Big shout out to the team that worked on the new Energy Management System. I can’t wait to start getting my usage into it!
My utility uses AMR-capable meters (so they can drive down the street and read all of them). Most utilities use these to make reading efficient meaning that everyone can use an SDR and some software to read these broadcasts and pick up their own meter data and feed it to MQTT.
Here’s the how-to for getting this data into Energy Management!
Cheers!
Unfortunately our electricity supplier uses meters that communicate via Zigbee, and disallow access to it, so the technique of reading AMR transmissions is off the table for me. However, I noticed your energy dashboard included natural gas consumption. Our gas utility does use meters that support AMR. How are you acquiring that data? Also via an SDR?
This is the next thing I want to tackle (Gas and water, I wonder if Water consumption will eventually get added to the Energy Management dashboard?)
I started doing some research, it looks possible with some modifications to the AMRIDM2MQTT project, see here: Sending scm data to MQTT instead of idm · Issue #4 · ragingcomputer/amridm2mqtt · GitHub
I’m guessing I’ll have to setup another SDR and an instance of this project with it configured to pickup the readings from my natural gas meter. I only use natural gas for heating and hot water though, so I don’t think I use that much, especially in the summer months.
I think that would be a different dashboard, water is not energy.
There’s an existing thread elsewhere discussing how to read AMR-capable gas/water/electric meters (using an SDR). There’s one post in it where the user’s meter provided no information because the gas utility has means of “wakening” the meter exclusively for their own use of reading the meter and then suspending it until the next time they pass through to read it.
Anyway, given that your energy dashboard indicates a value for gas consumption, how does it do that now?
True, I’m not fortunate enough to have my own solar array and battery storage so I suppose I’m envisioning a one stop place for all of my utility consumption and rates (it already supports grid electricity and gas, water consumption is the only thing missing).
I’m using the image from Home Assistant’s blog post when they announced the new system, if you scroll down in my blog post you’ll see that I only have the electrical grid setup. I’ll look into what it would take to collect readings from my gas meter. I know my utility for water and gas do use AMR meters, but I haven’t dived into it yet.
Doh! My mistake! I thought that was a screenshot of your system. 