Has anyone been able to successfully monitor their usage on the type of gas meter below? (UK) if so, what method did you use?
To add further, there appears to be an RJ11 socket underneath which I would like to utilise, I believe that has a pulse output.
Is there a mirrored sticker on the least significant dial? There are options to measure that type. The RJ11 might be an interesting option, but I don’t know about that.
No mirror that I’ve noticed.
After a bit more digging it seems the RJ11 is a pulse output, found a bit of info on a different forum but I’m unsure how to implement it.
Is there a standard way to measure the pulse output and get it into my HA? I’m running a RPi with HA OS and use Z2M for most stuff. Going to put a meter on an RJ11 cable plugged in to check it works to see if I get continuity on each pulse.
Unsure if there is a standard way, but one way would be with ESPHome, I believe pulse counter would be what you are after. Have a read here.
You likely want to measure the output of the pulses to ensure it doesn’t damage any equipment it connects to.
Yes was starting to think about going down this route, with an ESP32. I wonder if it can be done like HA Glow, just measuring pulse inputs instead.
I’ve just got mine working on a similar meter (UK too)
Check out my thread, I suspect you can use the same process, sensors and code.
Thread Here
Just shout if you need any assistance - it’s taken me since October to get to this point, and it is seemingly quite accurate now.
Hope it helps,
Mike.
2 Likes
Oh brilliant, will take a look, don’t know how I didn’t find your thread in the first place.
Have so far got mine up and running and seems to be working ok. I’m getting a couple of random ‘pulses’ every so often though which could be some kind of interference. Need to get the cost integrated in mine next.
Also using a NodeMCU ESP32s board.
1 Like
If you scan through my thread your random pulses may make sense. I’ve now got rid of my random pulses and it is working well. Just sorting out the cost monitoring as I type. 
Mike.
All else fails you can use: https://github.com/jomjol/AI-on-the-edge-device, but doesn’t look like you have enough room in that case to focus the image.
1 Like
For anyone interested, got this working perfectly.
I used an ESP32S NodeMCU dev board. I connected an RJ11 cable to the socket on the bottom of my gas meter (it’s ‘hidden’ underneath a sticker) and attached the wires from pins 2 and 3 to a suitable GPIO pin and GND. Added a socket in my cupboard where the meter is located for USB power to the ESP. Configured ESPHome with a pulse_counter and added into my energy dashboard.
This will likely work for any other similar meters, I’m in the UK and i think the Schlumberger ones are exactly the same. Always worth checking underneath it for the RJ11 port.
2 Likes
Would you mind sharing some images of the wiring, please?
Hi,
Apologies for the delay in responding. The unit is in a difficult spot to photograph and is attached to my gas meter. There is very little wiring to show; only three pins from the ESP32 and TCRT5000.
I’m using GPIO32 on the ESP32 (you will see this noted in the YAML code for the ESP32) this pin uses a built-in ADC on the ESP32 and has the name “Gas Meter Analog Value”. It reports back the voltage that the IR sensor is sending out. This voltage will vary according to what is under the IR LED’s.
There could be either three or four pins on the TCRT5000, there are 4 on mine. They should be positive and negative power feeds to power the IR sensor, both of these are taken from “+3.3V” on the ESP32 and the “Gnd” connection on the ESP32 and connected to the VCC+ and Gnd connections on the IR sensor. The other remaining outputs on the TCRT5000 are a digital output and an analogue output and are marked accordingly, AO for analogue output and DO for digital output. Just ignore the digital output as it is of no use to us, and connect the Analogue Output (AO) pin to GPIO32 of the ESP32 - this will feed the varying voltage output from TCRT5000 into the ESP32.
That is pretty much all there is to connect, just three pins “3.3V” to +ve/VCC+, Gnd to -ve/Gnd and AO to GPIO32
Just shout if you need any more assistance.
Cheers,
Mike