M-Bus

Technical performance

Being based on wired communication, its main advantage is the reliability. Unlike radio solutions that always are exposed to changing environments, being affected by other devices that uses the same spectrum and must penetrate changing physical environment, wired solutions are unaffected as long as the wire remains intact.

Bandwidth is limited but systems have excellent robustness against electrical disturbances, caused by e.g. lightning strikes, while at the same time allowing cable lengths up to several km using a standard 2 wire cable. 

End devices, such as meters, are called slaves in M-Bus terminology. They are powered by an M-Bus master, typically a separate product or built into a more advanced gateway product. While this design allows meters to only need to rely on the M-Bus cable for both communication and power, it makes the collecting device unsuitable for battery power.

Both Wired and Wireless M-Bus supports

• Two-way communication, but systems are, for technical reasons, most often thought of as “one way”, from the meter/sensor to a receiving system.
• Encrypted meter/sensor data

Suitable applications

Wired M-Bus is still a very good and robust solution for applications using simpler meters/sensors and where the cost of cabling is acceptable. The latter is often a critical point making it more popular for e.g. new buildings rather than retrofit projects.

Elvaco M-Bus products at a glance

Elvaco is the established manufacturer of various devices needed to build a complete M-Bus infrastructure. Our product range includes M-Bus products ranging from meters, sensors, converters to analog/digital/pulse signals, level converters to TCP or I/O, gateways and M-Bus masters. 

With the high-quality, M-Bus-compatible meters, you can collect precise data on heat, water and electricity. E.g. the low-cost temperature and humidity sensors also provide valuable data, which is collected by the M-Bus infrastructure. 

M-Bus gateways then collect the data from all meters from the network and create an interface to the Meter Data Management (MDM) software. The devices can be controlled both via the fixed network and via mobile technology. The scope and range of the M-Bus infrastructure is extended by special M-Bus masters. These can be used, for example, as amplifiers to increase the length of the M-Bus cabling or to be able to read out more devices. 

The Elvaco range in the field of M-Bus is completed by turnkey solutions, which are already fully and pre-wired in a protective housing and can be installed with minimal effort. A range of functional accessories such as M-Bus splitters and M-Bus adapters are also part of the portfolio.