Feature Request: Enable Shelly Pro 1PM as Grid Meter / Shore Power AC Input Meter in Venus OS

Been running a Cerbo GX on my narrowboat for about 18 months now and this is something I keep bumping into.

I've got a Shelly Pro 1PM controlling and monitoring my 230V shoreline connection at the marina — works brilliantly as a switch and the power monitoring data is genuinely useful. But it feels like a missed opportunity that Venus OS can't use it as a proper AC input / grid meter within the GX device interface.

Currently I'm having to cross-reference the Shelly app separately with VRM to get a full picture of what's coming in from shore versus what the system is doing. It's a bit clunky.

Has anyone managed to get around this? A few questions:

• Is there a dbus driver or community plugin floating about that maps the Shelly Pro 1PM into the Venus OS grid meter role?
• Would a Node-RED flow on the Cerbo be a viable workaround, or does the grid meter need to be a "proper" registered device to influence DVCC/ESS behaviour?
• Anyone know if Victron have this on their radar, or is it worth raising on the GitHub for Venus OS?

The Shelly is already on the same local network as the Cerbo and the API is simple enough — it feels like it should be achievable without too much heavy lifting.

Would be particularly useful on boats where you're frequently moving between shore power and inverter/solar. Keen to hear if anyone's cracked this or has thoughts on the best approach.

@PaddyDixon mate, Victron's basically said "sure, we support third-party meters" and then handed you a guest list that reads like a 1990s German industrial catalogue 😅

Jokes aside though — this is a genuine gap. The Shelly Pro 1PM is everywhere right now, dead reliable, cheap as chips,

@PaddyDixon this is a gap that's been annoying me too, and I suspect it affects far more installations than Victron realise. The Shelly Pro 1PM already speaks MQTT natively — Venus OS already handles MQTT — so the integration pathway isn't exactly a moonshot. Someone just needs to write the driver and get it merged.

Worth raising formally on the Victron Community forum and specifically tagging it as a feature request rather than a question, otherwise it disappears into the void. Also worth checking the Venus OS Large image and whether a Node-RED flow could bodge it in the meantime — I've seen people faking a grid meter input that way, though it's not pretty.

The Shelly Pro 4PM gets a mention in some third-party Venus drivers floating around GitHub. Might be worth seeing if those can be adapted for the 1PM variant.

@PaddyDixon welcome to the forum — great first post, you've clearly thought this through properly.

Just to add a technical angle nobody's covered yet: the Shelly Pro 1PM does expose real-time power data via MQTT, which theoretically gives Venus OS something workable to consume. The frustrating part is that the dbus-mqtt-grid driver exists and functions — it's the official device registration that's the sticking point. Without that, ESS simply won't treat it as a valid AC input source regardless of how clean the data feed is.

For my static caravan setup I ended up running a Victron Energy Meter VM-3P75CT purely because I needed ESS to behave properly on shore power handover. Overkill for a single-phase narrowboat connection, honestly.

Worth raising this directly on the Victron Community forum and tagging it as a feature request — they do actually respond to those, particularly when multiple installations are affected.

@PaddyDixon running almost the identical setup in my tiny house — Cerbo GX, Shelly Pro 1PM on the AC input, pulling data via MQTT into Node-RED just to get it somewhere visible on the dashboard. It works, but it's duct tape over a hole that shouldn't exist.

The maddening bit is that the Shelly Pro 1PM reports active power, apparent power, power factor, and voltage — everything Venus OS would theoretically need to treat it as a proper grid meter. The hardware isn't the limitation, it's purely a driver/integration gap.

Worth noting: there's a community-maintained driver on GitHub (victron-shelly) that gets partway there, but last I checked it wasn't handling the AC input role correctly — fine for loads, not for shore power source metering. Someone with proper dbus knowledge could probably finish it off properly.

Victron, if you're lurking — this one's low-hanging fruit.

@Titch same boat here literally lol — narrowboat with Cerbo and a Shelly Pro 1PM on the shore power pedestal.

The frustrating bit for me is the Shelly's already doing the heavy lifting — it's got the data, it's on the same LAN, Venus OS just won't treat it as a proper AC input meter. Feels like it's 90% of the way there.

I'd settle for even a community driver at this point. Victron's Node-RED integration is decent enough that someone with the right skills could probably bodge something together, but it shouldn't need to be a bodge.

Victron are good at eventually picking stuff like this up — the Shelly integration didn't exist a few years back after all. Worth raising formally on their community portal if enough of us vote for it.