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Comment by juahan | Hacker News Reader

In Finland (and I guess at least other Nordics as well) we are starting to get neters with so called P1-port, which is open for the user to get their data. All I needed was a wire with RJ26 and an ESP8622 with some esphome definitions and now I get all kinds of data from the meter every 4 seconds. Total consumption, consumption, amperage and voltages per phase etc.

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In Germany we have an infrared one-way connection (SML protocol). I hooked a Raspberry Pi Zero WH (consumes only 0.7 Watt) with Ethernet Hat and USB-Infrared-Reader-Cable to the Smart Meter. The PI reads and transmits all readings over MQTT to my InfluxDB 2.0, which is running virtualized on Proxmox. At the same time, I also read my solar inverter through Modbus TCP (via OSS called "Solaranzeige"), to the same Influx DB. Both is visualized in Grafana. It is a nice stack that did not produce any problems in 7+ years.

All of this helped me to better understand my electricity consumption.

This is a great post! Did you blog about it? I am sure HN would love a post like that. I would generate lots of interesting convos around similar setups in different countries.

Ah, you mention a pain point. It's on my list for years now.. I've just added 60 kWp Solar plant [1] to my existing 30 kWp; once this is through, my monitoring stack will need updating and I will blog about it here [2].

[1]: https://himself.alexanderdunkel.com/@alex/112443427011946461

[2]: https://du.nkel.dev/

The port/protocol originates in Netherlands and is getting widely implemented across the EU. It is really nice that the port provides power (esp. in recent versions) for an ESP, so you don't need to worry about bringing power to where your meter is (which may be outdoors.)

Yeah, P1 has been around for a decade or so in the Netherlands. If don’t feel like setting up an MCU yourself, Homewizard Energy is pretty good. I don’t use their services, but you can enable a simple API on the local network that gives you a JSON representation of the ‘telegrams’ that come out of the P1 serial port.

https://www.homewizard.com/p1-meter/

Oh yes, now I remember reading the P1 spec and it does indeed say that it has been in use in the Netherlands for many years already. In Finland we also call it the HAN-port or the H1-port. Also, I must clarify that it uses RJ12, not RJ26 which I don’t even think exists.

The HomeWizard stuff is great. They also make a water meter, separate kWh meters in 1 or 3 phase and smart plugs.

If you have a subscription to their service, they can be programmed to eg turn on when there's excess solar power etc. And integrates with HomeAssistant.

Our EL provider in SE Finland is installing (without charge) a new P1 meter next spring. It will be bidirectional, i.e. ready for solar-to-grid.

This is far from any metro area, so it might be a countrywide rollout.

I thought the old meters were all bidirectional (ie: the spinning wheel could go backwards if you back-fed). Dunno what older gen “smart”meters would do. But I guess the newer meters are capable of paying you some reduced/enhanced rate for backfeeding?

> installing (without charge)

Who’s paying for it?

Some combo of the ratepayer base and the taxpayer base, I assume.

Germany here, I have an optical UART, I get the data every second.

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