DTE Energy Bridge and Mosquitto MQTT Broker (general MQTT client issue)

I have a working MQTT and Mosquitto Broker installation. I’m getting great information from my Sonoff S31 Energy monitoring plugs, so it’s all working as expected.

The challenge comes because I just got a DTE Energy Bridge, and it “publishes” information about my energy consumption via MQTT. When I say “publish” there is no way for me to tell it to send the information to my broker. Instead, I have to have my broker open a stream to the Energy Bridge and read the topic updates. When I use mosquitto_sub to subscribe, here’s what I see:

[core-ssh config]$ mosquitto_sub -h IPADDRESS -p 2883 -t ‘event/metering/instantaneous_demand/#’
{“time”:1713973069966,“demand”:3463}
{“time”:1713973072946,“demand”:3564}
{“time”:1713973075948,“demand”:3600}
{“time”:1713973078944,“demand”:3588}
{“time”:1713973081949,“demand”:3469}
{“time”:1713973084946,“demand”:3476}
{“time”:1713973087949,“demand”:3437}
{“time”:1713973090952,“demand”:3481}
{“time”:1713973093957,“demand”:3522}
{“time”:1713973096958,“demand”:3452}
{“time”:1713973099957,“demand”:3518}
{“time”:1713973102954,“demand”:3432}
{“time”:1713973105961,“demand”:3440}
{“time”:1713973108976,“demand”:3457}

I’ve read every thread I can find on both the Community and Reddit. Most of them end up telling you that you have to create a file in /share/mosquitto as a .conf file (e.g. dte.conf) and put in the configuration for your client:

connection dte
address IPADDRESS:2883
clientid homeassistant-1
try_private false
start_type automatic
topic event/metering/summation/minute/# in 0

However, Mosquitto Broker never picks this file up (I never see a new client or device in the Logs). I’ve also tried adding it directly to the Mosquitto Broker Configuration in HA, right below the Customize stanza (in this case it needs to be YAML, so I added colons where appropriate), and I get the same behavior.

Anyone know how to get Mosquitto Broker to pick up this additional configuration file?