Has anybody had any success reading data from a smart water meter and importing it to emoncms?
What equipment / methods are available to collect the readings?
Good question …
There’s a home assistant integration GitHub - zibous/ha-watermeter: Data provider for smartmeter watermeter. if your water meter is supported
And an SDR to pick up the signal, for example:
Many smart meters send data unencrypted and some can be decrypted.
Assuming we’re talking about the relatively new Smart Water Meters being rolled out in the UK, many of these communicate using LoRaWAN technology - see e.g. Northumbrian Water’s Smart water meters page - and several regional water suppliers are using LoRaWAN network infrastructure operated by Connexin ( Connexin LoRaWAN network connects 250,000 smart water meters in UK | Smart Energy International ).
In principle a LoRaWAN gateway could be used to pick up the radio signals but presumably (hopefully?!) they’re encrypted using the techniques described here: https://tektelic.com/expertise/lorawan-security/ - so I suspect that’s a non-starter.
I should probably add that I’ve recently had a smart water meter installed by Anglian Water. They seem pretty backward when it comes to making data available.
It seems that Anglian Water are not one of the UK companies using LoRaWAN for their Smart Water Meters; they’ve gone for a different system, partnering with Arqiva for the data collection.
There’s some good info on the Sensus meter and its associated ‘signal booster’ or ‘wireless repeater’ (Sensus FlexNet 550M) from another Anglian Water customer here: Water Meter Replacement - My Blog
Overall I guess it depends what you’re trying to achieve and what granularity of data you’re looking to import - and whether tapping into the Smart Meter data feed (or downloading data from a website or API) will achieve what you want.
I have the unusual situation where the (Severn Trent) water meter is located 600 metres from my house and ‘my’ supply pipe runs under ploughed fields and a drainage ditch. I decided I wanted my own meter fitted ‘in series’ with the official meter, so I can compare the readings and check for any leaks in that long supply pipe. That second meter is inside the house and I chose one with an M-Bus adaptor so it can be read in the same way as the heat pump’s Heat Meter. You could always do something similar - if you can justify the cost of the additional water meter.
Thanks for that information. I’ve found another post at Anglian Water shares lessons from smart water meter rollout - IOT Insider that gives a bit more detail about the system.
I’m just looking to store the hourly readings in my emoncms system. But I doubt whether I can tap into the radio data stream from the meter, or rather I can perhaps tap into it but it’s encrypted I think.
Anglian claim to show the hourly data on their website, but don’t have an API to download it, so I’d be reduced to scraping their website. Except in my case the data is very intermittent, with only about half the data being received. I had to ask them specially to even show it to me. (Separately, their data protection seems backwards - they use the data without your consent but you have to give your explicit consent to see your own data!)
They say there’s a problem with the local radio mast and they’re investigating, but AFAICT, that means they may have asked Arquiva to investigate. Arquiva don’t even provide a map of their masts so I’ve no idea where the problematic mast is. Quite frustrating.
That further post helps complete the picture, thanks. I agree the 433 MHz comms between the meter and the separate FlexNet gateway are the most promising place to try to ‘eavesdrop’ the data flow. At 433 MHz it’s possible it’s using the Wireless M-Bus protocol (rather than something more proprietary) - but from some posts on the wmbusmeters GitHub it looks like the 433 MHz comms are indeed encrypted, for Sensus meters.
I stumbled over the fact that Thames Water are using the same technology stack so there are people trying to do the same thing there: Thames Water data - Third party integrations - Home Assistant Community
That thread points at this one for Anglian Water: Integrating an Anglia Water smart water meter - #12 by ZackaryH8 - Third party integrations - Home Assistant Community - which in turns points at this GitHub: https://github.com/pantherale0/haanglianwater that has some Python scripts for scraping the AW website. You might be able to adapt those for use outside Home Assistant (when/if they fix your data reliability issue…)