Prepayment IHD Alternative

SL5K

Hello,

My parents are currently with british gas and their IHD seems to have failed, however british gas won't replace the unity due to it being over 12 months.

The meter is in a very tricky location and it's not easy to get to it in order to check the current credit on the meter, and so they relied almost entirely on the display to know when they had to topup.

Are there any replacement units I could purchase that would help in this situation, I did look at the glow unit but apparently even though they do have a smets2 meter, the glow unit does not support pre-payment meters.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Thank you.

QrizB

Welcome to the forum.

Yes, there are replacement IHDs available. Most are for recent SMETS2 meters rather than older SMETS1 ones; do you know which type your parents have?

Hildebrand sell their IHDs from their glowmarkt shop (link). Stock availabiltiy is patchy but, if out of stock, they will let you register an interest.

Or there's the ivie Bud, sold by Chameleon (another of the common IHD suppliers) from the ivie shop (link).

There may be other options; I don't know of a retail souce for Geo IHDs but their website is here (link) and you could contact them if you'd prefer one of their products.

MWT

SL5K said:

Are there any replacement units I could purchase that would help in this situation, I did look at the glow unit but apparently even though they do have a smets2 meter, the glow unit does not support pre-payment meters.

I suspect you are going to be stuck, the requirement for Pre-Pay support cuts out most if not all the alternative options, and even if you could get one it would require BG to assist with the pairing.

Are your parents on the Priority Register with BG? ... I wonder if a complaint based on the meter location and their inability to check the remaining balance without the IHD might shake something loose...

Chrysalis

Interesting ivie bud looks like a wifi version of what I have (what advantage does the wifi give on these?).

Given Octopus look like they never going to fix my IHD, I wonder if I should buy one.

QrizB

Chrysalis said:

Interesting ivie bud looks like a wifi version of what I have (what advantage does the wifi give on these?).

The WiFi turns the IHD into a CAD. It can share your live data onto your home network and from there to the rest of the internet, if you allow it. You can then access the live data on your phone via an app, potentially from anywhere in the world.

MWT

QrizB said:

It can share your live data onto your home network and from there to the rest of the internet, if you allow it. You can then access the live data on your phone via an app, potentially from anywhere in the world.

There is one subtlety that is worth mentioning, these devices tend to send the data over your WiFi to a server elsewhere and then make it available to you from there, they don't share the data locally over your WiFi.

An exception is the new device due from Hildebrand shortly that will offer local MQTT.