In Home Display Unit (IHDU)
What is an In-Home Display Unit?
An In-Home Display Unit (IHDU) is a small electronic screen which shows your energy usage in kilowatt hours (kWh), in pounds and in pence. It reads directly and wirelessly from your smart meters and updates every 30 minutes for gas and roughly every 10 seconds for electricity.
It is simply a reading device
In Home Display Units are useful to see how much energy you’re using, but they don’t control things. If you press the wrong button on the display, or forget to look at it for a while, everything in your home will carry on working just the same.
It is not the same as a smart meter
Smart meters physically replace your old metering equipment, and unlike an In Home Display Unit, they are usually out of sight.
An In Home Display Unit is the small screen that the engineer, or the energy company, may provide to you once your smart meters are installed.
You can use the information to reduce your energy usage
An In Home Display Unit won’t save you money on its own, but it will give you a good idea of how much energy different appliances use, which means you can save money by making more informed choices about when and how you use them.
Keep it close to the meter
Your In Home Display Unit needs to keep a good connection with your smart meter, so wherever you choose to keep it, please check the signal strength by looking at the 4 bars on the top left of the screen. The more bars, the stronger the signal. If the signal is weak, move the In-Home Display closer to your electricity smart meter.
You don’t have to keep it plugged in all the time
You would, generally, keep the In Home Display Unit plugged in, but you can unplug it and move it around and it should still stay on for around an hour because it has an internal battery.
If the screen goes blank when the In Home Display Unit is unplugged, you can wake it up by pressing the round, flat button on the back. If it doesn’t wake up, just plug it in to recharge it. You won’t lose any data if it loses charge. It’ll all leap back into life when you plug it in again.