BT Whole Home WiFi Discs

[elliott-cowton]

Hi.  I have a BT Business Hub and 6 Whole Home range extender discs.  The system has been and still is working well.

The problem is that living in a very rural area we have no 3G/4G/5G mobile coverage so our smart meter can't "phone home".  Therefore, our energy provider has put us in a "bleeding edge" (and I really mean bleeding edge) trial of connecting our smart meter through our broadband connection - but it hasn't worked.

Their feedback is that in situations where there there is just a broadband hub the system works well, in situations where there are any sort of range extenders in place the system fails.

Twenty years ago I worked as a high level engineer in data comms; I'm a bit rusty and so I've been reading up on some of the issues and it seems that channel contention and signal bleed over between the WIFI and Zigbee is a "thing".

The really odd thing about this is the way the meter works.  It communicates - so I was told - with the In Home Display unit (IHD) by Zigbee and then it's the IHD that connects to the WIFI to dial my energy supplier.  

Questions:

1.  How do the Whole Home discs communicate between themselves?  My guess is that it's also Zigbee but I can't find anything on line to confirm this.

2.  I have reset my main router to channel 1 (from 11 where there is a known clash with Zigbee) and my Whole Home discs are happily blasting away on Channel 6, BUT is it possible to re-tune them to a different channel as well? 

3.  Can anyone add any other useful info to this problem please?

I've seen conflicting accounts of how Zigbee and 2.4 GHz WIFI can interact, and given that Zigbee has now been deprecated in favour of a standard called Matter it seems to be getting harder to make sense of what's happening.

Thanks for your time.

[Lesley_W]

Hi @elliott-cowton 

Welcome to our community. 

While I haven't come across this exact issue myself with regards to a smart meter, we have got many experienced community members who may be able to offer some more specific advice. 

I can offer some recommendations with the disc set up. 

As you're using the Whole Home WiFi discs, it's better to turn off the WiFi on your hub.

For the best connection, place your IHD as close to the meter as possible. 

The Whole Home WiFi has its own web GUI, to change the channel you'll need to identify the IP address of the primary disc, and use that IP to access the GUI (or http://btwhole.home should also work).

Lesley

[elliott-cowton]

Many thanks @Lesley_W

That's an interesting response:

1) I had thought about re-disabling the main hub but when the initial connection attempt failed the Octopus Engineer who was trying to commission the meter was advised by his office to ask to connect to "the direct internet" because of the problems they had experienced with range extenders.  Hmm.

2)  The fact that you're suggesting disabling the original router WIFI together with the things I've observed fiddling with the system make me suspect that I am on the right track thinking "channel contention" between the WIFI and Zigbee systems could well be at the root of the issues, particularly because of the next point.

3)  The channel change I mentioned in my OP has actually forced an unexpected change in what the IHD is reporting its status to be.  The problem is that I don't have the PIN to get into the inner workings of the IHD to try to reconnect the Zigbee signal from the meter.

The real problem here is that I live in rural North Devon in a building that was once an agricultural site and has a 200A (2-phase) supply.   This requires a 3-phase qualified engineer to do anything with the metering, even for investigating this comms issue.  Put simply, if you draw a line from Bristol to Weymouth and then move south and west of it there are some energy companies who are unable to service a 3-phase meter and even those that can have horrendous waiting lists - I went 18 months from first request to actually getting a meter that could even record my solar export.

I'll report back here as and when anything changes.

Elliott