Why didn’t I know about Zigbee until I read about it an hour or so ago?

What I was reading said that the SMETS2 smart meters use Zigbee to communicate and will be able to tell washing machines and the like when the lowest tariff commences allowing the appliance to run at the lowest cost to the customer.


Andy

So if the washing machine starts up automatically in the middle of the night you can open the door of the machine in the morning  to find damp and/or creased clothes.....great.


Z.

Why didn’t I know about Zigbee until I read about it an hour or so ago?

In the context of smart meters, probably because the powers that be decided not to confuse us all any nasty technical details about what the system was meant to achieve overall, but just fed us with a couple of silly misbehaving cartoon characters and implying that smart meters' only purpose was to avoid the inconvenience of needing to have the meter read by a person. ?

 

What I was reading said that the SMETS2 smart meters use Zigbee to communicate

That sounds right - AFAIK it's the same system as the meter uses to communicate with the in-house display. Subject to pairing and encryption etc, anything else can pick up the same information. Not just washing machines but embedded generation (e.g. feedback from EVs) could then know when it's financially worthwhile to make a contribution. Likewise load shedding for non time-critical loads. I've see ZigBee add-on for the like of the RaspberryPI - so I'd expect to see a bit of experimenting to be going on soon.

 

So if the washing machine starts up automatically in the middle of the night you can open the door of the machine in the morning  to find damp and/or creased clothes.....great.

A lot of machines already have a delayed-start facility (originally to allow customers to run them off-peak overnight - but now useful for running them from PV during the middle of the day too) - they usually have a some kind of 'final rinse hold' facility - so the clothes say in the water until someone returns, the final pump-out & spin is then done immediately before the clothes are removed - preventing creases setting in or damp clothes sitting in air for hours.


   - Andy.

A mention of Raspberry Pi.


Several years ago I replaced the storage batteries in a unit that was being trialled by a major electricity supplier as a product to offer their customers with PV installations, the guy who arranged it had the batteries delivered to the customers house then I went and did the swap. I had a copy of the manual emailed to me so I knew what to expect, the brain of the unit was a little Raspberry Pi that controlled the unit and allowed it to communicate, so the guy who had hired me could sit at his desk in London and determine if I had swapped the batteries correctly and had the unit back up and running correctly. Then I posted the old batteries back to them.


Since then I have realised that the Raspberry Pi has a lot of potential uses in and around a smart home.


Andy B.

Maybe they did not want customers to think that the smart meters could be bandying information about their lifestyles and routines about the internet.

Rather a shame that they mentioned the remote reading facility, but not the separate non-internet-connected 'personal area network' then,

  -  Andy.

And presumably it doesn’t need a subscription to an app to get it to work.


Andy B

It is used in a lot of the Smartspeaker technology to control electrical devices and lights in the smarthome.

Be aware that Zigbee is a transmission standard, rather than a frequency allocation and while it pops up both at 2.4GHz,  and shares that frequency with Bluetooth, WiFi and Microwave ovens, it also pops up in the  868 MHz  band in the UK, and it is this variant that is more common for smart metering. This band is snuck in the gap between the top of the TV broadcast band, and  the GSM 900 MHz band used for mobile phones.

Modules that allow 868MHz zigbee network packet sniffing from laptop are available.