What is the best, money is no factor solution for monitoring home energy. The goal is no cloud. I was using a zwave solution however it keeps falling off the network and now I cant get it back on. Looking to upgrade.
Edit: I live in the states.
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I have two Emporia Vue 2s one in each 150a panel, flashed with esphome so they’re only reporting locally and it works great. 16 circuits per vue.
Can you sum the data or do you have to run it as 2 different systems?
I add them each as their own entities but they are automatically totalled after that. You can see in my image left and right main. That’s each Emporia
The utility meter provided by the distribution company has an LED indicator reporting the consumption. I use this zigbee device which converts the LED pulses to a numerical value, and sends it to homeassistant.
So this unit goes on the meter? That sits outside??
Yes, on the outside meter. It comes with a magnet with a double sided tape which you place around the LED, and the sensor itself just hangs on the magnet. But I’m not sure if american meters provide such interface.
I’ve asked the utility provider for some kind of official, approved, solution, but all they have to offer was to replace the entire meter, and even that would only report a 15 minute average via some proprietary API. The frient device is clearly a better solution. No wonder they were sold out for months.
I personally like the circuit setup boards. Running an esp32 with esphome. Can be configured for anything you want them to do. On virtually any size or voltage system.
I setup up one system on an industrial 500A 3ph 480V site to track phase imbalance and trigger balancing loads.
Not sure where you are in the world, but I’m using OpenEnergyMonitor
Personally, I’m using their Raspberry Pi version (EmonPI) to monitor my total house energy - grid in, solar in and solar export and pull the data directly into HA.
But there’s other options available too, like the 6-channel monitoring, so you could potentially monitor separate circuits and / or high energy systems like heatpumps, etc. They have options for 3-phase too…
In my case, power in AND power out to the grid both flashed the LED on the supply meter (mentioned elsewhere here), so I had to go with CT sensors which I put inside the consumer unit… had a little trouble with calibration due to the electrical noise in there, but +/- a few W is nothing when I have to heat my home with electricity at 4kW+
I have the aeotec zwave HEM that I imagine you are talking about, and have been using it for 4 years. Mine is on its own zwave modem, separate from the one I use for everything else, but you can also try increasing the reporting intervals, and maybe disabling reporting for anything you don’t care about.
Yes this is the one I have.
Yes. It generates a lot of traffic. Once you get it reporting reliably, I struggle to see the benefit of a more expensive solution unless you want more channels.
Channels would be nice. Its just annoying at this point to have to keep resetting it. Makes the logs useless.
I haven’t had to reset mine in 4 years. I would get another radio and move it to its own network.
I have two IoTaWatts (https://iotawatt.com/) for all the circuits in my home. I also use Z-Wave and Zigbee devices to monitor individual plugs (I love these). I send data from all of this to an InfluxDB database and then into Grafana for displaying pretty graphs. Everything is running on my Windows desktop. The IoTaWatt doesn’t require internet access to work. I have been very happy with the setup and once setup it hasn’t required much maintenance.
The system is also good for recording temperatures, solar power information, and anything else that can make an API call. Not sure why your Z-Wave is falling off the network, for that I use a Hubitat and mostly Inovelli, Zooz, and THIRDREALITY ZigBee plugs.
I too have IoTaWatts. But they are out of business so not really an option for anyone else.
They appear to be available for order right now? I didn’t enter payment details, but kits are in stock.
Thank you I stand corrected! The owner definitely closed his business a few months ago but must have resumed.
