As a Belgian user, we were forced to move towards a smart meter. In theory I don’t really have that big of an issue with it, seeing as the only thing I see is “Data”. And I like data.
Sadly enough I have a bit of an issue. Obviously I could buy myself a P1 device and attach it towards the smart energy meter, however, sadly enough there’s no WiFi in the meter room whatsoever. It’s basically a centralized garage where all tenants can park their car and where the meter rooms are. My house is quite some meters away (too far away to get a WiFi connection + underground) and that sadly enough limits my possibilities of using Homewizard. I’m also not able to wire a UTP cable.
I’m just curious if anyone has any other ideas on how I would be able to measure my energy (total energy), as it’s obviously pretty useful information to me. It doesn’t even need to be realtime energy. Fluvius has an API but it’s sadly enough not open.
I was thinking of perhaps using CT clamps, but I’m no electrician so I’m a bit skeptical on working with those, as you can imagine ;).
Edit following comment from @johan_W : solution below will not work to integrate it with Homey. Dongle has to be on the same network as Homey.
Original message:
I’m also curious about other suggestions, but while this is not the most elegant solution, it’s still a valid workaround. You can have a portable hotspot (4G / 5G) connected to a power bank to give internet access to your P1 dongle from HomeWizard. Depending on the size of the Power bank, you might have to charge it every few months.
To complement it: My P1 from HomeWizard uses about 300Mb of internet data per month (75% of it is upload) on its own without any integration without checking it regularly. This particular home does NOT (yet) have Homey or other Smart home solution.
If you go this route, I would check with HomeWizard or other users how much data it uses.
For sim card without a monthly payment, you have many options. I personally use Keepgo but for different use cases. They are a pain in the a** to get the SIM card activated but once activated, it works well and it’s easy to top up the SIM card plan with additional data.
With the option off use off a simcard router, think on that your P! meter is on that moment for you out side you network. You don’t get the info direct (localy) to your homey.
Maybe you can find a provider which provides for a gsm P1 dongle along with it?
I happened to get such a dongle with Zonneplan (in NL), it appears to have a sim card and communicates to ZP with it. All I had to do was plug the thing in.
Via ‘the cloud’, I can read my meter using the, in my case, Homey Zonneplan app.
It’s minimalistic though:
Oh yes you are right, I thought the integration with HomeWizard was cloud based but it uses local API.
I’ll edit my previous comment to reflect that. Thanks
Ah I found the general reply button, good. I was looking for that one.
Thanks a lot for all of the responses, it’s much appreciated! The 4G solution, even though it takes some work, I do think it should be possible to set something up like this. If you use a device such as MikroTik in which you can plug in an LTE modem, you set-up a WiFi network for the P1 dongle to connect to, set-up your LTE modem and set-up a S2SVPN between your router off-site and your router on-site (depending of course on which fancy stuff is in your house).
That way the P1 dongle could still be reached “locally”, but of course you have a VPN tunnel set-up and those can be finnicky from time to time.
I wasn’t aware of the HomeWizard EM’s, those look good. They remind me a bit of the Shelly EM’s and I suppose are the easiest solution to overcome this issue. Just need to find myself a good electrician (come to think of it, I work in a company of awesome geeks. Quite sure someone knows something about electricity )
Well just to give you a heads up on the final solution. I was able to wire up 2 HomeWizards kWh meters towards my electrical cabinet which gives me perfect detail about what’s being used on my groups in the house (love it, totally geeking out with the statistics). Just wanted to thank you all for the advice!
)