Hello.
I have 3 energy meters for quite some time, which have modbus output. The three of them measure the 3 branches of a plant with self-generation, Grid, Inverter and Consumption. I got bored of the ones with zigbee or Wifi communication because they deliver very little information.
The implementation I did it placing a micropc that I had thrown away some time ago, I installed Debian Server and Nodered, using Modbus RTU and a low cost 485 to USB converter. Nodered, polls, receives and processes the data and sends it via Mqtt to my other NUC running homeassistant, making use of autodetection. Everything has worked flawlessly, autodetect is powerful. I have only been inconvenienced by the fact that I have 2 machines. The consumption of resources (and energy) in my microPC is almost null, imperceptible, so it could be viable to run in homeassistant the nodered also, only has the disadvantage of wiring the modbus network as 30 meters (I do not think it degrades, so far I scan every 3 seconds, and with modbus error rate of 0), but to extend it 40 meters could appear, I’m making use of UTP cable only.
The query, of benefits vs costs of moving everything to a single machine.
if anyone has more cost/benefits and which one they go for it would be good.