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energicos, an innovative provider of decentralized energy supply solutions headquartered near Berlin, has been a pioneer for many years in the fields of sustainable heat supply, energy efficiency, and digital energy systems. The company leverages Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and self-learning heating technologies to reduce energy waste and provide heat and electricity as efficiently and climate friendly as possible.

Instead of relying on large central power plants, energicos deliberately focuses on local supply structures with many small, intelligently controlled generation units. The portfolio ranges from combined heat and power plants and heat pumps for multi-family homes to complex district heating networks for entire neighborhoods. Since its founding in 1997, more than 2,200 projects have been successfully implemented—numerous cities, municipalities, housing associations, and commercial customers trust the company’s expertise.

Project Goal: Automated Remote Reading of Heat Meters

As part of current energy efficiency guidelines, energicos sought a solution to efficiently, securely, and automatically read heat meters remotely. Specifically, the data from SHARKY 775 (Diehl) heat meters was to be transmitted via OMS wM-Bus through a gateway to energicos’s own ERP system.

“The challenge was to build an investment-friendly and scalable ecosystem that enables secure and almost maintenance-free data transmission—from the measuring points, through an IoT device management platform, all the way to our AWS-based energicos solution,” explains Léon Lieske, project engineer at energicos. “For economic reasons, we deliberately wanted to rely on an established, proven technology.”

After extensive testing scenarios, energicos chose technology partners WEPTECH and ROCK5—specifically, the SWAN NB-IoT Gateway and the powerful IoT service platform from ROCK5.

Special Features and Innovative Process Automation

To automate the entire process—from ordering, through manufacturing and configuration, to on-site commissioning—the SWAN NB-IoT Gateway was assigned a customer-specific article number by WEPTECH.

This number is linked in the WEPTECH ERP system to an initial configuration file approved by the customer (including, for example, SIM configuration, credentials, server ID, collection and upload frequency, etc.). During production control, this file is automatically installed and checked together with the firmware at test stations after inserting the customer-supplied SIM cards (alternatively, eSIM is possible).

During this process, relevant data such as the “vendorID,” a “randomly generated password,” the respective device ID, and the SIM card ID (ICCID) are transmitted to the ROCK5 IoT Device Management Platform.

After installation at the respective measuring points, energicos performs what is known as whitelisting: a specific whitelist file is remotely transferred to the gateway via the ROCK5 platform. If necessary, firmware updates (“FOTA”) or security updates can also be applied—completely remotely and without on-site intervention.

The transmitted measurement data is intelligently processed (“parsed”) by ROCK5 and then sent via MQTT to the energicos ERP system, where it is made available for monitoring, control, and billing processes.

Project Progress and Outlook

After a successful rollout with an initial 400 installed gateways for heat meters, the next step is the integration of additional sectors.

Currently, the integration of gas meters (Honeywell type with Absolute Encoder in combination with WEPTECH communication adapters—JONAH-W for the Absolute Encoder and CHENOA for the pulse interface) is being tested and planned.

In the coming years, energicos also plans to significantly expand metering operations in the electricity sector. The goal is to integrate suitable electricity meters that can communicate with the SWAN NB-IoT Gateway via wM-Bus/OMS—a key step toward interoperable, future-proof smart metering structures.

Advantages for energicos:

• Future-proof smart metering infrastructure
• Fully digitized and streamlined processes
• Minimal maintenance effort due to long battery life
• High building penetration thanks to robust 868 MHz radio signals
• Simple cross-sector scalability

Conclusion: Léon Lieske, Project Engineer at energicos:

“The SWAN NB-IoT Gateways from WEPTECH in combination with the ROCK5 platform have enabled us to build a reliable and scalable solution in a very short time. This creates an important foundation for the digitalization of our customers’ energy management.“