I have now installed my Smappee Gas Monitor. My initial comparison with the Loop Gas Monitor is:
Pros
- Provides status reports – Battery level; Temperature; Humidity
- Batteries are replaceable (2 x AA)
- Optical sensor lead is 1.4m long – much longer than the ribbon with the Loop gas monitor – and so allows more flexibility in locating the Gas & Water Monitor.
- Smappee App has a web interface, allowing analysis at your desk, rather than having to squint at a phone screen as the new Loop app requires (although the legacy Loop app did have a good web application).
- The setup process would tax your granny but most people on this forum would prefer it to the Loop setup as it lets you see what is going on. The calibration process shows the output from the optical sensor as the gas meter dial turns to let you set the trigger point for recording a rotation. (See image).Calibration.jpg
Cons
- Neither the Smappee legacy energy monitor nor the Gas & Water has an ethernet port, so there are constraints on their locations. (By contrast, the Loop monitor is ethernet cabled.) The Smappee (legacy) Energy Monitor has to be within WiFi range and within about 2m of the electricity current transformer (CT) (normally near the electricity meter), and the Gas & Water has to be within radio range of the Energy Monitor and within 1.4m of the gas meter.
- They have very poor radio connection range (using 433.92MHz). The Gas & Water monitor claims “20-30m clear line of sight” but I found it struggled to work at 2m through one thin breeze-block wall. My gas and electricity meters are about 15m apart, the gas meter is outdoors and the electricity meter indoors. I have had to abandon radio connection and rely on periodic manual data downloads from the Gas Monitor using bluetooth from my phone.
- The Gas & Water’s spec quotes a maximum humidity of 96%. In December, my outdoor gas meter chamber is giving a reading of 100% humidity. The monitor stopped working altogether after about 36 hours, so I dried it out and relocated it and it forgave me and started working again. The optical sensor lead is 1.4m long (and no extension is available) and so I have moved the Gas & Water into the adjacent mower shed and fed the sensor lead through the wall into that shed (just within the 1.4m length) but humidity is still a problem in any outdoor shed. I am contemplating cutting the optical sensor lead to check that it is just a 4-core cable and experimenting with a DIY extension, which would let me thread the cable through my external wall and into my house to bring it into the dry and possibly within radio range of the Energy Monitor.
- Installation is non-intuitive from the Smappee app. There is no mention of Gas & Water on the Smappee app prior to installation. You have to select “Repeat installation” (as if reinstalling the Energy Monitor), then scan the QR code on the Gas & Water Monitor to get started. Only then does anything about ‘Gas & Water’ appear. And the question “How many digits are visible on your meter (0.0; 0.00; 0.000)?” is asked after fitting the optical sensor and I failed to interpret the question as “How many digits were visible before you fitted the optical sensor?” (which is what they meant) and so had to repeat the whole installation after getting some alarming consumption data.
- The optical sensor does not fit my meter. It is a little bit too long and so fouls the edge of the clear plastic bezel around the meter display (see photo)20201215.jpg. The sticky pads supplied are not very good anyway but, because I could not get the sensor to lie flat against the screen, I have had to resort to cable ties to hold it in place. (See photo.) Because my meter shed is enclosed and dark (when I close the door) it works OK as no light leaks in through the gaps but others may struggle with this set up.
- Granularity of data is only hourly. With Loop the real-time indication showed the consumption in the preceding 15 minutes which was helpful (e.g. to check the boiler’s full-power output).
- Consumption is reported in m3 only. Loop enabled reporting in kWh, which is more helpful in recording expenditure on home heating and comparison with electricity consumption.
- The app has no cumulative meter reading indication (for remote meter reading). I liked being able to sit at my desk and read my gas meter in the legacy Loop app and copy that to my online energy supplier account at the end of each month. Now I’ll have to go out into the cold to read my meter.
It is a hobby-horse of mine that modern devices are too readily designed to be battery-powered and wirelessly connected when this just creates a huge hassle for maintenance and for configuration. I much prefer connecting devices with ethernet cables which can also provide power (PoE). That is how my CCTV cameras work and they are fine and need no maintenance or batteries. (My moans about the Evohome home heating controls, which have battery-powered wireless thermostats relate.) The Smappee Gas & Water Monitor appears to be in this category. Is it really not possible to get an ethernet connected gas monitor? The rest of the Smappee products appear to have moved to being all wired together, and the Genius now has an ethernet port, where the legacy Energy Monitor had none. That is a big improvement but it seems that the Gas & Water Monitor is the only Smappee component that now relies on a wireless connection.
Thus, I do now see the limitations of the Smappee legacy Energy Monitor and why Smappee no longer markets it. Because the legacy unit has no ethernet connection, it is restricted to a location where it can maintain a WiFi signal. Also, having just one CT input, the app struggles to differentiate appliances from the legacy Smappee monitor to track consumption. I am therefore minded to investigate migrating to the new Smappee Genius, which does have an ethernet port and which allows a daisy-chain of multiple CT inputs that would allow me to monitor several circuits separately and so give greater differentiation to the appliance consumption recorded. If I can’t extend the Gas & Water optical sensor lead (to let me bring the Gas Monitor indoors) then I could run an ethernet cable to my workshop (which is a breeze-block construction outwith the main thick stone walls of my house and so has no WiFi) which adjoins my external mower shed and which should allow me to install the Genius there to maintain radio contact with the Gas & Water monitor. I would need to run a CT bus cable to the Genius also.
It might be worth it!