Hey all, I’m in the market for an energy monitoring solution to add to my service panel. Right now, my front runner is Refoss. My only hesitation is the limit of 16 clamps. There are 30+ breakers in my service panel. I know I won’t care about a few circuits, but half?
What do you guys do for this? Buy a 2nd one?
Iotawatt hands down.
ooof…. iotawatt cost 2.6x more ($425USD) and has even less clamps. I’d be looking at 3 of those. Even or 1 of these, its simply not worth that much to me. The Refoss which has a local only configuration is on sale for $159 right now.
It went up it looks like, used to be $250. That said it’s 100% local and works with hubitat.
If you have clamps on main feeders coming in you get total. Then put clamps in order of most likely large draws, AC condenser, air handler/furnace, electric appliances (clothes washer, dishwasher, water heater (if electric), dryer, …), then onto smaller loads like plugs and lights in most used rooms. When you run out of clamps lump the rest as misc. If misc is less than 20% maybe good enough? As a minimum you can start here and if it isn’t enough granularity then onto plan B. Granularity comes with a price tag however, and if it is to measure a 50kWh load/month ($7.50/month) then why bother?
Depending on how much free wire is on the breakers you could maybe clamp around a pair of wires combining their reading to economize on clamps. The breakers would need to be on the same phase of the panel though (or the currents will cancel out).
I’ve been happy with Emporia Energy, but there are no local options, so the one you are suggesting seems much better from that perspective. I would get 2 to cover all circuits. That’s what I did with my Emporia, though with that one, there’s an option to combine them together into a single output.
Supposedly, it can be flashed to run locally but looks like a huge PITA and i never considered it.
That should start video at point where he starts the flash process.
I like my Emporia Vue 3. I have a 2nd and 3rd sitting in boxes because i have approx 24 circuits in my 1st electrical service along with 2nd service with 8-12 more circuits.
Was looking at the Refoss the other day as well; but some of the negative Amazon reviews give me that “half baked and not ready for prime time” feeling about the product and the manufacturer.
I’m a big fan of BrulTech GEM - It’s 32 channels, as well as 8 temps, and 2 Pulse inputs. - It’s fairly easy to configure into MQTT (locally), and then it’s fairly easy to leverage that into Hubitat. The various protocols it speaks are fairly well documented, but YMMV.
Was looking at the Refoss the other day as well; but some of the negative Amazon reviews give me that “half baked and not ready for prime time” feeling about the product and the manufacturer.
I just get the sense its less polished and more of a DIY product than Sense or Emporia. The funny thing is it looks like they white-box it and Meross resells it. The Meross version has better ratings.
That looks nice and it’d be great to have them all in 1 box, but goodness, it’ll be $500 by the time I buy all the CT donuts.
Yes.. 32 channels is alot of CTs
Yeah, I hear ya.
I think I’m getting less tolerant of taking the early risk on some of this stuff. Every time I have to dust off my memory of how I got something to work that now doesn’t for some reason I find myself realizing that, for “things of consequence”, …the money saved may not be worth the headaches later.
Not saying this particular device would cause headaches ...but… whether it be the HE environment or the HA environment there is a lot of comfort in picking what works for a lot of other folks and knowing all of them will be complaining & looking for a solution if something no longer works right with a particular device.
Anytime you’re putting stuff in a Breaker Panel you kinda wanna lean towards tried, tested, and true….and there are folks that would also want “certified/approved/code” to be in that list too.
The Brultech GEM with an additional 10 Micro-40 donut CT's (giving you a total of 30 donut circuit CT's plus two split CT's for the mains) is $400.
The clamp-on CT's used by Refoss are easier to install than the Brultech donut CT's, but they look larger and might clutter up the load center a little more. The Brultech CT's have 6' leads so the monitor itself can be mounted outside the load center, e.g., above it on the wall. Again, less clutter in the load center. At a previous home, I used cat6 cable to extend the CT lead length (4 CT's per cat6 cable) and mounted the monitor on a wall about 20' from the load center.
yeah…. its always hard to tell with these things. I watched about a dozen Youtube videos for the Refoss last night and the HA integration looks solid. If I go this route, I’ll just have to do the math of (Mains - Sum(individualClams) to get my untracked circuits. I can always move clamps around if I need to investigate further.
Ah… I wasn’t seeing this package. That’s approachable. What I just realized though is that those donuts don’t open. I’d have to disconnect and thread every single circuit though. I think I want to sign up for that!
At the risk of hijacking the conversation (mods, move it to a new thread if appropriate) I also have a large panel with a lot of circuits. I’ve toyed around with the idea of installing an energy monitoring system, but then I think about all the clutter that I’d have to stuff inside the panel, whether all of that stuff would be safe (in general, mixing line and low voltage stuff in the same cabinet is a no-no), how do I safely get those leads outside the panel, etc. etc.
Then I think about the cost, and finally, what actionable information am I going to get after spending the money and doing all the work?
All my lighting is LED, so there’s no cost savings to be had there. I’ve already experimented with the hot water temp and it’s as low as we’re willing to go. I can’t very well tell my wife to do less laundry or less cooking. I have a variable speed motor on my pool pump and I don’t run it any longer than necessary to keep the water clean and properly sanitized (I have a salt chlorine generator). Our appliances and a/c units are fairly new and energy efficient. If any of the high-draw things in our house started to malfunction, I’d notice it pretty quickly.
In short, see very little if any opportunity to reduce my energy usage, so aside from another gizmo to tinker with, what am I going to gain by knowing how much each circuit is drawing? I’ve gone so far as to order a few different systems but always change my mind before I pull the trigger and empty the cart.
What am I missing?
Happy with Emporia Vue 2 w/16 sensors here. I’m not that anal about local if the cloud is stable and works well and the Vue has been working well since Oct ‘21. I’ve not experienced any issues with not being able to access it.
This is a very real debate I’ve had with myself as well. I have a few things that I would like to have energy constant monitoring on that don’t have easy local access. (220v Dryer, Septic Aerator). I also thought, as you do, that if something starting drawing a lot more than usual, that I’d notice. But I had that proven to be a false-confidence this past fall when my solar inverter died and I didn’t notice for several months. That cost me a few hundred bucks in lost solar production. That’s how I’m justifying it to myself. Who knows, it might be 2 months worth of fun looking at new data after which I lose interest. But hopefully it’ll help me notice the next electrical malfunction before it cost me much.
I ordered the Refoss. I’ll let you guys know how it goes.
For myself I monitor both main legs and then high draw items like Dryer (washer I use a zooz appliance outlet) Both hot water tanks, servers. I don’t need to monitor each breaker (way too many). I look at overall draw and then use the rest for notifications.
