OBI Energy Tracker – For Beginners AND Home Assistant Pros

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

OBI is selling a small electricity-meter reader right now for under €15 – and I’d argue it’s a small sensation. At that price there simply hasn’t been anything comparable, neither for beginners nor for advanced users. In this article I’ll show you two things: whether the OBI Energy Tracker is worth it for beginners and what the app can really do – and how to get the data into Home Assistant, with the OBI cloud, but also completely without the OBI cloud and app.

How I even got hold of the device: a friend forwarded me the heyOBI newsletter about the Energy Tracker and asked if I wanted to take a look. I thought it sounded interesting, and he put me in touch with someone at OBI – that’s how I ended up with my test unit.

Disclosure: The device was provided to me by OBI free of charge. No fee, no requirements – my opinion stays my own. Links marked (paid link) are affiliate links.

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The problem: smart meters in Germany

Smart meters and Germany – that’s an absolute disaster. Only about 5% of all meters in this country are so far a real smart meter, even though it would have solid advantages for both sides.

Most of us instead have a simple digital meter – in technical terms a modern metering device. An important distinction, because it often gets mixed up: a real intelligent metering system, i.e. the actual smart meter, is that modern metering device plus a gateway that sends the data to the grid operator on its own. That gateway is exactly what most people are missing – they only have the optical interface on the front to read the data out locally. And yet the question nags at anyone with a smart home: where does all the energy actually go?

What is the OBI Energy Tracker?

The device consists of two parts:

a sensor that is magnetically placed on the optical interface of your meter, and
a bridge that receives the data via radio (868 MHz) and passes it on to your WLAN.

The official retail price is €30, but right now you can often get it for around €15, sometimes even cheaper in promotions.

👉 OBI Energy Tracker at OBI (paid link)

Why it’s interesting

What was there comparable so far? The best-known candidate is the Tibber Pulse – but it costs around €130 for non-Tibber customers and is only usable in a limited way without an active Tibber electricity plan. Or the classic DIY route: an infrared reading head with USB on the meter, plus a Raspberry Pi and a rather crude console tool (Volkszähler / vzlogger). It works – but it’s not for the masses.

For €15, a beginner gets a finished app, while the advanced user gets a device that can even be pulled completely locally into the smart home (more on that below). A Shelly Pro 3EM can do more, but needs an electrician and DIN-rail space. The OBI is the simple, cheap way in – without touching any wiring.

Setup and the OBI app

The first curiosity: the feature is tucked into the completely normal OBI app, which at first feels like a shopping app. Only under Profile does the Energy Tracker show up as its own item. Unusual – but it works, and pairing the bridge and sensor is straightforward; every step is explained in the app.

Unlocking the meter (PIN from the metering point operator)

One point where many people get stuck: many digital meters only release the optical interface once you unlock them with a PIN. You get it from your metering point operator – you even have a legal right to it, but you have to request it once (many offer a contact form for this).

A tour of the app

The overview immediately shows the status of bridge and sensor. The consumption analysis is really well done for beginners:

at the top the absolute meter reading, separated into consumption and feed-in,
a daily overview as a bar,
an analysis view with day/week/month and the trend as a curve,
and – for those who don’t need it that precise – aggregated four-hour blocks (morning/afternoon/evening).

CSV export

The data can be downloaded as a CSV and analysed further in a spreadsheet. The values are provided in five-minute intervals. In my export you can nicely see the solar bell curve of my PV system (over 5 kW of feed-in around noon, with dips from passing clouds) and the big load blocks when the EV charges.

Standby analysis – handy, but with a caveat

I find the standby analysis especially interesting: on a completed day the app shows the standby consumption – not just in watts, but also as a share of daily consumption. Very vivid for getting a feel for your own base load.

An important caveat from an “…but secure” perspective: the sensor measures at the grid connection point – it only sees what flows between you and the grid, not what happens behind the meter inside the house. If, like me, you have a PV system with a battery, the battery covers the base load at night and almost nothing shows up at the grid. So the standby figure is mainly meaningful for households without a battery. If you have a battery and want a clean reading, it’s best to disable it for a day.

