Has someone found a way to read the radio transmission of the Brunata-Metrona water and heat meters? These are very common in Germany.
I remember reading somehwere about a project logging their data from the collector devices that listen to the individual meters from outside the appartment and provide the stored data to the meter company when they come for the annual reading. But I cannot find this anymore.
After a bit of research I found an article in the German computer magazine cāt with a high-level description about how some meters might be read [sorry, German and paywall]:
The article refers to this software:
Does anyone of experience with that, especially with regards to Brunata meters?
Iāve started to research this a bit more and got myself a radio stick to receive the radio telegrams sent by the meters. Apparently, there is some standard, which many meter firms stick to, called OMS: https://oms-group.org/en/
OMS seems to use something called M-bus and Iāve setup the wmbusmeters software mentioned above in a docker container. As I did this on Windows with WSL2, I had to make the USB device available to WSL2 first. For that, you need some extra tool called usbipd:
Unfortunately, the stick came without an antenna, so currently Iām not receiving anything. Not sure if that is the missing antenna or the Metrona devices are in the end using a different protocol. If I get it running, Iāll report back. Any help appreciated.
I have a heat sensor āmetro a heat cā and it seems to have an impulse LED. Possible infrared. The very minimalistic technical documentation mentions mbus and ā FernzƤhlimpulseā, maybe that would be a good approach instead of trying to hack into the wireless protocol which most probably is encryptedā¦. Otherwise you could read the consumption of your neighbors!
My water sensors are similar to yours, and on the hallways we have similar data collectors.
Iāve now experimented a bit with wmbusmeters and I can listen to telegrams of heat meters and smoke detectors of my neighbours, but the Metrona devices are not among them. So Iām stuck.
I just found this thread here when I was also looking for a way to read my water and heat meters. However, the problem is that I already have a new generation Minol/Zenner meters with LoRaWan, so i cant mess around with the wireless m bus repo.
I do have Zenner Minomess LoRa water meters (DE-07-MI001-PTB010) and one Zenner Zelsius C5 IUF (DE-12-MI-004-PTB010) heating meter
I have exactly the same devices in the house and are looking for a solution as well. Do you know how often these devices send their current value? Maybe itās just once a day or even once a month?
I found this:
ZusƤtzlich sendet TELMETRICā monatlich alle abrechnungsrelevanten Daten an den Datensammler.
According to that sentence it only sends it once a month which makes it very difficult IMHO to listen for it.
And also this:
Which says that is encrypted by AES-128. And in addition, that its according to the open OMS-T1 standard. Not sure if that helps us. (But I see you already assumed that).
Here is the feature request for wmbusmeters Support for Brunata Metrona Telemetric Smart
I asked my landlord and it seems it possible to get some kind of login from the provider so that you can access the consumption per month. Maybe itās a better approach then to create a custom component to fetch that data and make it available in HA.
Iām not sure how often theyāre sending the data, but I would expect that this is several times an hour, or even several times per minute. But thatās just guessing.
Yes, there are some legal changes based on the European Union Energy efficiency directive. In Germany, this has been put into law with the āHeizkostenverordnungā, which became effective in December 2021. As I understand, it mandates that:
new meters installed after December 2021 need to be remote readable by the metering companies
walk-by and drive-by also counts as remote readable
existing devices need to be replaced by end of 2026
from December 2022 all new devices need to be interoperable with different manufacturers
from December 2022 all new devices need to be connected to a smart meter gateway
existing devices have a grace period until end of 2031 for smart meter gateways
starting from 2022 the building owner (landlord) needs to provide the consumer (tenant) monthly consumption data, if the system is already remote readable
So yes, a lot of stuff will happen. However, I doubt that the metering companies will provide nice APIs to make the data accessible. In the worst case, this will be PDF files sent by email.
I am also experimenting with this device. Iāve tried to add a Tasmota reading head to get data. However, I donāt seem to be able to get any data from it.
The manual tells it is 2400 Bauds, but nothing really else. Did anyone get this to work?
Manual:
The real question here is can we get them to slow down, stop or turn backwards
Joking apart, these B M water counters, were they ever found to be over-reading in Germany? I had both the Hot and Cold water ones replaced back in 2019 and since then, Iāve been receiving unusually high bills.
Quick update from my side: I am now using a couple of ESP32-CAM boards running off a phone charger to visually monitor my water meters. They take pics every 5 mins automagically and use AI to read the numbers. I found it mind-blowing and super easy to set up with user-friendly browser-based interfaces. the ESP-32 cost me 28Eur for a pack of 3! It is so well-written I donated.
