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Here in the Netherlands most houses are equiped with a so called ‘Smart-meter’. This device makes it possible to register the in- and outtake of the power used. While this is mostly confinient for the powercompanies for sending you the powerbill, it can also be read with the right equipment and monitor your energy consumption for yourself.

I myself do this with a ‘Smart-meter cable’ that connects to my Raspberry Pi running Domoticz.

All you need is a ‘Smart-meter’ cable and a Pi running the latest version of Raspbian and install Domoticz. Any Pi will do for this particular use, but if you want Domoticz to do more than just registering your Power consumption a Pi 3B is adviced. The footprint of Domoticz isn’t that big, so a 8 GB SD card should be enough (I used a 16 GB card).

You can follow my guides to install Raspbian if this is your first time.

From the command prompt (or from a terminal) you give the following commands.

sudo curl -L install.domoticz.com | bash

After the installation is finished be sure to reboot your pi.

sudo reboot now

Now your Domoticz server is running on your network you can connect to it by using a webbrowser to the ip address of your Pi. If you do not know the IP address use the following command to get it.

ip addr

Your <IP address> should look something like 192.168.2.123 in my case for instance it’s 192.168.2.23

In a webbrowser type the follwing and be sure to replace my IP address with your address.

http://192.168.2.23:8080

Your browser will show the Domoticz admin page where you can add all sorts of domotica devices like Nest, Netatmo, Hue, etc. But also your smart-meter cable.

To do this go to the top right menu item named Setup and choose Hardware

Than add a new device called P1 smart meter USB and configure like it is shown in the image below.

Now go back to the Setup menu and select the Devices option.

Now look for the green dot with the white arrow in it an click on it. A pop-up will appear where you can give the device a name. Leave it default or type something you would like to name the device in Domoticz and click Add (the example is when I was adding my Rain meter from Netatmo, just so you know).

When you have added the device, Domoticz will start registering the power intake and report it back to you in various graphs. Starting with the 24 Hour graph a Weekly graph, Monthly and even a Year view. So this time next Year all graphs will be filled 😉

If you are using solar panels in combination with a smart meter Domoticz will also show how much energy you have produced in regards to your power consumption.

As a nerd these figures and graphs are not only usefull, but fun to watch if you ask me.

As a domotica enthousiast a domotica hub is a must. This is due to all the ‘standards’ that are used that do not communicatie with each other. There is Zigbee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth, WiFi, etc, etc. A pain in the butt if you ask me. Guess that’s just the way these things work (or don’t work actually).

But here come the domotica-hubs and all the various protocols just suddenly talk with each other. Because the domotica-hub is the universal translator so to speak (pun intended).

There are a few hubs you can choose from and some good ones are even free. Just install them on a computer and plug them into your home network. One of the first hubs I tried is Domoticz. Simply running on a Raspberry Pi. Totally free, super easy to install.

Just get a freshly installed Raspberry with a fully updated Raspbian connected to your home network and the Internet and run the following command.

sudo curl -L install.domoticz.com | bash

Now you have your own domotica hub.

Just start a webbrowser and connect to the Domoticz installation using the IP address of your Pi. My Pi for example uses 192.168.2.23

http://192.168.2.23:8080

And voila! All that is left to do is configure your various devices and you are done. Okay, there are better solutions that are also running on a Raspberry Pi, but as I said this was my first experiment regarding the domotica hub software extravaganza.

Adding devices is done by these three steps.

First go to the Setup menu (upper right of the screen) and choose Hardware

The first drop down menu you see is called Type. Here you must choose the device your want to add. For example Netatmo.

Click Add and go back to the Setup menu. Now choose Devices.

If the device you’ve added under Hardware has more than one function or several attached other devices they will probably all show up here. In my case I use multiple Netatmo devices such as indoor temp, outdoor temp, rain, wind, and so on. They all show up in the Devices menu.

By clicking on the green dot with the white arrow of each device I can actually add them to my Domoticz server. After which I can use them from the various other menu options (Temperature, Weather, etc.).

Just go through all of the other menu options to see if a device is added. Once you have found one you can click on the little star icon in the bottom left corner of each device to make them a favourite and they will be added to your Dashboard.

Do this for all your other domotica devices if you wish. Add your Hue lights, Logitech Harmony remote, Nest thermostats, what ever is presented in the Type dropdown menu.

This is just the basic setup. If you look in the Setup menu you will find more advanced options to automate and even script all of the devices triggers and values into a complete automation Walhalla. But that is for another post…

featured image source: techpulse.be