Review: Octopus Home Mini - Real-Time Smart Meter Monitoring
I unashamedly love my smart-meter. Rather than having my energy provider guesstimate my bill, or having to send manual readings each month, it automatically beams them back to its mothership. It also enables interesting things like variable energy tariffs.
By design, the smart-meter is limited in how much data it can send back. You can choose to have readings sent monthly, weekly, daily, or half-hourly. There's no option for minute-by-minute precision. That's useful from a privacy perspective - and no doubt makes the network engineering simpler - but slightly annoying from a home-monitoring perspective.
The smart-meter has the ability to send real-time information to a local device using the ZigBee network. If you have an in-home display (IHD) then you'll have seen just how accurate it is.
As I've discovered, you can't just pair any-old ZigBee device to your meter. Luckily, Octopus have sent me the "Mini". A little device which connects to the smart-meter and your home WiFi, then reports usage every 10 seconds. Let's put it through its paces.
Size
Mini by name, mini by nature!
It's rare to find a device smaller than its plug. I half-wonder if they could have integrated it and just made it into a smartplug.
Annoyingly, it is micro USB. I am a USB-C maximalist. There's no reason this device shouldn't use the same cable as everything else I own.
Installation
Plug the Mini in - ideally within 5m of your smartmeter - and wait for the blinkenlight. Follow the in-app instructions. Because, like every modern device, it needs an app. You need to install the standard Octopus Android app, and can then add the Mini to your account and to your WiFi.
Like all cheap IoT devices, it will only work on 2.4㎓, so you may need to adjust which network your phone is on.
And then…
That's it. Every 10 seconds it sends an update to Octopus. You can use the app or the website to view your current consumption or to see your last 5 minutes or last 30 minutes usage.
If you're a dab-hand with the API, you can poll that. Or you can connect it to HomeAssistant.
Downside
In theory this is nifty, but there are a few things I'm not keen on.
- Export readings simply don't work for some brands of smart meter. That's an annoyance - my meter can send half-hourly readings for export, but the Mini just shows that I'm using zero Watts.
- No local connection. It sends the data to Octopus, so I have to use their API to get the data. I'd like the ability to stream it directly from the Mini.
- USB-micro. We live in the future. USB-C or GTFO!
Honestly, a bit disappointing. If you don't have solar panels - or your meter works correctly - this could be very useful. Even so, the lack of an local API is a bit of a buzzkill. Sadly, for my purposes, it isn't very useful.
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If you want to keep your data local, then the Hildebrad Glow CAD may be up your street - https://shop.glowmarkt.com/products/glow-cad-for-smart-meters . It works locally over MQTT . Alas, it's £65, sold out, and I think they've now stopped taking new names for their waiting list too. And it uses Micro-USB, not USB-C.
@Edent I have one of these (with the “right” gas and leccy meters) and import the data to my #homeAssistant instance. Seeing (almost) realtime and historical usage is really useful for forecasting use, and seeing what devices around the house use lots of energy. Like when I’m at work and my son leaves the oven on all afternoon after cooking his lunch 🤨😀
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@Edent I've heard they have developed another model that does have local access for use with more advanced things, though only a limited group have access to it.
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@Edent I use the Glow IHD, which doesn't integrate with any particular energy provider, but as well as being a display, it does allow you to send usage via MQTT to any destination of your choice via wifi. Not cheap, but my energy-supplier's IHD had died and was display-only.
Ordering was a bit of a convoluted process because they have to pair it with your smart meter before shipping.
https://shop.glowmarkt.com/products/display-and-cad-combined-for-smart-meter-customers
Display and CAD - Smart meters
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@Edent I've been really happy with my glowmarkt CAD/IHT. It's setup through the touchscreen display, and will send data to a local MQTT server out of the box. From there it's been easy to integrate with Home Assistant, and log to a time series DB. I have 2 yrs of data at 10s granularity. Things can't be perfect: it is powered by μUSB.
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@blog something I learnt (through necessity) recently - the new Home Minis can operate as zigbee routers for the smart metering HAN, so Octopus are using them to extend the HAN in situations where the gas and electricity meters are too far apart.
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I'm quite happy with the mini but I don't have solar, so can definitely understand that it's frustrating if your meter/the mini is not compatible to get the export stats.
Lack of local connection sucks too I agree, I really don't understand why it's so convoluted to pair something with your meters - but given the device was 'free' I've made my peace with it and the setup was very simple - I've been running mine for about 2 years now I think without a hitch.
The real value for me was integrating into Home Assistant, so I can export the metrics via prometheus and plot them in Grafana, I have 2 years of data now and if I do get solar I think that's a lot of useful information I can give to my installer.
Obvious downside is I'm vendor locked-in to Octopus and would really miss the data the mini supplies if I switched supplier.
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