Slimmelezer

I investigated several options to connect the digital meters to homeassistant. I already used homeassistant for several other things so it was logical that I also wanted the readings of electricity, gas and water in there. There are several options to do this. I chose slimmelezer because it was, to be honest, the cheapest option. The website is https://www.zuidwijk.com/product/slimmelezer-plus/

The page says:

"SlimmeLezer integrates your energy meter with P1 port seamlessly into Home Assistant. Plug and play, no coding necessary. It comes pre-installed with ESPHome code. After joining it to your WiFi it will be recognized in Home Assistant and can be added easily.

The SlimmeLezer is designed to work with DSMR/ESMR 5. Working with DSMR 5 means that the Smart Meter can deliver enough power through the P1 port to power the reader. Therefore, no extra power adapter is needed to work.

Older Smart Meters with DSMR version 4, 3 or 2 will work too, but will require extra power via the USB-C (not included)."

So, it's cheap, easy to install and powered directly via the digital meter.

Following page explains the initial setup: https://www.zuidwijk.com/initial-setup-slimmelezer/

Basically, it is what is written there:

"The best way for setting it up, is to power it via an USB power supply. In some minor cases, when the SlimmeLezer starts broadcasting its own AP ‘slimmelezer’, it may draw a little too much power and can give problems during setup.

When it’s powered up, it broadcasts a wireless network ‘slimmelezer’. Be patience as this can take 20 to 40-ish seconds. Connect to that wireless network with a phone, tablet or laptop. Once connected, a captive portal will show after some seconds (10 seconds on my iPhone SE and 40 seconds on my iPhone 11 Pro). There you select your network and fill in the required password if needed. Note: hidden networks do work, yet needs an extra setting which isn’t set in my precompiled firmware: fast_connect: true).

When it takes too long to show the slash page, got with a browser to the ip-address http://192.168.4.1

Once connected, it will auto discover in Home Assistant, where you can complete the integration."

It indeed worked immediately as described. The USB port is an USB-C port as used by most recent devices like a gsm so I used the adapter and cable from my gsm to initially give it enough power.

And yes in homeassistant it is reported quite fast that a new configuration is found. You can go to Settings, Devices & Services and there it already showed the slimmemeter.

Press configure and then you get this screen:

Press SUBMIT and then FINISH and you are done.

Click on 1 device and you get something like this:

Note also the VISIT link. If you click on it you go to the IP address of the slimmelezer itself. It has a small buildin webserver also showing you quite some information:

Left shows the last results that were received, right shows a continuously updating pane with the data that is received. Note that this is not the raw data received from the meter. It's nicely formatted and it shows only the data slimmemeter listens to.

Note that above print screen is not what you initially will see. This is the end result. For example Water Consumed is not there initially.

See also https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/dsmr/ for an explanation by home assistant.

I was missing two (I thought) things here. My gas meter usage and water usage. Electricity was all fine.

First the gas meter usage...

It must be me but I was really confused here.

It showed two gas meter values:

Gas Consumed and Gas Consumed Belgium. For Gas Consumed it showed NA (Not Available) and for Gas Consumed Belgium it did show a value.

My interpretation of this was that my Gas Consumed value could for some reason not be read from the meter and that Gas Consumed Belgium was the (average) gas consumption in Belgium... I had for almost a week this tunnel vision. As it turns out, the Belgium meters return the gas consumption a bit different than in other countries. And as such the slimmemeter has two values. In Belgium it returns gas as Gas Consumed Belgium and in all other countries it returns gas in Gas Consumed. I should have looked earlier on my gas meter display to see that this value is actually in Gas Consumed Belgium. On the other way I was also mislead by several messages on slimmelezer that it can actually happen that no gas readings are shown because the gas meter is returning its information on another port. So I was looking on how to change that port and that lead me to the next topic: yaml configuration