Method of monitoring home's power from the smartmeter into Home Assistant?

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AlDrag

247 posts

Master Geek

#289529 11-Sep-2021 10:20

Is there a way I can monitor output from a Smart Power Meter in my current rental to my Home Assistant? Some sort of device I can purchase or something?

Thanks!

Edit: Looks like I have a `Elster gRex D AMI meter`
Edit 2: Looks like Meridian gives me 30 min interval data. Not real time though (only can get the past day). I can probably write a script to retrieve that automatically. Realtime monitoring would be so cool though.

mattenz

190 posts

Master Geek

#2776340 11-Sep-2021 12:19

There is usually a little blinky light you can read with an ESP. Not sure on other options at the meter.

chriswiggins

413 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2776396 11-Sep-2021 14:56

Check out the official home assistant project which monitors how many times your meter blinks per second:

https://github.com/klaasnicolaas/home-assistant-glow

neb

11294 posts

Uber Geek

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Lifetime subscriber

#2776409 11-Sep-2021 15:30

Not a direct answer to your question but depending on how much time/money you want to invest in this if you've got a DIN-rail power board you may be better off getting one or more pulse count meters installed into that, it's a one-off up-front cost but solves the problem nicely and you can monitor individual circuits as required. We have one for the house as a whole, one for hot water, and one for the fridge and heat pump, it's really convenient to know how much power different appliances are using. For example our HWC, despite being over thirty years old, barely loses any heat and uses surprisingly little power, which easily answered questions about putting in hot-water heat recovery, a heatpump-based cylinder, and other exotic technology.

phrozenpenguin

840 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2776559 11-Sep-2021 19:56

neb: Not a direct answer to your question but depending on how much time/money you want to invest in this if you've got a DIN-rail power board you may be better off getting one or more pulse count meters installed into that, it's a one-off up-front cost but solves the problem nicely and you can monitor individual circuits as required. We have one for the house as a whole, one for hot water, and one for the fridge and heat pump, it's really convenient to know how much power different appliances are using. For example our HWC, despite being over thirty years old, barely loses any heat and uses surprisingly little power, which easily answered questions about putting in hot-water heat recovery, a heatpump-based cylinder, and other exotic technology.

Can you let us know what device you have?

We use a CT clamp currently, but would like to monitor other circuits and tidy up our install.

neb

11294 posts

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#2776565 11-Sep-2021 20:36

phrozenpenguin:
Can you let us know what device you have?

We use a CT clamp currently, but would like to monitor other circuits and tidy up our install.

I've got a Flukso which I've had for years, but anything will do really. The advantage of using the pulse-count meter is that you're getting a reading directly from the device the power is flowing through rather than an approximate reading via a current clamp. The downside is that it's digital while some monitoring systems can do advanced processing on the current-clamp analog signal and tell you more about what's going on.

Oh, another benefit of the Flukso is that it'll also talk to pulse-count gas and water meters, so mine records water usage as well as power circuit info. But it's really just a case of what was available at the time, there's plenty of other devices out there.