Comments on: Introduction to Whole-House Electricity Monitoring

By: Shawn LeMons

Shawn LeMons — Sat, 18 Mar 2023 14:30:24 +0000

Late to the party on this article. Love my Emporia Vue2. I’ve had it for 1.5 yrs. I have 12 circuits monitored on a 1700 sf home in Westminster, Colorado. I’ve been using it to understand my ccASHP operation as well as my total usage. I now have an (almost) all-electric home plus EV running on a 100A panel. A couple key takeaways:
_ 100A panel is plenty big enough for a house that has been put on an energy diet; insulation, air sealing, low-e windows, LED lighting, Energy Star appliances. Nothing fancy.
_ My Mitsubishi PUZ-HA30 Hyper-Heat, sized to meet my cooling load (per Manual J) actually has enough capacity to heat my house as well. I’m pulling out my dual fuel system later. It’s been -15F this winter in Denver. And I’m now confident backup heat not needed for my house / system.
_ After logging 70,000+ 1-minute data for my whole panel, my absolute highest peak power draw is 57 Amps.
_ This helped me decide on a hard-wired 30A dryer / EVSE switch from http://www.bsaelectronics.com to charge my EV. Our dryer usually only runs on sunday afternoons. I generally only charge it at 10-15Ah overnight for daily drives.
_ Looking at your HPWH data, Allison, I’m planning to upgrade to a ASHP and keep it in HP mode.

All of these things and more have been clearly proven by using my Emporia Vue2. Takes effort to dig in to the data, but extremely valuable.

By: Allison Bailes

Allison Bailes — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 18:06:47 +0000

In reply to Butch Whitehouse. Butch: Sorry about not providing the answer. It was the electric cooktop in our basement.

By: Butch Whitehouse

Butch Whitehouse — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 18:03:15 +0000

Just reading this in February of 2023. Going to have to check this device out. I had thought Sense was the only game in town. I read through the comments and still want to know what the mystery 30 amp load was?

By: John Mattson

John Mattson — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 00:52:08 +0000

Oh about the HPWH. Rheem recently came out with a 110v Plug-in HPWH which does NOT even have a resistance heating unit. I have one, and it is great. I figured in a warm climate why even have the resistance unit. As you found out when you use the resistance it IS A HOG. And it is controlled from your smart phone, you can schedule it, and shows energy usage.
I learned about resistance heat from my ducted split when I allowed it to heat one winter. Went from about $100 to $500/month. Now I use the gas fireplace and its far less expensive (but polluting, I know). When my old split dies, my new system will not have a resistance heating unit.

By: John Mattson

John Mattson — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 00:44:55 +0000

I like the emporia products, and am using several of the Smart Plugs and have profited from them. Wish list: 1) smaller, you cannot use four of them on a quad outlet. 2) that there was a way to set them to “ON” for a specified time as you would for a bathroom exhaust or towel warmer. Schedule is fine, but hard to schedule your bodily functions.
Wish Emporia would come out with “Smart Outlets” which are wifi controlled.
I considered the VUE, but with all that work, how about Emporia just making a whole panel with monitoring, on/off, reset, wifi built in? I’m gonna wait for that.

By: Chris Spychalski

Chris Spychalski — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 19:03:03 +0000

Sense with a Kasa wifi controllable smart plug is watt I use to chase vampire loads, log interesting loads for better understanding & more. It’s resting position is at a TV, cable box etc that is remotely turned on 15min before use & off after to kill vampire loads. Yes, I did forget to turn it off & left on a trip but then check remotely & killed the vampires.

Our GE Profile fridge has a “high efficiency” component that uses way less than the 11.6A stamped on the nameplate to maintain temp & 12A would be what is used to calculate capacity of a backup generator (to justify cost of oversizing). 67W is the measured number to keep things cold/frozen by Sense. Using the Kasa, I also saw iirc ~300W for watt I guess is defrost. I can easily backup teh fridge with a 1000W 12VDC inverter on my EV’S lead acid battery instead of an expensive backup generator.

I doubt this would work if the fridge got to room temp & we were not just maintaining temp. I do not want to run that experiment.

It shocks me GE doesn’t market the advantage of an appliance that is so minor to backup. Everyone talks about FLA (full load amps) but what about SLA (STEADY load amps)?

By: cal

cal — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 16:47:13 +0000

1. The Emporia Vue data can only be accessed via their cloud, which leads to three concerns:
a. If Emporia’s business model changes, and they shut down the app access via cloud, shut down their business or start charging a subscription to access your own data, are the CT’s standard such that they could be used on another system, such as the IotaWatt? Or would you need to totally replace the CTs?
b. If the CT’s are not standard, and one of the above listed changes occurs to Emporia, is the hardware such that the data is local, and some enterprising programmer could backward engineer it to be able to get the data out of it?
c. Since all your data goes to their server, has anyone read their privacy policy? From what I can make of it, they aggregate the data, and don’t sell specific data, but I’d appreciate others opinions.

There is talk on other boards of requests to Emporia to release their API, to allow people to connect locally to Home Assistant, Hubitat, etc. Emporia has been clear they won’t do that. But the API is only useful if their servers are still operating; if those shut down, do you then just have useless hardware?

2. For those of us with SmartMeters, it is really disappointing that most power providers won’t let you access your own data. Some of the information, although not as granular as the Emporia, is already available to someone…but not to those who could actually impact that usage…
Does anyone know if there are methods to pick up the data the SmartMeter tracks, or does that require power company cooperation?

By: Gene DeJoannis

Gene DeJoannis — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 04:25:08 +0000

In reply to Sophie Ashley. Sophie, You could use the Emporia Vue2 without any circuit sensors and just put the main sensors on the mini-split circuit breaker. But the model with 8 sensors is only $110. It’s such a good deal I would get it and monitor all the major appliances. The Vue2 comes with 2 sensors for the main breaker, but you could put them on the 2 poles of your mini-split’s circuit breaker. The phone app would have the label Total Usage , but you would know it’s just the mini-split.

By: Sophie Ashley

Sophie Ashley — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 14:00:00 +0000

Thanks very much for sharing your process Alison!

Does anyone have a product recommendation for monitoring just the electrical usage of a minisplit system (two indoor units, one ODU)? Something I could attach to that particular circuit in the panel and get data on run time and draw?

By: Gene DeJoannis

Gene DeJoannis — Sun, 26 Jun 2022 18:04:46 +0000

In reply to David Butler. David, I used to design Building Automation Systems for commercial builidngs. Over time I started collecting more and more information about metering sensors for all kinds of energy and fluid use. It became easy to monitor energy use by fans, pumps and air flow & delta-T across air handler coils, so that our systems always reported to the building owner their total energy and water use, but more detailed breakdowns by each pump, fan and air handler, often with a public display to motivate building occupants. I don't know how that data was used by the owner, but it was there if they wanted to know.