Good morning, all today, i want to take a look at this. It is a smart meter, in fact it's a single phase, smart meter and it's the type that has a din rail mounting at the back and fits into a consumer unit, otherwise known as a distribution board for mains electricity. Now the main feature of this is that it's wi-fi wi-fi and it's compatible with the toyo smart system. So what i can do is put this into my consumer unit and in the solar power circuit and when the solar system is generating more than say, 800 watts.

I can get it to uh automatically switch on one of my cryptocurrency miners. Now at the moment i do that manually in the morning. I keep checking the uh the inverters output, when it's generating enough to turn on a minor. I turn on a minor.

This could do it automatically. So let's have a quick look around this and then i'll take it apart. So here it says that uh live in is one liveout is two now they're both on the bottom, so live in is one liveout is two uh three and four are neutral and as i remember it, because i have had this apart, there's just simply a big Bus bar running across there, but of course it requires neutral on here to power up the circuitry to get this lcd up and running and get the wi-fi unit communicating and all that sort of stuff right. Let's take the screws out of the bottom.

There are two screws in here and have a look, oh, that one's behind the din. Oh, i can get to that. If i push that down, okay, i'll switch to my slightly narrower screwdriver and take that screw out. So does this have clips at the side? I think it might.

Oh yes, it does now. If i take this off gently, i think i might be able to get it off without unplugging the front circuit board. On the other hand, that may not happen. Oh, yes, i've managed it so there that's an lcd.

That's the button for the little switch here. We've got three leds and then this daughter board, which also appears to contain the wi-fi module slung underneath, should come away from the main board on these little uh. Well, they're not point one inch they're, probably two mil dupont style pins. So let's have a closer look at this board.

We have a wi-fi module, a type tywe3s. I don't really know what that means. Oh that's repeated there. Next to the strip antenna um.

There is a microcontroller on this bottom board and there's x1 here at a funny jaunty angle: it's a sort of long thin black box, i'm assuming a ceramic resonator, but it could be a crystal, i suppose, and on the top uh we've seen lcd button and three Leds, ah now, what do these say? Alarm, calm, okay, let's get a go a bit further into this. This just appears to be clipped in. There are screw holes here, but uh they've not been fitted for whatever reason: okay, let's try and get this out and uh there. It is, but it's wired to all the stuff underneath so i'll, just tip that to one side.

Okay inside here we have live coming off the red, um, there's a big black thing in the bottom here, and that is a relay now. In the last video where i looked at this, i discovered that this is normally closed, so when you energize it through these red and yellow wires, which i believe is nine volts, i think it says that somewhere, it pulls the relay in which disconnects the link between Live in and live out now, there's a section there, which is slightly silvered and blue and yellow wires, either side of it. So that's the current shunt um there's a neutral connection, this white wire over to the neutral bus bar here. So this thing can measure voltage across red and white.

It can measure current flowing through this shunt on the yellow and blue wires. Also in here we have that looks like a capacitor, because it's marked 681 10k 681. So i'm guessing that's a capacitor there's a large value, or at least a large power rated resistor there, that's probably a low value. I can't see it brown black brown, 100 ohms, three uh electrolytics here little inductor there um i'll, see if i can get a shot of that relay yes, so that is an fc808 you can see.

It says their coil 9 volt dc, something written after that. I can't see what it is: 80 amps, 250 volts, ac and then lots of stuff which i'm having difficulty. Oh, the fc808 again down the bottom, nine volt dc for the coil again and some other stuff just try and get a close-up of the connections on that shunt there. I don't quite know how those are attached on, but they look a bit uh but uh.

Certainly yeah red would be the direct live tap and blue and yellow are across that shunt area. Okay, so i think i'm going to put this back together and then i'm going to attempt to power this up with some mains i'll, probably take mains from a power bank rather than live mains, because i think power, bank mains is probably less dangerous, so slip that, Under that clip, and now i've got to see why it doesn't want to go back down. Oh okay, i think it's fine! Oh yeah! There are some little um plastic pips these little pips here that sit in slots in the circuit board, so that certainly provides the positional alignment. I mean the only real thing that requires position.

Accuracy is the push button and the lcd okay. Let's put this back on the top with all its connections and then put the front back on and that i don't know whether that has clips. No, i think that's just screwed on, but it was a bit tight getting it off, but yeah that seems to have gone back on okay, i'll screw that together and then we'll get some mains on it. So i'm wiring up a plug with two black wires.

Um, live and neutral aren't really different, i think from a power bank. I think the only thing that differentiates neutral from live on the mains is the fact that it's earthed at the substation um, so from a mains generating power bank live and neutral are essentially the same. I think right there we go so uh, two black wires on live and neutral. Let's put the lid on this plug, go and get oh, a small power bank that has a mains facility power.

This up. So i'm going to use the small jackery, the jackery 240 and plug that into there, i'm not going to switch it on yet because i don't have my wires wired up. Actually, i was wondering if i um touched one of these wire ends when this is on. With one finger, obviously, i wouldn't do that sort of thing and put one on each hand.

That would be dangerous, but if i just touched one and brushed against it, would i even feel it because nothing is referenced to ground. The other end would be floating around. What do you think so live in is one i'm going to use live in it wouldn't really matter. If i use live out because, as i say, the relay is closed but um.

I want to do that because i might put a load on live out and then we can see whether this lcd works. I wonder if it's back illuminated, i didn't see a back illumination light neutral can go to either one of the neutrals up here. They're just bust together got a feeling that one had the wire on it, but it doesn't really matter at all, so, let's screw that into there, because these screws are live, which is why you've got these covers. Oh that's, fallen out.

