Energy Monitoring Help

I am trying to set up energy monitoring in my apartment. I have seen several different options but I’m not sure if any of them are quite correct for me.

  1. Shelly clamp - As I live in an apartment, I really can’t make modifications to the electric panel.
  2. Smart plugs - I have one of these but I want to monitor everything as well as individual devices and I can’t really use these for my a/c or refrigerator or stove as these are not owned by me.

I do have access to the energy meter outside but I don’t want to attach devices to it as where I live, anything attached to it will definitely be stolen. Ideally I’d like to pull the data from it wirelessly and integrate it with HA. I have read online that you can possible do this with SDR and pull the info in that way but I have no idea where to start with that and I don’t know if this meter has any other smart capabilities. I don’t know really anything about energy meters but I am hoping someone here does and can at least point me in the right direction to figuring something out. Meter in question:

I also know that my electric company (Cleveland Utilities) has the MyUsage app but I have yet to figure out a way to pull this data into HA. The data also appears to be behind by a day so unsure if possible to use the data for automations. I have thought about seeing if there’s some other way to get this data but I don’t know how or if I should try to reach out to my utility provider and see what they can help with (plus no idea who I’d even want to talk to).

I also recently found a way to make virtual power sensors but that only applies to smart devices and cannot show for things like my a/c. (As for my a/c, I’d like to get a smart thermostat and that might help but as it’s an apartment, I don’t see that happening).

I think I am really just looking for suggestions on how best to approach this.

Hi @Zixxorb

You need a optical pulse counter which you can stick on the blinking led on your energy meter.

There are several projects you can find.

Cheers
Matt

Hi matt! Did you happen to read this line of my post: “I don’t want to attach devices to it as where I live, anything attached to it will definitely be stolen.”?

Sorry. My bad.

Yes, SDR seems an alternative.
But first of all, you need to be sure, SDR is enabled on your Powermeter and you need the MeterID of your device.

But to be honest.
It seems quite difficult.

I found a thread over here.
Get your smart electric, water and gas meter scm readings into home assistant with a RTL-SDR