As the headline says.
We’re finally getting fjernvarme (district heating), and have our introduction meeting soon.
Are there any “fjernvarmeanlæg” that can work with home assistant?
If so, any experience with them? Any that anyone can recommend?
You just control each room with thermostats.
I have chosen a Homemaric IP system bought over Amazon.de, since the national dealers are way too expensive.
Danfoss make some too and there should be alotbof zwave and ZigBee options too.
Homemaric requires a hub or a special usb stick.
Danfoss should be ZigBee compatible, but Danfoss is pretty closed with their development of their products.
Thanks for the suggestion, I do already have individual radiator valves (mix of Danfoss Zigbee and Fibaro Z-wave, and a few Danfoss BLE I haven’t bothered to set up yet), and I agree, that works fairly well.
But I was hoping for something to be able to monitor usage of (and maybe also control?) the central part (“fjernvarmeanlæg”) for total use, both radiator and hot water heating. So it’s more for monitoring and integrating into the energy dashboard (the old natural gas usage integrates just fine).
And since we’re unlikely to change it once it’s installed, now is the time 
So you want to monitor the meters?
I think there is a law that state that consumers must get access to read outs of meters.
I know a lot of Kamstrups meters have pinouts for this and there are also ready-made devices to connect on some of this pinouts.
Neat, I’ll look into that a bit. Thanks.
If course, if anyone has additional insight, feel free to add.
Hejsa.
Due to old age, my supplier changed the meter in my house to this model, Diehl 775.
I asked if it was possible to get a WIFI reading out of the unit, the supplier told me that it was possible, but it had to be done by the supplier.
My guess is that it is possible to make yourself, but they do not like people to mess around with the unit.
Find out what meter you got, and read the manual, to see if there are some type of outputs.
We don’t have any, but have a meeting in a months time to find out how/what/etc. I was hoping to be prepared, with a suggestion for them by then (since they probably only know what has WiFi, not what plays nice with home assistant)
Do not expect WiFi at all.
You will most likely get the same access way they have, which can be LoRa or something similar.
WiFi requires an AP to work.
Sometimes there are just pins and you have to make or buy a board that can read these pins, bit then you can choose your own protocol.
Kampstrup meters have a ready made board, but it is pretty expensive.
There are ESPhome boards though.
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BTW, I’d recommend anyone using district heating (“fjernvarme”) to vote for this “Month of WTH” post about getting district heating into the energy dashboard.
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This is an old topic, but in case someone comes by here, here’s my experience with danish utility companies:
Electric: Easy. Use the Eloverblik and Energi Data Service integrations (custom, HACS). For live data it is also fairly easy to read out data from the meter, depending on how new it is. We are in the process of getting solar panels and needed to get a newer meter anyway to accomodate that. The new one has a connector for simple RJ11 based connection plug to an ESP8266 registered in ESPhome. That works really well. (I believe it is called p1mini)
Water: We have a local water company, and while the meter is a Kamstrup Multical 21 with wmBus they apparently rent the equipment to read the data from them twice a year and sounded like they don’t know anything about accessing data or decryption keys. I tried the argument about having legal right to my own utility data, but they said that so far that only applies to electricity. (The government have a working group on the topic since beginning of 2024 I believe so hopefully we get more free data in the future). I decided to try something else for now, and instead I am exploring using AI-On-The-Edge (GitHub - jomjol/AI-on-the-edge-device: Easy to use device for connecting "old" measuring units (water, power, gas, ...) to the digital world).
District Heating: We live in the area covered by Aalborg Forsyning, and switched from Gas to district heating about 18 months ago. The water heater unit etc. is under service agreement. The meter for the heat is a Kamstrup Multical 403 which supports wmBus as well, as far as I have been able to tell from the model number. Unfortunately Aalborg Forsyning are strongly opposed to any customer reading of the meter. The first argument was battery power consumption in the meter, but that makes no sense, if I just listen in on the wmBus telegrams broadcast from the meter. The data is available on their website and in the Watts app, so they clearly have data available on a continous basis. They also offer live-data for enterprise customers by API, but promptly denied when I asked about the price for getting access to the data. Website or Watts app is the only solutions. According to them. Instead I am currently having an AI-on-the-Edge ESP32Cam set up to read the meter and broadcast to MQTT in Home Assistant every 5 minutes. It’s the same solution I was hoping to implement for water but in that case the meter is situated in an isolated well in my front lawn, which gives complications when it comes to powering the unit (wifi signal is surprisingly ok).
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Hi fellow dane,
For water I use this: https://www.homewizard.com/shop/wi-fi-watermeter/ I think it’s fairly cheap and it works very well. Haven’t had any issues.
I’m also looking into getting “Fjernevarme” into my setup … but no luck.