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

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.

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.