Energy Meters

If you have a P1 socket, start here. Around €30, installed in the time it takes to open the meter cupboard, and on a DSMR 5.0 meter it draws its own power from the port so there is no adapter to find a socket for. DSMR (Dutch Smart Meter Requirements) is the specification Dutch and Belgian meters are built to; version 5.0 and later can power a dongle directly.

It reads gas as well as electricity, which most CT-based systems cannot do at all. The cable is short, so if your router is far from the meter cupboard, check Wi-Fi coverage there first.

The splitter is the detail worth paying for. A P1 port is a single socket, and increasingly two devices want it — your monitoring dongle and, say, an EV charger that needs live consumption data to do load balancing. This one passes the port through rather than occupying it, which avoids an awkward choice later.

Older meters that cannot power the port are handled with the supplied USB cable. Reads gas and water where those are linked to the electricity meter.

The serious option for a three-phase house, and DIN-rail mounted so it lives neatly in the consumer unit. DIN rail is the standard metal mounting strip inside a breaker box that components clip onto.

It does 4-quadrant measurement, meaning it tracks import and export of both real power (the part that does work) and reactive power (current that sloshes back and forth without doing work, caused by motors and transformers). That is more detail than most homes need, but it is the level at which you can actually diagnose a strange bill.

The Z-Wave choice, and a good one if your network is already Z-Wave and you would rather not add another Wi-Fi client. Three non-invasive clamps mean you can either monitor three phases or split a single-phase supply across three circuits of interest. Bi-directional, so solar export is reported separately rather than confusingly netted off.

The one to choose if you want to know which circuits are responsible rather than just the total. With clamps on individual circuits you can see the difference between the kitchen and the heat pump, which is where actionable insight actually lives. One-second data resolution makes appliance-level patterns visible. It is the most invasive install here.

The compatibility pick: it handles old DSMR V2 meters as well as current V5 ones, which matters if your meter predates 2015. The Ethernet port is the real reason to choose it — meter cupboards are frequently the worst Wi-Fi spot in a house, and a cable removes the problem entirely. Which is just as well, because the Wi-Fi radio is the unit’s weak point.

A clever answer to the commonest practical problem: no Wi-Fi in the cellar. The optical head sits on the meter and talks to a bridge elsewhere in the house over 868 MHz sub-gigahertz radio, which passes through concrete far better than 2.4 GHz — up to 50 m or three floors. The bridge stores readings if your connection drops, so the history has no holes.

The flexible option: one product family covering optical pulse reading, P1 for the Benelux and HAN for Norway. Battery powered and Zigbee, so it needs no socket and no Wi-Fi at the meter. The failure mode to know about is optical mode on a meter whose LED pulse is dim or oddly timed, where readings can drift.

Easy to fit and well made, but be clear about the architecture: readings travel to Powerfox’s servers and come back to you from there. An internet outage or a service problem takes your energy data with it. For a device whose whole job is feeding automations and dashboards, that is a meaningful weakness compared with the local alternatives above.

Good hardware with a commercial string attached. The reader itself works broadly, but the features people buy it for — cost conversion, hourly tariff awareness, peak-usage tracking — require a Tibber electricity contract. If you are a Tibber customer it is an obvious choice; if not, the money is better spent elsewhere.