A bit of context - I live in Ireland and have a smart meter (Kamstrup 8660) in the meter cupboard on the outside of our house. Our consumer unit is inside the house but there’s no easy way to access the main tails to install a current clamp.
I’d like to monitor our real time power usage by either installing a current clamp on the main tails or an photoresistor on the meter to count the pulses. The big problem is that I don’t have a way to power a device in the meter cupboard.
Are there any zigbee/wifi devices that run for extended period on battery (3-6 months at a time) that would be able to achieve this?
I could scrape the data from the ESB website using this script but there seems to be a 24/48 hour lag time.
In an ideal world, I would use something like the MyEnergy Harvi but I don’t want to buy one + their hub just for this.
p.s.: battery life probably heavily depends on the number of pulses. To give you an idea: I’ve got the aqara sensor as an actual window sensor, and with i guess a dozen pulses per day, the battery is at 73% after 1.5 years of usage. So depending on how that meter translates power to pulse frequency, and how cold it gets in the outside box, you might want to upgrade the power source to AA batteries
Thanks for that @Lakini ! I wonder how it would handle 420 000 cycles/month (14kWh * 1000 impulses per kHh * 30 days)… Probably only one way to find out
In the UK smart meters communicate using encrypted private zigbee and there’s one company that are certified to enter their network (Hildebrand/Glowmarkt/bright). It is live. They have a cloud HACS integration but also do MQTT. It is USB but you could connect it to a battery pack. Maybe there is similar for IE.
