I recently upgraded my heating control to the 2nd Generation Hive Active Heating Thermostat. To ensure complete Zigbee wireless coverage throughout my house I wanted to add a signal booster plug, which would extend Zigbee’s wireless range and give me the option to move the thermostat to different rooms in the house. I contacted the […]
I have already written a post about my difficulty in 2013 persuading British Gas to install Smart Meters, followed by installation issues fraught with delays. I am sorry to say my experience with British Gas Smart Meters continues to be… well… broken. Last year, in July 2014, my ecoMeter (In Home Display) stopped being able […]
In my previous blog post I wrote about the difficulties I experienced finding any Zigbee based home automation devices on eBay. It almost became an obsession for me to find a Zigbee device which was not either a Xbee, development kit or a book. When I came across a cheap 4-Noks ZC-GW-ETH-EM Ethernet to Zigbee […]
Following my mission to get smart meters installed I started to look into the possibility of using Zigbee to gather my energy usage statistics from my new state of the art meters. This, as it seems, would not be as easy as I at first thought. Tantalisingly, on the back of the ecoMeter In Home […]
After quite a bit of pestering and waiting I eventually managed to persuade British Gas to swap out my archaic Electricity and Gas meters for the latest ‘Phase 3’ Smart Meters. This certainly was not an easy process and, despite constant bombardment of TV adverts on television from British Gas about how smart meters are […]
Armed with the knowledge about how meters have a ‘pulse’, I was then able to start building a sensor and simple Arduino sketch (C++ code) to calculate my electricity consumption. Power v’s Energy Before I started, I needed to understand some basic terminology about electricity! I did not fully appreciate the difference between Power and […]
For the past year and a half I have habitually been recording my Gas and Electricity meter readings (my wife would probably say it was an obsession!). Each week I would clamber under the stairs armed with my iPhone flashlight, crawling through the dust I would read the digits from my old ‘dumb’ meters. I […]