Our Home Automation Project

Chapter 1 — It All Started with a Meter

I hadn't exactly set out to automate the house.

I simply received a letter telling me that my electricity meter was going to be replaced with a smart meter.

Obviously, I couldn't just accept that piece of information and leave it at that.

A smart meter. Fine. But what exactly does it communicate? To whom? How? What data is available? And, most importantly: can I access it myself?

A bit of research later, I learned that I could check my electricity consumption "live" through the grid operator's website.

"Live" definitely deserves those quotation marks: the data can be delayed by at least fifteen minutes.

Noted.

Digging a little deeper, I discovered something much more interesting: the meter has a port that, with the help of a small dongle, can provide direct local access to the consumption data.

And, well...

I want that.

Not necessarily because I need it. But because the data is right there, in my house, generated by a device installed in my house. Being able to access it directly, store it and process it however I want seems considerably more interesting than relying on a third-party service, its app and its limitations.

And, obviously, what was supposed to be a simple meter replacement didn't go entirely according to plan.

→ A Smart Meter, a P1 Port and a Few Misadventures

And then there are the solar panels.

Having real-time access to both the house's electricity consumption and the energy being fed back into the grid immediately opens up a few possibilities: why not use that information to control certain devices depending on how much energy is available?

At the time, though, there wasn't much of an economic incentive for me to do so. Under the prosumer scheme I was still benefiting from, the grid essentially behaved like a gigantic virtual battery: what I fed into it offset what I drew from it later.

But that system wasn't going to last forever.

So it was an excellent excuse to start figuring out how all of this worked and prepare for what came next.

There was, however, one small problem.

If I was going to start collecting data from the meter and then add devices capable of reacting to that data, I had absolutely no desire to end up with a collection of proprietary apps, each tied to a different manufacturer or cloud service.

I wanted something I could control.

Something local.

Something I could modify, connect to other things and, most likely, break from time to time.

Home Assistant quickly became the obvious choice.

At first, it was simply a matter of seeing whether I could use it to retrieve data from the meter and a few devices. Obviously, it didn't really stop there.

→ Home Assistant? What Is This Thing?

And that was roughly the point when a simple question about a new electricity meter started turning into a project to automate the entire house.

One thing leading to another...