Qubino 3-phase smart meter - Homey Energy

Devices
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42

@DirkG Thank you for your reply. I will write in english next time :wink:

43

My apologies, I didn’t mean to sound rude in any way. I did use a language that was not called for.

But, as to your comment about “Why didn’t you inform yourself properly beforehand?”

Excuse me sir. How is this at all possible? I am an experienced engineer with 25 years of working with IT, development etc, and before I bought and installed and tested this smart meter, I couldn’t figure out that Homey used z-wave device classes as their first and only way to collect energy and that this wasn’t possible to change in a configuration. How could an average Joe, or electrician be able to figure this out? This is a very strange limitation, since I can use a qubino for all kinds of measurements in my home:

  • The ONLY smart meter in my home
  • The smart meter for my guest home, which is a part of my home
  • The energy meter for any kind of device, like car charger, heat pump, pool pump etc.

Surely you understand why this must be configurable in Homey, since neither I, you or Qubino know what I will use this device for. And an end user or your average electrician should not have to know about these things either, don’t you agree? I mean, this is a very common use case:

(Me) - “hey Mr Electrician, I have this device in my home that I want to get into Homey, and collect statistics via Insights on how much energy it comsumes, now that electricity is so darned expensive here in Europe. Maybe I can save a few bucks with some automations or use the device it in some other fashion.”

(Mr Elctrician) - “Yeah I can help you with that. I have several energy meters that would do the trick. Any one in particular that you are interested in? It sounds like you have a bit of knowledge in the area?”

(Me) - “Well, I want to measure on my heat pump, which is 3 phase 400 volts. I also need to see the energy metering outside of homey in an LCD display or something, if I ever sell my home. I don’t want the buyer to have a smart device like homey to see it. It should be visible at the fuse box where you install it”. My Home also supports zigbee and z wave, and since I have a HOmey Bridge, I have checked both on the “supported apps” on the homey website, as well as the article written by a guy called Dino, and from what I can tell, there is only one kind of device that suit my needs. It is a qubino. It is z wave, it supports Homey bridge, it has an LCD display to read energy metering and there are no negative opinions about it from Homey, it looks like it is supported 100%."

-(Mr Electrician) “well no problem, I can order one of these for you and install it for you next week. You have to connect it to your smart home your self, I have no knowledge of that. Total cost for the device and the work is about 300 EUR”.

(Me) - “sounds good!”

I am all for constructive critisism, and I hope the above example gives a very clear idea as to why it bothers me that the product and homey didn’t work at all together when it comes to monitoring in homey energy. If I was fooled, how many others are also fooled? There are not that many reliable 3 phase meters out there.

Basically, when I set up my smart home energy monitoring, I should be able to set

1)What I want to monitor?
2) How I monitor it?
3) Where it is?

To give you a few examples

Watty

  1. Smart meter (something that measures an area and not just an individual device)
  2. Read values L1, L2, L3 net power (hint, values can be negative if solar panels produce more power than the house consumes)
  3. Zone - Home Top level

Shelly 3EM - measure pool heat pump

  1. Appliance meter
  2. Read values L1, L2, L2 for import power
  3. Garage

Qubino - measure boiler/heater energy

  1. Appliance meter
  2. Read values L1, L2, L2 for import power
  3. Utility room

Qubino # 2 (measures total consumption for our guest home, separate area)

  1. Smart meter
  2. Read values L1, L2, L2 for import power
  3. Guest building

Qubino # 3 (measures production from our solar panels)

  1. Solar
  2. Read values L1, L2, L2 for export power since we have a useless API to get this in real time from our inverter.
  3. Attic

All above scenarios are for me relevant for energy measuring at someones home. Every home is built different, therefor, if you want to build an energy graph that works for most homes, it needs configurability, but it should not be overly complex either (hint hint home assistant). The more energy meters you add, the more detailed the energy map of your home will be. This can be great!

Keep up the good work, I do really like the Homey, aspecially the automations are simply awesome, and the new Dashboard is everything I have waited for!

cheers!