glowmqtt.md

⚠️ There is now an official way to connect Glow to Home Assistant via MQTT, I would suggest using that instead of the method described below. Here are the sensor templates for that (replace GLOW_DEVICE_ID with the relevant information for your device):

mqtt:
  sensor:
    - name: "Home Power"
      state_topic: "glow/GLOW_DEVICE_ID/SENSOR/electricitymeter"
      unit_of_measurement: 'W'
      value_template: "{{ (value_json['electricitymeter']['power']['value'] * 1000) | int }}"
      icon: 'mdi:flash'

    - name: "Home Energy"
      state_topic: "glow/GLOW_DEVICE_ID/SENSOR/electricitymeter"
      unit_of_measurement: 'kWh'
      state_class: 'total_increasing'
      device_class: 'energy'
      unique_id: 'home_energy'
      value_template: "{{ value_json['electricitymeter']['energy']['import']['cumulative'] }}"

    - name: "Home Daily Energy"
      state_topic: "glow/GLOW_DEVICE_ID/SENSOR/electricitymeter"
      unit_of_measurement: 'kWh'
      value_template: "{{ value_json['electricitymeter']['energy']['import']['day'] }}"
      icon: 'mdi:flash'

    - name: "Home Gas"
      state_topic: "glow/GLOW_DEVICE_ID/SENSOR/gasmeter"
      unit_of_measurement: 'm³'
      state_class: 'total_increasing'
      device_class: 'gas'
      unique_id: 'home_gas'
      value_template: "{{ value_json['gasmeter']['energy']['import']['cumulativevol'] }}"

    - name: "Home Daily Gas"
      state_topic: "glow/GLOW_DEVICE_ID/SENSOR/gasmeter"
      unit_of_measurement: 'kWh'
      value_template: "{{ value_json['gasmeter']['energy']['import']['day'] }}"
      icon: 'mdi:flash'

Here is a way to expose most of the Glow Display MQTT information to home assistant through templates. Please make sure you ask Hildebrand support to enable your account for MQTT access before setting everything up.

The first step is to connect Home Assistant to MQTT. If you don't have your own broker hooked up yet, go ahead and set it up (I would suggest using the Integrations UI) and specify your Glow username and password as well as glowmqtt.energyhive.com as the server and 8883 as the port to make sure we're establishing a secure SSL connection.

If you already have your own MQTT server hooked up to Home Assistant, like I do, you will have to set up a bridge between your MQTT server and the Glow one, after that your server will mirror the MQTT messages from the Glow server. You have to do this because Home Assistant does not support connecting to more than one MQTT server.

I will assume you are using Mosquitto as an MQTT server. Start by creating a file named /etc/mosquitto/conf.d/glow.conf with the following content (replace GLOW_USERNAME, GLOW_PASSWORD and GLOW_DEVICE_ID with your relevant information):

connection glowmqtt
address glowmqtt.energyhive.com:8883
remote_username GLOW_USERNAME
remote_password GLOW_PASSWORD
bridge_capath /etc/ssl/certs/
topic SMART/HILD/GLOW_DEVICE_ID in 0

Once that is done, just restart Mosquitto to reload its configuration:

sudo systemctl restart mosquitto

Now you should be able to see your Glow messages over MQTT by using your client of choice.

If that works all right, you can open the Home Assistant configuration.yaml file (for me it is located at /home/homeassistant/.homeassistant/configuration.yaml) and add these new sensors under the sensor section (replace GLOW_DEVICE_ID with the relevant information for your device):

mqtt:
  sensor:
    - name: "Home Power"
      state_topic: "SMART/HILD/GLOW_DEVICE_ID"
      unit_of_measurement: 'W'
      value_template: "{{ value_json['elecMtr']['0702']['04']['00']|int(base=16) }}"
      icon: 'mdi:flash'

    - name: "Home Energy"
      state_topic: "SMART/HILD/GLOW_DEVICE_ID"
      unit_of_measurement: 'kWh'
      state_class: 'total_increasing'
      device_class: 'energy'
      unique_id: 'home_energy'
      value_template: "{{ value_json['elecMtr']['0702']['00']['00']|int(base=16) * value_json['elecMtr']['0702']['03']['01']|int(base=16) / value_json['elecMtr']['0702']['03']['02']|int(base=16) }}"

    - name: "Home Daily Energy"
      state_topic: "SMART/HILD/GLOW_DEVICE_ID"
      unit_of_measurement: 'kWh'
      value_template: "{{ value_json['elecMtr']['0702']['04']['01']|int(base=16) * value_json['elecMtr']['0702']['03']['01']|int(base=16) / value_json['elecMtr']['0702']['03']['02']|int(base=16) }}"
      icon: 'mdi:flash'

    - name: "Home Weekly Energy"
      state_topic: "SMART/HILD/GLOW_DEVICE_ID"
      unit_of_measurement: 'kWh'
      value_template: "{{ value_json['elecMtr']['0702']['04']['30']|int(base=16) * value_json['elecMtr']['0702']['03']['01']|int(base=16) / value_json['elecMtr']['0702']['03']['02']|int(base=16) }}"
      icon: 'mdi:flash'