Why has that happened? Right? Stand back a little bit and turn on the mains output. Oh and we've got something on the display. Let's have a oh and some flashing lights. Are they all blue? No, it's just the middle one flashing at the moment, and that is the wi-fi light.

It would appear now i'm guessing that this flashing led means that this is in pairing mode. I'm going to run up the lidl home app. I do also have the trio smart app, but actually the little home app if you back out of it, says tap again to exit to your smart. So the little home app is the to your smart, app right.

If you push and hold the button for 10 seconds, then this flashes at half speed and it is putting out an ssid. I can't show that because i can't really show my home ssid, so i'm going to connect to smart life 1080 or whatever it said well after a huge amount of fiddling about i've managed to get meter to appear here now. I've never installed a wi-fi device before. So, that's probably why um i got it to work on the two-year smart app first, but you can actually make it work on the little app if you fiddle about.

So let's go to meter and there's a huge power on button, and if i press it there's a big click. This light comes on, which i think means that the relay is energized and therefore this thing has shut off, or at least it's switched off its link between live in and live out um. But i don't want to cut the power, particularly because, when i connect this into my solar power system, that would cut the solar off, which is not what i want. What i really want is the electric stuff which is down here and that's showing me that there is an accumulated total of 0.12 kilowatt hours.

I don't quite know how uh, unless it's this thing just had some residual data in it. We've got a voltage of two to eight point four and it measures power and current in milliamps. So i need to put a load on this thing really um. But what i can't see here is there are two registers in here which you can select with this button.

Can you see that it is visible? Actually you have to press and hold it for that's slightly longer than ah. Is that that's the pulsing thing um? So that's i v two two something it's very hard to see: let's play power, naught q power factor; 1.0 uh frequency 50.24. That says all zero is 0.1, and that says all zeros - and i think one of those is the uh forward power counter, and one of them is the reverse power counter i'll have to look further into that right. I've attached a bulb on here led filament bulb.

So it's not taking a huge amount of power, just one check the on off thing: first, obviously, the relay switches, the bulb off and back on again now, if we're going to electric we've got current le 28 milliamps uh current power, 3.2 watts 230 volts. Let's unscrew that, if i can, how quickly does this respond? Oh reasonably quickly, power, zero, screw it back in a little bit of a delay, power 3.3 watts. Well, it seems to work well. The manual says that it's got total energy kilowatt hours, positive kilowatt hours and reverse kilowatt hours.

So there's my connection. I've got live, going into live out and my load the lamp going into live in and on the app it still seems to measure power correctly. So it doesn't seem to mind which way you draw power through this thing. It measures it as positive power, so that's gone to zero and the current also - and let's see if this goes back up to about three watts, which was what it was showing yeah.

So you can have this either way around, but on the display, because you've got the positive kilowatt hours counter and the negative kilowatt hours counter um. It makes sense to put this the right way around for solar. Now, solar uh feeds power from the soul from the inverter back into your mains, so i do need to think about getting this the right way around and then the next thing is. Can i set up an automation for switching the miners on now? You can see my current automations are green, shed overheat, lola 46 goes off.

Loader 46 is one of the three l3 plus ant miners. The other ones are lexian lottie and the number there is the ip address i've given them all names, beginning with l. If the modular shed overheats, it turns both the miners off that's lexie and lottie, but i want to set up an automation, so that's plus um when device status changes and it will be the meter. Oh switch one, i'm not really interested in that.

Yes, power and we've got watts, that's good, so if i get more than about 800 watts, oh that's a lot of watts. Oh that's a lot of one! So it's right near the bottom. Okay, it's rather fine grained, but there we are 800 watts. Then i can well notify myself, but also run the device and that will be on the power strip and uh.

What's all that, i don't know what those are that's really peculiar, but anyway there are my three miners, uh lola, 46 lottie 45 and lexi 43, and i can select one of them to switch on. I shouldn't bother going through all that now, but yes, i can certainly automate the miners coming on at certain power levels. Excellent. So that's the dds 238-2 wi-fi energy meter which you put in your consumer unit and i've just got to sum up the courage to actually do that and put it in there and have it.

Have the solar power go through it, so that i can measure it and the little diagram uh shows a not very impressive curve. I think yesterday was better bit of cloud day before. Oh, yes, that was a near perfect day of almost completely full sun, a little bit of cloud there at the end of the day. Ah, that's interesting with these connections wired up backwards, um i pressed the big button and turned the power off to the relay, which of course has now isolated it from the incoming mains from power bank and it won't turn back on and even if i turn the Power bank off that relay doesn't fall out.

So i think that relay is a is a slide relay that's um able to stay in both positions without power. Yes, that's interesting! It's not a permanently energized relay! So that's a little look at the dds. 2. 3.

8-2. Wi-Fi in consumer unit or distribution box meter a couple of other things: i've noticed the total cumulative energy in kilowatt hours. It doesn't appear to be any way to reset that i've tried all combinations of pressing this button and looked all throughout the app. So i don't think that can be reset.

I did discover a treble click, one two, three toggles the relay and then treble click again to toggle it the other way. So you can control the relay from this button. Um the press and holds are press and hold for about a second to flip through all the different display modes on the lcd press and hold for five seconds to do an init. But i'm not entirely sure what an init does, because it doesn't reset the cumulative counters press and hold for 10 seconds and it resets the wi-fi details and then you'd have to put those in again but uh.

That's it. I think for looking at this. I think the next thing i'm going to do is put it in my solar fuse box, but for the moment cheerio.