Firmware update

At the start a firmware update was pending – it ran in the background and was simply done after a few minutes. Nothing a beginner stumbles over.

Interim verdict for beginners

For beginners the device is absolutely solid: cheap, simple, and the app does its job.

Credit where it’s due: the Data Act page

Despite all the criticism of cloud solutions, one thing I find genuinely great: OBI has its own Data Act page. It states completely transparently what the device does and how it communicates – encrypted via MQTT in JSON, meter readings every five minutes, roughly 19 MB per month in total. Even the exact values that are read out (consumption, feed-in, current power) are listed, and only the technically necessary data is stored on the device itself. This openness is a requirement under the EU Data Act – but very few manufacturers implement it this cleanly. A big compliment for that.

In Home Assistant: the easy way via the cloud (HACS)

Many of you run Home Assistant as your smart home hub and want the values right there. For that, there’s an unofficial integration in the Community Store (HACS): install it, enter your heyOBI credentials – and your meter readings show up as sensors in Home Assistant.

➡️ hacs-obienergytracker-integration (GitHub)

The catch: this integration doesn’t get the data from the device, but from the OBI cloud. It logs in with your heyOBI account and queries OBI’s server. So without the cloud nothing works, and if OBI changes the interface, it breaks.

Completely local – without the OBI cloud

For anyone who wants to be truly independent, there’s another project: OBI Energy Tracker Local Cloud by Aaron Christophel (atc1441). The community has fully reverse-engineered the device. With it, you can redirect the bridge so that it no longer sends its data to OBI’s servers (on AWS), but directly to a server at your home – and if you want, you can even flash your own open-source firmware onto the device.

Roughly sketched: the meter provides its data optically to the sensor, which transmits it over 868 MHz to the bridge, and the bridge normally opens an encrypted MQTT connection to the cloud. Because an openly documented AWS IoT protocol is used here, you can point the bridge at your own local server – for example next to Home Assistant on the same Raspberry Pi. Optionally, an open-source firmware replaces the OBI software entirely, flashed via the normal update mechanism, without opening the case. The result: the tracker runs completely offline, in real time, directly in Home Assistant.

Rebuilding this step by step would go beyond this article. Want a detailed guide? Then write “local” in the YouTube comments – if there’s enough interest, I’ll turn it into its own video, from redirecting the cloud to proving that really not a single byte leaves your network.

What OBI is planning next

Good news to finish, especially for those who don’t want to tinker themselves: according to the OBI FAQ, an official integration into smart home systems (Home Assistant, OpenHAB, FHEM) is “firmly planned” – in OBI’s own words, “our heart beats for open source”. On top of that, multiple sensors on one bridge should become possible soon. In the heyOBI newsletter, OBI additionally announces a live mode with per-second values and a consumption comparison with other households. So a lot of what’s still community tinkering today may soon arrive officially – and then this little device gets even more interesting.

Conclusion

For under €15, the OBI Energy Tracker is a surprisingly good way to make your own power consumption visible – with a clean app and exemplary data transparency. The cloud requirement and the still-missing official HA integration are the weak spots. For tinkerers, though, the ability to run the device completely locally is exactly what tips the scales.

👉 Buy the OBI Energy Tracker at OBI (paid link)

Note: Links marked with affiliate link are affiliate links. As a partner of Amazon and OBI (via the Awin network) I earn from qualifying purchases. This means I receive a small commission if you purchase through these links — at no extra cost to you. The revenue helps me run this blog and YouTube channel and keep creating content. Thank you for your support!
― Joachim

OBI Energy Tracker on Smart Home? Sure — But Secure!

OBI Energy Tracker – For Beginners AND Home Assistant Pros

The problem: smart meters in Germany

What is the OBI Energy Tracker?

Why it’s interesting

Setup and the OBI app

Unlocking the meter (PIN from the metering point operator)

A tour of the app

CSV export

Standby analysis – handy, but with a caveat

Firmware update

Interim verdict for beginners

Credit where it’s due: the Data Act page

In Home Assistant: the easy way via the cloud (HACS)

Completely local – without the OBI cloud

What OBI is planning next

Conclusion