How and why I read my apartment energy usage?
Let's start with why I have no good answer other than that I want to. It's 99% for fun, since I live in an apartment with district heating and good insulation, and the energy consumption does not really correlate with heating or cooling. Energy usage is tied mostly to cooking, the dishwasher and other appliances that we use consciously. I just want to get the wattage into Home Assistant in a way I can understand and/or manage myself. But how do you measure it? That's been quite the journey. The go-to way of reading the energy usage (here in Norway at least) is using a device that plugs into the HAN-port in the fuse box, and Wifi. Tibber Pulse is a good example of this. My problem with this is that my HAN-port is in the basement, four concrete stories below my apartment, way out of reach of my Wifi. There are HAN-devices that work over ZigBee, and I did contemplate sneakily replacing lightbulbs down the stairwell with ZigBee-bulbs, to extend my ZigBee-network all the way d...