Smart Home Energy Monitor with 16 50A Circuit Level Sensors | Vue – Real Time Electricity Monitor/Meter | Solar/Net Metering

Not perfect but pretty good. I’ve been wanting to be able to monitor my home’s electrical usage for some time now, not just from a standpoint of trying to minimize our electricity bills but also from a standpoint of situational awareness and equipment health status. I’d like to know if my well pump is running more than usual, if my oven has been left on, or if my heat pump is having a harder time starting up than it usually does. And, with a little effort, Emporia lets me set notifications for each of those things.Emporia tells me that the so-called “50A” sensors actually saturate at 75A, and will not be damaged if you go beyond that—they’ll simply fail to report any additional current. It makes sense that they’ve allowed some margin above the nominal value—a 50A breaker might easily let you draw 100A for several seconds without tripping. But that’s good to know if, like me, you have a 60A emergency heat circuit in your air handler that you want to monitor.There are alternatives out there. The most widely known one is probably Sense (also sold as Wiser Energy), which tries to infer based on only sensing your main lines what loads are running. That’s a neat idea, and certainly easier to install because of so many fewer sensors, but I can’t say I really trust their computer to be able to tell the difference between all the various loads in a house just from looking at the combined draw. Plus, Sense costs twice as much as Emporia—and I needed two monitors because I have two completely separate panels in my house (neither is a subpanel of the other), so I was doubly sensitive to price. Another interesting option, though, is called IotaWatt. Its price tag is comparable to Sense, but like the Emporia it relies on individual circuit sensors rather than guesswork (although you only get 14 sensors, including the mains). And the IotaWatt is open source, so you don’t have to rely on a company like Emporia to keep supporting the software ecosystem in the future (on the flip side, though, you’re almost certainly looking at having to fiddle more with the software, and I’d expect it to be a lot harder to contrive a way of looking at the data when you’re not at home on your local network). Another interesting option, although it won’t work for most people, is the Emporia “Vue Utility Connect wireless energy monitor.” If you happen to be in one of the relatively few markets using the appropriate Zigbee-connected smart meter, that cheap little device can tell you your total power draw by simply asking your existing smart meter what’s happening. Not as informative as being able to monitor 16 individual circuits, but not bad for the price tag and ease of installation.I also like how the Emporia ecosystem includes smart plugs to monitor individual devices. I bought some of those also because I wanted to be able to schedule the on and off time of certain equipment, and being able to monitor the power draw of that specific service is handy. You can nest the device to put it under the appropriate circuit in the app.If you’re getting the 16-branch-sensor version like I did, there’s no getting around the fact that it’s going to turn the inside of your breaker box into a rat’s nest. I don’t care for that, but I don’t have any better ideas. The Sense approach of only monitoring the mains is the only way around it that I can see, and as I said I don’t really trust that.The app feels a little dodgy. Sometimes the branch circuits don’t show up unless I fiddle with the time scale. Changing the name of a circuit doesn’t update until you leave the menu, so it can get confusing if you’re renaming several at once. And I ended up remaking all of them because when I finished typing them all in the first time it suggested I take a picture of the inside of my breaker box—and navigating from the Emporia app to my camera seemed to abort the entire setup process. It also failed to update firmware and said it would do it overnight instead. And even after it’s all set up, the high resolution data by the second—which is the only glimpse into how hard a motor is starting—disappears quickly (3 hours), in many cases preventing you from comparing to previous runs of that equipment if you haven’t explicitly gone to the effort of saving it. I would’ve appreciated emporia saving the peak draw from each circuit over the last day, week, and month. So on the whole I’m not feeling like it’s a very polished experience.The one second sample rate frequently misses startup spikes. If you’re really only concerned with total energy usage, that might not matter, but if you have an interest in how hard a motor is starting then that’s a bit disappointing. The one-second data is also only saved for three hours, which isn’t a lot of time. I wish they would save the peak consumption per hour and per day, ideally from a quick enough sample to catch startup peaks reliably.I’d like to be able to set a notification for power draw between two bounds rather than just above or below a threshold. If I want to recognize a hard start of my air handler but not confuse emergency heat with a hard start, I need that kind of functionality.If I’m understanding things correctly, setting the time scale to minute or hour or day shows me how much energy has been consumed so far during this minute or hour or day (etc) even if it just started seconds ago. I don’t see a way to view my usage over the last rolling 24 hours, or 60 minutes, or 60 seconds, which makes it hard to understand how much energy I’m using right now as opposed to one unit of time ago.About a week after installing the sensors, I accidentally hit the breaker to my heat pump while turning on another breaker that was new and quite stiff. The next morning, I got a bunch of notifications that I had configured to alert me when the system was in emergency (resistive) heat mode. I found my error with a quick investigation and remedied it before a lot of energy was wasted.In all, it could be better but I like it.

Simple to Install and Use – Lets Me Choose What to Monitor. When my electric company started to include a demand surcharge for high usage period of the day I needed to get a handle on usage of not only the total demand but also the particulars for AC, Range, etc. No longer wanted to use a plug in watt meter and couldn’t use that with 240V or any of the hardwired appliances. Did check in breaker panel to be sure I had room for meter monitor and that I had a half inch knockout available to install wifi antenna through the box bottom. Got the 16 sensor package to give me maximum items the sensor provides for monitoring. There is a multiplier for two pole 240V breakers so you only need to apply a sensor to one of the wires and adjust during setup. The sensors are directional so have to make sure the arrows point to breaker when clamping on the wires. Best to power down panel but mains would require utility removal of meter to turn off. Took about 30 minutes to install all the sensors and about fifteen minutes to setup individual items. Wire dressing in the box with cable ties a must. Monitors by the second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year. Also gives Monthly 15 minute Peak Demand, which is what my utility bases surcharge on. Final plus is that I was able to add my adjustable Sensi thermostat to the Vue 2 app to monitor and control heating and cooling instead of using the Sensi app. That will save $30 a year in Sensi fees.

Great insights. Bought unit for 2 main reasons, see what is inefficient (Global warming and carbon footprint is a myth and control) to lower energy bill and also to size the house for the most reasonable whole home generator. It only has 16 leads, so depending on you, you may need 2 of these is you want EVERY circuit monitored. 16 worked for mine because I was not worried about the major appliances I have no control over except for swapping them out. That said, swapping the leads is EASY…IF… you are comfortable getting inside your power panel AND have a detailed knowledge of the security and precautions of doing so.As to accuracy? Will need to wait for a full bill cycle to see and then after I can compare to see if Elec company is honest and if meter is accurate. It has been in for a week, and so far, the information is helpful.