes for the previous day

Of course all of this can utilise triggers, graphing, control of car charging, tesla battery and all of the other things you may want to do in Indigo to shape your usage. It also links to my Octopus Energy Plugin to project costs based on the then current electricity costs. The support from Hildebrand is truly excellent and they engage with users, I would definitely recommend the CAD/IHD device that I purchased from them, and that brokers my meter data. http://www.glowmarkt.com
I can definitely do even more with the plugin development and am open to testers and new requirements (I will add csv export capabilities next), and I need to explore Grafana use cases.

Octopus Agile

This really comes useful when you combine it with the Agile Tariff from Octopus Energy, that gives you wholesale derived rates for each 30 minute period. Prior to the Covid Crisis the headline capability here was that rates even go negative when supply exceeds demand, and the grid doesn't want the cost of closing down generation resources especially renewables when wind or sun is plentiful, During Covid the number of "price plunges" has been frequent. This rate does track the wholesale price, and includes a "premium" during peak hours but if the rates change you are not locked in, and can switch to a fixed rate at any time and without penalty. For illustration it is saving me 47% versus Octopus' standard variable rate over the last month (and their rates are competitive) and that is without any meaningful charging of my car due to lockdown. The plugin allows you do display the then current rate, and again to trigger anything when rates fall. Want to use the pyrolytic cleaning function on the oven ? How about getting paid to do it ?

You can see from the screen shot above from my test machine that it presents a rich amount of usage data, especially when combining the two plugins. I need to give the Octopus plugin a little more love, and will add device states so you can also see the future rates (and apply logic like "if my tumble dryer needs 2 hours to run when will be the cheapest time to run it") as well as extracting the billing data from their service (for those people who do not have an account with Hildebrand.

Thanks

Also if you are tempted to switch to Octopus then please consider using my referral code, which I will donate the equivalent cash to our local hospitals Children's Oncology Team to make life better for families undergoing childhood cancer, and who sucessfully treated my son. https://share.octopus.energy/cute-peak-364

I would love to here thoughts, suggestions and feature requests and also ideas on how to visualise some of this data with Graphing Plugins or Grafana, to be honest my focus has been on the plugin development as much as developing the use cases as much as I should.

Posted on
Sat Jun 06, 2020 8:59 am
matt (support) offline
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Posts: 21411
Joined: Jan 27, 2003
Location: Texas

Re: UK Smart Metering & Tracker Energy Use

Thanks for giving a higher level overview!

Image

Posted on
Sun Jun 14, 2020 1:04 pm
neilk offline
Posts: 714
Joined: Jul 13, 2015
Location: Reading, UK

Re: UK Smart Metering & Tracker Energy Use

So a little more progress this weekend, both with the two plugins (Glowmarkt and Octopus Energy) both of which are close to either release (or additional functionality. I have some really rough work going on a control page as well. I need to tidy up the rounding and Uivalues bit this is my smart energy control page. It has dials rendered from Grafana to give the current rate and actual instantaneous usage for electricity.

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I also finally got into the Grafana Plugin which is truly marvellous when you get your head around it. I still have a lot to learn and to sort the interesting from the useful


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You can see the real time usage with the variable rates applied. If you look at the shark teeth graph you can really see the impact of the peak rate period on Agile

I really cannot recommend enough the Glowstick / Glowmarkt CAD to grab real time data. The API from Octopus for historical data is a little flaky (they still haven't published yesterdays usage for example), but the data from Glow is rock solid and independent of supplier. Well worth the £64 investment if you have a smart meter.

The API issues have allowed my to improve the resilience and over the next week or so they should be ready to push to the plugin store.

Plenty to try now with Grafana as well, the plugin is awesome, and I haven't scratched the surface yet. Oh and I am charging my car which is why the usage is so high right now ! Should wait until the rates drop but too busy playing with writing plugins to actually apply it to the reason I started this stuff !

Neil

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