Emporia Smart Home Energy Monitor, Anyone use these?

Korishan

Korishan

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I came across these power monitoring system on Amazon and was wondering if anyone has used these before:

Emporia Smart Home Energy Monitor with 8 50A Circuit Level Sensors | Real Time Electricity Monitor/Meter | Solar/Net Metering - - Amazon.com

Emporia Smart Home Energy Monitor with 8 50A Circuit Level Sensors | Real Time Electricity Monitor/Meter | Solar/Net Metering - - Amazon.com
www.amazon.com

Overall, considering the number of sensors, the price is pretty decent. Since I have done some work on a power monitor for the AC side of things, I can relate to the costs associated. The sensor probes, the clip on sensors, cost about $10 each as it is.
 
@Will Prowse did a youtube on these. I looked into it but confirmed with the Emporia folks that you have to send data to their cloud servers - e.g. you cannot keep it local. Data to the cloud is a personal issue for me but may not be for others.

View: https://youtu.be/EjfojCBSk_4
 
OffGridInTheCity said:
confirmed with the Emporia folks that you have to send data to their cloud servers -
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Yeah, just recently came across that in one of their forum posts, as of late April 2021. So that's a no go for me. I was interested because of the cost, and there is a Home Assistant plugin for it already. But according to the post, all data is sent offsite.
Looks like I'll continue working on my OpenEnergyMonitor project instead. At least with that, I know everything is kept inhouse.
 
I love the OpenEnergyMonitor, I've been using it over 10 years now, rock solid and still works similar like the first day I set it up. The improvements over the years only made me love it more. It can easily be integrated in home assistant, publish data to mqtt, my next experiment on the list is the energy diversion, but I'll need to prepare some hardware for that first
 
ziporah said:
I love the OpenEnergyMonitor, I've been using it over 10 years now, rock solid and still works similar like the first day I set it up. The improvements over the years only made me love it more. It can easily be integrated in home assistant, publish data to mqtt, my next experiment on the list is the energy diversion, but I'll need to prepare some hardware for that first
Click to expand...
Looks interesting....
https://shop.openenergymonitor.com/emonbase-web-connected-base-station/ - Its says "web-connected base-station", does that mean its local and the web part is connecting to a web server at the Rasberry? or does it require external cloud.
 
I have one of the smaller Emporia sensors and it worked fine but was not particularly accurate. As I have learned more about how AC current testing works while researching the OpenEnergyMonitor I think part of the error is I powered my sensor directly off of the DC from my batteries and there may be voltage/frequency sending going on in the AC to DC converter that came with the sensor.
 
cak said:
I have one of the smaller Emporia sensors and it worked fine but was not particularly accurate. As I have learned more about how AC current testing works while researching the OpenEnergyMonitor I think part of the error is I powered my sensor directly off of the DC from my batteries and there may be voltage/frequency sending going on in the AC to DC converter that came with the sensor.
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When you say 'not particularly accurate'.. can you quantify that a bit - e.g. 5% or 10% or more? for example, I use cheap Amazon meters to track my AC power use and suspect they could be up to 5% off but that's OK for my purposes.
 
cak said:
there may be voltage/frequency sending going on in the AC to DC converter that came with the sensor.
Click to expand...
Yes, the transformer that's used, as far as I am aware, is "actually" an AC adapter, but drops the voltage down to about 5V or such. Then internally it pulls some of the current to run the circuitry. The voltage may be different on the output as I'm not sure of the power input. However, for the OEM projects, that's how it reads the voltage of the mains. Altho, the OEM config uses 2 transformers. But, it is possible to use a single input. Just need to have the proper circuitry to monitor and use it as power w/o altering the readings.

If there is no alternating voltage on the input, then it would always read a constant voltage, which can effect the power consumption reading/estimations.
 
OffGridInTheCity said:
When you say 'not particularly accurate'.. can you quantify that a bit - e.g. 5% or 10% or more? for example, I use cheap Amazon meters to track my AC power use and suspect they could be up to 5% off but that's OK for my purposes.
Click to expand...
I am estimating about 30-40% error. I don't have a different meter to compare against but my system is off grid so for awhile I tracked all the power coming in and by looking at the average charge between two full sun days got a pretty good estimate of common daily power usage, 3-5kWh if your curious. Comparing that data to the Emporia data is where I got the concern. I also noticed a very high "idle" load read by the Emporia which is understandable knowing the technology and in a more common residential setting the base load is probably high enough to get into higher accuracy but for my house base load is under 1A where the sensor is not very accurate.

IMPORTANT note is that my use case was abnormal because I set things up incorrectly since I didn't know any better. As @Korishan has now confirmed the DC power supply to the Emporia needs to be provided from the supplied converter to get an accurate reading. So now we all have that confirmed, your welcome :)
 
Yes, I also use Emporia Smart Home Energy Monitor, and I am very satisfied. Since I have one, I have become more organized in terms of energy expenditure. Already I am not wasting a lot of money electricity. I have a lot of light bulbs, especially a lot of multicolored light bulbs that consume a lot of energy because I used to keep them on all day and all night. But since I have this energy monitor at home, I have become more aware of the energy I use, and I have a better idea of how much you spend on energy. So I think twice about using appliances with high energy consumption and whether it's worth spending so much money on electricity. So I turn on those light bulbs less often, lol.
 
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