I am living in an apartment on the 8th floor but my energy meter is on -1. My Wi-Fi does not reach that far at all, and I have no power supply options at the energy meter. The energy meter has a ‘P1’ port that allows you to read the data from it.
I know there are Home Assistant compatible devices such as the ‘slimme lezer’: https://www.zuidwijk.com/product/slimmelezer/, but they work through LAN or Wi-Fi, meaning they are not feasible for me.
I am wondering if it would be possible to use a ESP32 with ESPHome and lora capabilities running on for example a power bank.I have done a little bit of research, and I think the setup could look something like this:
In the basement at the smart meter I would have a ESP32 with lora capabilities, sending the energy data, which would be a rather small packet containing only a couple of numbers of energy and gas usage.
In my apartment, connected to my router I would have a lora receiver, which would also be able pass through the data to my HA istance. It seems that the recommended way to do this is through MQTT, making use of the LilyGo LORA32 or the Heltec LORA32 as a receiver.
I live in a city, so I am not sure if a local lora network would have lot’s of interference and thus delay. In optimal conditions, I would like real-time data of my energy usage, but I fear that might have a negative impact on my battery life.
I have never used lora or ESP32’s or ESPHome before, so I kind of wanted to get the communities opinion on this project, and if the above choices seem like the best way to allow me to get the energy meter data to my home assistant instance. I’m also wondering what the battery life could be decent enough if attached to a powerbank.