Rainforest Smart Meter Energy Monitor Gateway

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mediatechnology
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Joined: Sat Aug 11, 2007 2:34 pm
Location: Oak Cliff, Texas
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Rainforest Smart Meter Energy Monitor Gateway

Post by mediatechnology »

Some of you may recall from the LED lighting thread references to the GE Nucleus Smart Meter Gateway: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=408&start=21

The GE Nucleus has been a very useful tool to read Smart Meter data and energy usage in realtime.
Unfortunately the Nucleus stopped connecting to the meter on the morning of January 6, 2016.
RIP GE Nucleus.
GE stopped supporting this product sometime around 2012 and it looks like they may have shut down their authentication server.

A little background about the deregulated Texas retail power market...

I buy power from a retailer who buys power from a generator.
A third party, Oncor, distributes electric power generated and "retailed" by the other parties.
Oncor is the transmission and distribution utility, "TDU," in this part of Texas.
The grid is controlled by a fourth party known as ERCOT.
There are multiple "TDUs" in Texas also using SmartMeters: To access your meter data - something that is completely optional - there is a portal called SmartMeterTexas.
Unfortunately the SmartMeter portal displays data that's two days old.
Realtime energy monitoring requires a gateway or display device attached to the SmartMeter.

It sounds really complicated but it isn't.
If I have a question about my bill I call the retailer.
For Service outages I call Oncor, the TDU.
The system works and I pay the same or less for power than I did 20 years ago.


Back to SmartMeters...

The project manager for Oncor's Home Area Network, "HAN," part of Texas' Advanced Metering Infrastructure provided suggestions of manufacturers that made energy monitors.
I chose the Rainforest Eagle because it was most like the GE Nucleus.

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Rainforest Eagle Gateway

The Rainforest Eagle has an Ethernet port for connection to the LAN and a Zigbee RF connection to the meter.
The Eagle has an internal webserver to display usage data in a web browser and a Rainforestcloud Internet connection for SmartPhone or remote monitoring.

Setup was very simple.

The first thing you have to do is let the utility know you want to bind a device to the meter through the Zigbee RF link.
This is done in the Smartmeter portal.

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Adding a HAN Home Area Network to Your Smartmeter

The TDU needs the MAC address and "Installation Code" for the device as well as the device type.
The Rainforest Eagle is an "Intelligent Gateway."

Once this info is submitted the local utility will signal the SmartMeter - through it's Zigbee mesh network - to accept a connection from the device.
This can happen in near realtime or it can take several minutes to ripple through the network.
Meters far from the utilities' data collectors and out of RF range propagate through other meters in the mesh.
In my case it took a minute or less for the "Antenna" LED to stop flashing and switch to solid.
That indicates that the gateway has successfully bound to the SmartMeter.
Once the meter is bound you can check its connection status on the SmartMeter portal.

The second step requires registration of the device with Rainforest's Cloud server.
You tell them your device ID, utility, ESID (Electric Service ID) and meter number.

Once authenticated to all the service providers you can view meter data either through direct web access to its IP address or through the Cloud.

This is the history and meter display:

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Rainforest Eagle SmartMeter History Display

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Rainforest Eagle SmartMeter Meter Display

You can learn a lot about your appliances and habits by watching this thing...

Rainforest Automation: https://rainforestautomation.com/
Available from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_ ... automation

ERCOT list of Texas HAN Devices: http://www.ercot.com/content/meetings/a ... e_2014.xls
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