Sunflower Grid — multi-meter remote reading and self-consumption platform

Continuous M-Bus and Modbus meter reading with MQTT uplink to a Swiss platform for collective self-consumption groups.

The context

Sunflower Grid is a Swiss company orchestrating collective self-consumption groups (RCP): meter installation, remote reading, data aggregation, transparent billing and dashboards for property owners and tenants, all exposed as white-label APIs to solar installers, electricians, municipalities and distribution system operators.

Since the January 1st 2025 Swiss reform expanded the scope of collective self-consumption, Sunflower Grid has been helping property owners and municipalities turn local solar production into shared energy.

Visit sunflowergrid.ch

The need

  • Continuous reading of energy meters over wired M-Bus or Modbus RTU/TCP, depending on the manufacturer on site.
  • Deployment across very diverse buildings — new or old, with or without existing IT infrastructure.
  • Reliable uplink to the Sunflower Grid MQTT broker: timestamps, QoS and recovery after network outages.
  • Fast, repeatable commissioning, with no network engineer required on every site.

The solution deployed

Sunflower Grid deploys two Weble gateways depending on the site:

  • WBox E413-LTE — for sites with no existing connectivity: built-in 4G modem, autonomous from power-on.
  • WBox S485 — for buildings already on the network, in a compact DIN rail form factor.

Three Weble drivers carry the data end to end:

  • M-Bus Driver — cyclic reading of meters over wired M-Bus or via wireless converters.
  • Modbus Driver — meters and sub-meters over Modbus RTU and Modbus TCP.
  • MQTT Driver — structured publishing to the Sunflower Grid broker, with QoS, timestamps and a persistent queue when the link drops.

For operations, the remote access module lets Sunflower Grid configure every new site automatically from its headquarters: profile deployment, meter additions, remote firmware updates — no need to send a technician back on site.

The benefit

  • Commissioning in minutes, with no IT engineer required on site.
  • A single architecture for hundreds of sites, whatever meters are in place.
  • Reliable, continuous data: tenant billing and owner reporting with no blind spots.
  • Business focus: Sunflower Grid stays focused on its platform — Weble takes care of the field layer.