Frient Energy Monitor - Driver

Have you looked at iotawatt instead? It my be less of an issue and it can not only monitor whole house but individual circuits and works on uk electric. It's a bit more but direct integration. If you can return that the iotawatt may be your solution (better than pulling out your hair)

Thanks for your suggestion. The Frient energy monitor I purchased around 7 months back and I will wait for some more time and if I am not getting this driver, I will think about this iotawatt.

It's fantastic. I use it to monitor whole house energy but I also use it for triggers. So I have a clamp on my washer circuit and one on my dryer circuit. I can use it to set notifications. (wash/dryer done) I also watch my water heaters and hvac..

So was there any progress on this in the last 6 months?

This device is pretty neat and the price is very reasonable. As far as accuracy is concerned it should be spot on with the billing as it is just displaying what the wall meter actually measures, not a V x A calc that current clamp meters do - note this isn't 100% accurate as our instantaneous voltage (in Aus anyway) does fluctuate and of course the CT taps can't allow for the exact power factor in each individual home)

However, if anyone has this, it does work in zigbee2mqtt so all is not lost! :grinning:

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I saw another thread in our hubitat community where some initiative is happening to integrate the Frient devices.

So, we may be able to use Frient devices in the future.

In my case I took some work around to integrate this Electricity Meter Interface to Hubitat. Even though our community members tried to develop a device handler for this , it didn’t get succeeded due to the unavailability of simple power refresh method.

As suggested by the community member, I tried with Generic Zigbee Outlet driver and the meter interface started fetching the power consumption, but the value was very low.
In my case I was facing 2 challenges.

  1. Frient Meter interface is designed to read 1000 pulse /kWh(Default)
  2. My Electricity meter was providing 600 pulse/kWh (Don’t remember exactly but sure it’s not 1000 pulse)

I took few of the devices like a 7 watts LED bulb and 800 watts hair dryer and then measured the exact wattage of these devices using a physical watts meter. Later isolated the grid connection from home circuit and connected these LED bulb and hair dryer separately and measured the value providing by the Frient Meter Interface. In my case the power reading was 22.28 times less than the actual value.

I created a virtual energy monitor and few variables in hubitat and used the calculation(Virtual HEM = actual reading*22.28) to display the wattage. Later I checked the wattage using air conditioner, geyser, Laundry Dryer and even with a 1 watts LED indicator and it’s shown the power consumption as low as 1 watt to 4500 watts.

It’s not a 100% accurate or a proper solution but at least in my case it serves my purpose and I will get a notification in the event when my kids or somebody turns on AC/Geyser etc and when it’s running for a long time.

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That's interesting. Most smart meters (at least over here) are have an impulse rate of 1000, so not an issue. In Z2M I believe this can be set.

Also I'm not sure what kind of "watts meter" you are using but the pulses from your meter determine how you are billed, which is what matters in the end. It also seems strange that the frient would so significantly under state the power you using when it's a relatively simple calculation unless the sensor isn't correctly attached and missing pulses. It's easy enough to check as your mains meter will also display the energy used on its LCD screen so you can compare this with any other measurement.

I'd encourage you to request to join the beta if you want to try out Frient stuff :slight_smile:

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Could you please provide me some link or docs that describes about beta ? I would like to get some understanding about this.

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I note that mike.maxwell has mentioned in this thread that "they didn't send one of these" - which I take to mean there won't be a driver developed for the energy meter.

Any views on whether that's correct or not?

I think they ended up sending him one later. Dunno if @mike.maxwell worked on it yet though

I had contacted Frient support team few months back and reminded them to send one device to hubitat team and they given the following reply. They may send it later once it’s back in stock.

“Unfortunately, currently, we cannot ship any of the Energy Meter Interfaces, because we do not have them in stock.

Best regards,

frient.”

@Pradeep thank you for the tests!

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Hi, if I understand this correct, the Frient Energy meter is now working on Hubitat?

Hi,

The official integration (support in HE inbuilt driver) is still pending.

What’s available at the moment is support of Frient ( Develco) Energy Monitor in a community custom driver.

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Hi,

Where can i find this community custom driver - been searching - but no luck.

Maybe a stupid question - but I am new to this :slight_smile:

Think I found it - it in the Tuya Zigbee Metering plug :slight_smile:

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Let me know if it works OK.

Hi again,

seems to be working ok - but the "Hourly energy" isn't updated.

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@Pradeep can you share what is your working Preferences settings with the Frient Energy monitor?
The 'Hourly Energy' should be working, or at least was working before.

Please see the screenshots.



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