I live in an Austin Energy market and was wanting to take advantage of the features introduced this last year for power monitoring. Austin Energy does use Landis + Gyr smart meters.
AFAICT there are 4 ways that you can get real time power data in:
AE doesn’t provide realtime data for option 1. It lags a day.
Induction measurements are totally an option, but it would mean mucking around in the breaker box which I’d like to avoid.
Getting information from the meter using an SDR seems viable (including some reverse engineering of the protocol I’ve come across). This would mean a bunch of custom work though, especially as I want to get it transformed into something consumable by HA.
So the most appealing to me is the Zigbee HAN approach. I don’t need to modify any hardware in the house, just need the HAN to pair with the meter.
As Rainforest eagle is out of stock I contacted Emporia to talk to them about whether AE is viable. They said they don’t have a previous relationship with AE and there is some “backend” work that needs to be done to enable it. So I contacted AE and they had no idea what I was talking about. I’m sure I didn’t contact the people at the right level at AE, but here I am.
I’m wondering - has anyone else in Austin made it any further in getting data from the smart meter directly? Any pointers on who to contact at AE?
@superm1 Did you ever find a solution for this? I’m also an Austin Energy customer and I just received the updated smart meter they’ve been installing. I own a SDR and scanned several of the frequencies found in the FCC docs but wasn’t able to catch anything. I contacted Emporia to see if they have had any contact with Austin Energy since it’s not listed on their site.
Oh regarding an SDR and scanning - it’s encrypted data. There are some header bits that have been identified but, none of the interesting stuff for keeping track of usage.
I reached out to someone from City of Austin Utilities when they installed the new meters and they said that even though there is a Zigbee radio, they are not configured to be accessible to users.
The 2024.2 HASS release includes a new integration. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/coautilities
A City of Austin Utilities integration provided by Opower.
I added the new integration, using my COA login and it connects without issue.
However, no entities are enabled.
Has anyone tried this new integration?
I’ve upgraded to 2024.02.01 this weekend and added the Opower integration and find the same results as you that there is no data present. Do you by chance have multiple properties in your account? I’m wondering what is common about our situation but different for @DellanX.
In my case I only have one meter.
Apparently, because COA does not provide forecast data to Opower, no entities are created.
The integration owner mentioned that data can be used in the Energy dashboard. There are some statistics entries labeled opower.xxxx
I followed instructions, but after several days, kWh is still 0.
I am at a loss here.
I am going down the same path, have Austin Energy and SunPower solar.
Trying first to get the info from Austin Energy.
Says loading failed, although my username and password work on the website. Any trick I need?
For Sunpower, that’s a task for another day. I am now using the Solar Forecast integration just to build out my dashboard, then I can replace by actuals.
yeah, I just don’t have a LAN line going to the SunPower box yet. It is on Wi-Fi now.
Didn’t plan ahead as I falsely assumed it would be accessible from Wi-Fi. I need to research a bit to find a workaround or figure out how to get a LAN line to it.
