schmidt.florian
95c51842e8
The headline tiles were lifetime consumption, a raw reading count and the register span. None of those answer why someone opens a meter: how much this month, more or less than last, where the year lands, what it costs. A cumulative counter's register value is an accident of when the meter was installed. MeterPeriodService buckets consumption by calendar month in the instance timezone -- via date_trunc(... AT TIME ZONE) rather than EF grouping, because a reading at 00:30 local on 1 January is 23:30 on 31 December in UTC and would be booked to the wrong month (SDD §10). It reports generation for a generation counter and consumption otherwise, so a PV meter stops claiming it consumed 0 kWh. Month- and year-to-date are compared against a projection of the current period rather than its running total. Three days into a month, "12 kWh vs 340 kWh last month" reads as a collapse in usage when nothing has changed. The projection is straight-line on elapsed days -- wrong for anything seasonal, but the honest reading of "at this rate" -- and the UI marks it with a leading ~. A 12-month bar strip gives the shape at a glance. A meter with nothing normalized yet returns an empty history rather than a flat line, which would look like a meter reading zero. Register span, reading count and lifetime total move into a collapsed panel. Still there when needed for an audit, no longer the first thing you see. Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01V6joyergfvVLFEizH1hJLd
MeterVault
A self-hosted, local-first energy & utility metering platform. MeterVault pulls meter data from Home Assistant, Tasmota and raw MQTT on a schedule, stores every reading timestamped and immutable, normalizes it into consumption, and turns it into cost dashboards. Energy types (electricity, water, heating oil, gas, district heat, …) and meters are user-defined — nothing is hardcoded.
Successor to a hand-maintained Energiebilanz spreadsheet. See docs/SDD.md for the
full design.
Features
- Automatic ingestion from MQTT/Tasmota (persistent subscriptions) and Home Assistant (REST poll or push), plus manual entry, a REST push API, and CSV import.
- Immutable raw readings on a TimescaleDB hypertable; a normalized, append-only consumption layer on top — reproducible, auditable.
- Seven measurement modes (cumulative/generation registers, burner runtime, tank/consumable, direct delta, instant rate, virtual). Handles meter swaps, counter resets, tank dip-sticks with calibration, and virtual meters defined by an expression (PV self-consumption, savings, net).
- Tariff engine with time-ranged price history (unit/base/feed-in), scoped global / per type / per meter; cost categories decoupled from energy types; meterless manual costs.
- Continuous aggregates (daily/monthly/yearly, local timezone) so dashboards never scan raw.
- Dashboard: cost KPIs with period-over-period deltas, "what costs most", a "what cost more/ less" difference view, trends, a PV/Solar panel (generation, self-consumption, autarky %, savings), an oil/consumable panel (tank gauge, deliveries, burner runtime, effective L/h, forecast-to-empty) and a per-meter detail view (raw readings, consumption, sources, tariff timeline, events), one-click reference-data load, CSV dry-run.
- Per-energy-type flow pages (Electricity, Water, …): a Sankey diagram of the meter chain — a downstream meter is a subsection of an upstream one (main → car, pool, garden, …), arrow thickness ∝ amount, with an auto-computed "Other/unmetered" remainder. Meters can have several upstreams (a merge, e.g. grid + solar → house).
- Admin UI: full create/edit/delete for energy types, meters (with consumption recompute on mode/baseline change, and cycle-safe upstream-meter wiring), ingest sources, tariffs, cost categories, and MQTT/Home-Assistant connectors; a "Test connection" for Home Assistant; effective-settings view.
- REST API + OpenAPI/Swagger, API-key auth, reverse-proxy trust (Authelia/Traefik).
- JSON config export/import for portability; Docker Compose + multi-arch image.
Quick start (Docker)
docker compose -f deploy/docker-compose.yml up -d
# open http://localhost:8760 → Import → "Load reference data" for a populated demo
# ...or start pre-populated: METERVAULT_SEED=true docker compose -f deploy/docker-compose.yml up -d
# API docs at http://localhost:8760/swagger
Quick start (Proxmox VE LXC)
A community-scripts–style installer builds a self-contained LXC (Debian + PostgreSQL/TimescaleDB + the app as a systemd service). Run on the Proxmox host:
bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://git.finalfactory.de/FinalFactory/MeterVault/raw/branch/master/deploy/ct/metervault.sh)"
It asks the standard container questions, optionally loads the demo dataset, and prints the URL
(http://<ct-ip>:8760) plus the generated DB password. Re-run update inside the container to pull
the latest source and rebuild. It builds from this public Gitea repo (there is no prebuilt tarball —
releases ship as a container image). See deploy/ct/metervault.sh and
deploy/install/metervault-install.sh.
Configuration is via environment variables (Section__Key double-underscore mapping), e.g.:
| Variable | Purpose |
|---|---|
ConnectionStrings__Default |
PostgreSQL/Timescale connection string |
MeterVault__TimeZone |
Local timezone for buckets/display (default Europe/Berlin) |
MeterVault__ApiKeys__0 |
An API key accepted on the X-Api-Key header |
MeterVault__AllowAnonymousApi |
true to open the REST API without a key (trusted LAN only) |
MeterVault__ReverseProxyTrust |
true to honour X-Forwarded-User behind an auth proxy |
MeterVault__EnableLiveIngestion |
false to disable the MQTT/HA workers |
MeterVault__SeedReferenceData |
true to load the bundled demo dataset on first start (idempotent) |
The REST API is closed by default: with no ApiKeys configured and AllowAnonymousApi off, it
returns 401. Set at least one API key (or open it explicitly for a trusted network).
Secrets (broker/HA tokens) are never stored in the database — endpoint configs hold the name of an environment variable, resolved at runtime.
Pushing readings (Home Assistant)
curl -X POST http://localhost:8760/api/v1/readings \
-H "X-Api-Key: $METERVAULT_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '[{"meterId": 1, "time": "2026-01-01T12:00:00Z", "value": 47200}]'
See docs/wiring.md for wiring up Tasmota, MQTT and Home Assistant.
Development
dotnet build
dotnet test # integration tests spin a TimescaleDB via Testcontainers (needs Docker)
dotnet test tests/Core.Tests # fast unit tests, no Docker
dotnet run --project src/App
Architecture, project layout and conventions live in CLAUDE.md.
Releasing
Edit the VERSION file on master; Gitea Actions tags vX.Y.Z and builds/pushes a
multi-arch image to the Gitea container registry (.gitea/workflows/). Locally:
pwsh deploy/build-and-push.ps1 -Registry git.finalfactory.de -Image finalfactory/metervault -Push.
Requires a Docker-capable act_runner; the image build itself is self-contained.
License
Not yet chosen (see SDD §14). Add a LICENSE before the first public tag.