Home Energy Revisited

It has been almost 6 full months since (after long procrastination) I finally completed the home energy monitoring project. In short: Home Assistant + Circuit Setup energy meter based on ESPHome.

Long story short: all has been working flawlessly. There have been multiple routine firmware updates (they are released ~monthly). To be honest I have not paid (almost) any attention to them. Luckily nothing got broken, but equally Home Assistant could be releasing one update per year.

This is a side observation, but generally people are fed up with software updates. Even if they go flawlessly, there is always the risk of something getting broken. I've been hearing the same from our customers: you release too frequently (we used to every 6 months, but now there is the pressure to release at most once a year).

Ove the 6 months I have learned quite a lot about my usage patterns. Daily hot bath is an energy hog, but I can easily run the boiler when the energy is least expensive (=middle of the night). Except that I was complaining I had a flat rate. But that is soon going to change. The plan is to migrate this month to variable pricing. Not entirely dynamic pricing but fixed hours Summer / Winter variable. The boiler is scheduled by a Nest thermostat and I will probably need to install a programmable clock to cut off floor heating (which too has a lot of accumulation capacity) during peak hours.

The utility has already silently installed me a new connected meter and the data from the meter matches the data reported by Home Assistant. Ideally I could integrate the meter into the Home Assistant. Supposedly the utility meter uses Wireless M-Bus, so there should be a way. Stay tuned!