Glow CAD and Matter
First of all belated kudos to Hildebrand for being I believe the first brand in the UK to provide local access to Smart Meter data. (Most other brands at the time required re-downloading your own data from their cloud servers.)
I do have a query about future plans. With Matter becoming the holy grail of a universal smart home standard I was wondering if you had any plans to add support for Matter. I suspect that right now the Matter standard is still not ready and able to even partially support the capabilities you provide but if and when it becomes even partially capable will you begin adding Matter support?
For those unaware of some of the history behind smart meters, they are a rare example of government led forward thinking. One of the originally proposed capabilities was for home appliances to be able to 'talk' to a smart meter and directly discover when cheaper energy was available and then schedule their operation to take advantage of that. Whilst there are smart energy tariffs to make this possible, and I believe this information is provided to IHD devices, I am not sure any home appliances in the UK take direct advantage of this.
The original plan was that smart home appliances would connect to the same Zigbee based HAN - Home Area Network that the smart meter, IHD and CAD form. I felt that requiring home appliances to implement this special type of network was unlikely to take off although this might be happening in some EU countries. (Germany?)
I am therefore hoping that the Glow IHD/CAD if it implements Matter at some point in a suitable way might be able to contribute to then talking to smart home appliances also via Matter and Matter controllers and thereby enable this sort of automation in a way more likely to be more widely adopted. At a minimum you might be able to use Matter compatible smart power sockets that are already available from several companies.
Comments
You can already do this with Home Assistant. Matter is some way from being useful, but there are loads of smart devices that work via Wi-Fi, Zigbeee and Z-wave. My Bosch dishwasher is connected to Home Assistant and I can use the MQTT data from the Glow CAD to automate this.
"The original plan was that smart home appliances would connect to the same Zigbee based HAN - Home Area Network that the smart meter, IHD and CAD form. I felt that requiring home appliances to implement this special type of network was unlikely to take off although this might be happening in some EU countries. (Germany?)"
I've never seen that in any of the UK specs, can you provide the reference? Th HAN uses a unique set of keys which will not be shared with anyone for security reasons plus there is a limit of 4 HAN devices per meter as the meter doesn't have the CPU capacity to handle a full ZigBee network.
As already mentioned the CAD provides a gateway to MQTT for the connection of local devices which is how I envisage this working in the Uk.
@gedger
I may have misinterpreted the original document which as I recall was on the BEIS government department site. It did not specifically say a direct link but merely a link between the smart meter and smart appliances so the appliances themselves could decide when to operate.
A quick search did find the following which is not the same article I read originally.
https://www.smartgrid.gov/the_smart_grid/smart_home.html
I was not aware of a 4 device limit for the HAN and thought as it is basically Zigbee with a special profile it would have been possible. I did however say I felt in reality it would be unlikely as I cannot see appliance makers doing this.
So based on your comments and the above article I think the reality is that this would be done via some sort of gateway keeping the number of HAN devices within the limit and converting to a more widely used standard supported by appliances.
So my comment that the standard was forward thinking applies - the reality is of course far less true.
Here my suggestion for adopting Matter support would I feel help because whilst slower than desired, the spread of Matter does seem to be progressing and looking like it holds out the chance of being a success.