Have you investigated deciphering the modbus link?
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Hi Simon, the messages this integration parses appear to just be modbus encapsulated in mqtt, so the reverse-engineering is already done!
So I guess you could slap an esphome device on the bus and make a local integration that way. I have no experience with the modbus physical interface, so I don’t know how hard that would be, or what risks it holds. It’s not on my todo list, but I’d certainly consider switching to that is someone else figures it out first 
Dave
That’s exciting to hear!
Modbus serial connections usually operate over RS485. You can get RS485 transceivers for ESP32 microcontrollers, and esphome has support for the modbus protocol. While I’ve done some fairly advanced stuff with esphome, I’ve never played with modbus before. But in my experience with projects like this, the main challenge tends to be reverse engineering the protocol—so if that work is already done, there’s a real possibility of making something work.
The M5Stack ecosystem is a really tidy and low cost way of piecing together an ESP32 controller with accessories, without soldering or breadboards. This tranceiver can even grab power from the RS485 bus and step it down to power the microcontroller.
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Nice, this definitely looks like a good path to a local integration. Would you have to disconnect the existing controller from the modbus or could they co-exist? There’s a lot I don’t know about modbus.
From what I can tell, modbus is designed to handle a large number of endpoints. Looking at a photo of the Reclaim V2 controller board, it has two modbus connections, strongly implying that it has been designed with expansion in mind.
I have a Reclaim on the way for a home under construction, so I’ll be able to tinker around with it in a few months.
Of course if we can tap into the RS485 with an esphome controller, a second sensor would be an obvious addition.
If we could somehow add a flow meter as well, we could estimate hot water status with some precision.
Presumably a high mounted temp sensor tells you how warm the hottest water is, whereas a low mounted sensor tells you how warm the coldest water is. While the former might be useful for product development, I can’t imagine any use for it in a straightforward HWS controller.
I know that hot water tanks are designed to avoid up-down mixing, so cold water can continuously replace hot water as it’s consumed without cooling down the overall temperature. But I don’t know enough about how it achieves this, at what point heat is added, and whether it’s at all feasible to estimate how much hot water is left using temperature alone.
It looks like the latest Home assistant update 2025.3.0 breaks the Reclaim integration. I’m getting this error now:
Logger: homeassistant.setup
Source: setup.py:275
First occurred: 06:46:02 (1 occurrences)
Last logged: 06:46:02
Setup failed for custom integration ‘reclaimenergy’: Requirements for reclaimenergy not found: [‘aiomqtt==2.0.1’].
I haven’t yet tried rolling back to see if it fixes it.
You can temporarily get around this by editing line 15 of the following file and restart HA.
custom_components/reclaimenergy/manifest.json
from
“aiomqtt==2.0.1”
to
“aiomqtt>=2.0.1”
This is now fixed, if you installed through HACS it should offer an update.
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Just wanted to say thank you @david-collett for putting this integration together. Followed your instructions to install, all pretty straightforward. Seems to be working great with my Reclaim v2 HP so far. Fantastic work!
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I may be getting one of these systems in the next little while.
How worried should I be on the system’s reliance on AWS?
What’s your specific concern?
I don’t recall having any issues ever.
It’s been very reliable, and a core feature of the wifi controller. So it won’t be going away any time soon.
That said, there isn’t a way to directly communicate to the controller over LAN/WiFi, and Reclaim have previously said they were looking into publishing a formal API.
So, the API could change in the future, which I imagine could temporarily break this integration until it was updated to match.
Maybe I should email them about this. Their app update notes say “remove API” but I think this is unrelated
This frustrates me. Devices on my network shouldn’t need an Internet connection to function, at least at a basic level.
Well, to play devils advocate, the controller functions fine without an internet connection. You just have to use the buttons on the front of the unit to make any changes to settings.