Category Archives: ZigBee

British Gas Smart Meters – Part 3

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 […]

4-Noks ZB-Connection Gateway and Plug

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 […]

Zigbee vs Z-Wave

In this blog you will find a series of ramblings, product reviews, ideas and projects centered around the topic of Home Automation and Smart Energy. One of my initial aims is to find out the answer to the question… “Which wireless protocol is the future of home automation: Zigbee or Z-Wave (or other)?”. With ‘the […]

British Gas Smart Meters – Part 2

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 […]

British Gas Smart Meters – Part 1

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 […]