    - name: "Home Monthly Energy"
      state_topic: "SMART/HILD/GLOW_DEVICE_ID"
      unit_of_measurement: 'kWh'
      value_template: "{{ value_json['elecMtr']['0702']['04']['40']|int(base=16) * value_json['elecMtr']['0702']['03']['01']|int(base=16) / value_json['elecMtr']['0702']['03']['02']|int(base=16) }}"
      icon: 'mdi:flash'

    - name: "Home Gas"
      state_topic: "SMART/HILD/GLOW_DEVICE_ID"
      unit_of_measurement: 'm³'
      state_class: 'total_increasing'
      device_class: 'gas'
      unique_id: 'home_gas'
      value_template: "{{ value_json['gasMtr']['0702']['00']['00']|int(base=16) * value_json['gasMtr']['0702']['03']['01']|int(base=16) / value_json['gasMtr']['0702']['03']['02']|int(base=16) }}"

    - name: "Home Daily Gas"
      state_topic: "SMART/HILD/GLOW_DEVICE_ID"
      unit_of_measurement: 'kWh'
      value_template: "{{ value_json['gasMtr']['0702']['0C']['01']|int(base=16)  * value_json['gasMtr']['0702']['03']['01']|int(base=16) / value_json['gasMtr']['0702']['03']['02']|int(base=16) }}"
      icon: 'mdi:flash'

    - name: "Home Weekly Gas"
      state_topic: "SMART/HILD/GLOW_DEVICE_ID"
      unit_of_measurement: 'kWh'
      value_template: "{{ value_json['gasMtr']['0702']['0C']['30']|int(base=16)  * value_json['gasMtr']['0702']['03']['01']|int(base=16) / value_json['gasMtr']['0702']['03']['02']|int(base=16) }}"
      icon: 'mdi:flash'

    - name: "Home Monthly Gas"
      state_topic: "SMART/HILD/GLOW_DEVICE_ID"
      unit_of_measurement: 'kWh'
      value_template: "{{ value_json['gasMtr']['0702']['0C']['40']|int(base=16)  * value_json['gasMtr']['0702']['03']['01']|int(base=16) / value_json['gasMtr']['0702']['03']['02']|int(base=16) }}"
      icon: 'mdi:flash'

If you would like to set up the energy dashboard, pick Home Energy for electricity and Home Gas for gas.

Now restart your Home Assistant instance, and you should be good to go! All the sensors should appear in the developer tools menu, for instance sensor.home_instant_energy, and update in real time.

If you'd like to play with the MQTT API, you can also check out my python code to connect and fetch data directly from the MQTT server.

Does any know how to drop specific value readings that come through in mqtt? I have been talking with Hildebrand about the spikes I keep getting, specifically in gas meter readings, and they have come back with:

`We confirm that the meter has returned a value of "FFFFFFFFFFFF", which for the data type means it's an invalid value.

The ingress to the Hildebrand database detects these invalid values and discards them so they don't appear in our APIs (and therefore Bright); we assume they do appear in the MQTT feed and so will need to be detected and discarded by MQTT users.`

it certainly explains why I’m getting gas readings at various times even though gas should only come through every half hour

I bring in the raw reading and then use a template as below to remove the zeros:

gas_meter_reading:
  friendly_name: "Gas Meter Reading"
  unit_of_measurement: 'kWh'
  value_template: >-
      {% if states("sensor.gas_meter_raw") | float(0) > 0 %}
      {{ states("sensor.gas_meter_raw") }}
      {%- else -%}
      {{ states("sensor.gas_meter_reading") }}
      {% endif %}

@pg-nut thanks. Being as "FFFFFFFFFFFF" in hex converts to 281474976710655 in decimal and Hildebrand have said they exclude "FFFFFFFFFFFF" from any readings, would the following then work (so that I am excluding that as well as 0)? Or would the register value be a signed 2's complement and therefore convert as n/a? If n/a, would that be a 0 value registered in HA?

gas_meter_reading:
  friendly_name: "Gas Meter Reading"
  unit_of_measurement: 'kWh'
  value_template: >-
      {% if states("sensor.gas_meter_raw") | float(0) > 0 %}
      {{ states("sensor.gas_meter_raw") }}
      {% elif states("sensor.gas_meter_raw") | float(0) == 281474976710655 %}
      {{ states("sensor.gas_meter_reading") }}
      {%- else -%}
      {{ states("sensor.gas_meter_reading") }}
      {% endif %}

When I was having problems, I looked at my “raw” sensor history and could see that every night it spiked down to zero and that was why I setup my template that way. Maybe you could see what your rogue value is in the same way and adjust the template accordingly?

It’s been a while since I have checked in here, nice to see people are still fixing issues!

I’ll refresh my config soon and expect to make the following changes, let me know if there is anything else you’d like to see or stuff I should know about:

• share my energy dashboard configuration which took WAY too long to set up properly
• leverage the new local MQTT connection to hopefully improve privacy / latency / resilience
• filter out spikes and invalid values in the gas measurements in particular