You can hook up a cheap dongle to expose the stats in an app. For instance, we use:
https://www.homewizard.com/nl/shop/wi-fi-p1-meter/
This meter also exposes an API on the local network. I have written a small driver for the SmartThings Hub, so that you can get the stats/graphs in the SmartThings app as well (we use a SmartThings hub for Zigbee/Z-Wave devices):
Does that support monitoring each power circuit separately?
A natural integration would be with Home Assistant. I’m not sure if the Earu breaker has an OOTB integration with HA yet, beyond doing something like Zigbee2MQTT and configuring entities for readings. It’s a good pattern though - integrate meter with your automation hub, let the automation hub push the images to displays, for meter and everything else.
Hey dude, fix your "open in wallet" button when paying with BTC. The link is janked up.
Otherwise, it works great. See https://imgz.org/iAB4tgaJ/
I also bridge my utility (ComEd's) pricing feed to prometheus (https://github.com/kklipsch/comed_exporter). Between those 2 I get pretty good whole home utilization and pricing info graphed into Prometheus (and thus into Grafana).
Victoria metrics/ grafana is supplanting our industrial historian, which is admittedly not a best in class product - I am sure osi pi is better
The clones I can find are roughly the same price as the "original" hardware.
ATM90E32AS seems to be ~$1 per channel on JLCPCB, so I'd imagine this could be pretty cheap with SMT assembly. My use case is like ~60 circuits.
Per plug monitoring is cool however for getting specific devices on a circuit.
(Short video about the setup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tcbJCvuJG8)
I just did a new video on building a 68030 computer that I suspect will have a much smaller audience!
I've had perfectly lovely reliability with wifi smart devices in my mixture of zigbee/wifi at home, such that I don't really have a preference. Except for one cheap ESP8266-based wifi relay module that had some liquid damage (not the module's fault), and the LED driver in my very first RGBW light bulb finding death after being used for a few years (a common-enough tale regardless of connectivity choice), they seem to Just Work.
It's all semi-random brands of devices, bought over time.
I'm not doing anything particularly fancy with the network itself: It's just a couple of hardwired dual-band Mikrotik access points, with one upstairs at the back of the house and one downstairs at the front of the house (perhaps non-obviously, on non-overlapping channels). A Pi 4 with OpenWRT quietly does the packet-slinging.
Like in many other places, the 2.4GHz band is approximately ruined where I live these days. It's noisy and slow. But it all works well enough to reliably toggle a relay on or off, at least.
Am I just lucky? Are others just unlucky? Or is there an actual pattern here?
(i work at Grafana Labs)
Traditional scada systems have such brutal plotting abilities they are ripe for disruption
https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/panels-visualization...
there's some initial movement towards "press Canvas element -> invoke HTTP api call":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6fg1TpfBUg
we added streaming/websocket data sources a few major versions back.
i'm hoping to make something more standardized and pluggable like data sources.
since IoT devices have limited storage, usually the metrics are dumped into another system like Prometheus. but that Prometheus data source used plotting cannot be used to control the device, which will have another endpoint and another API, so we need some kind of concept of data sinks. at least that's my idea right now, allow data links configured in the panels to poke some "data sink" with values that are available in the DataFrame or custom-entered into the UI, like we do with traceID for Exemplars, etc.
I also have another esp32 at my elderly relatives house with a pir sensor connected to it, it's also sending the movement data to a different sheet on the google sheets site, so that i can monitor some sort of movement.
i'm i expecting google to discontinue this service at anytime - yes, but its working for now. you can write and read data from the google sheets via json via the esp32, not very inutitive but doable (and free!!)
I think it makes more sense to use “dumb” OTS circuit breakers in your house and augment with add-on monitor than combining the capabilities into a tightly-coupled single device.
I think the key differences are in cloud requirements, control, and granularity. Price appears higher than Vue, though it's not when considering that Shelly is far more capable in all of the above categories.
The Shelly 3EM, which I use for split phase monitoring (in the US) at the meter is $109. That's not bad for its capacity, capability, and build quality. Mine is outdoors though enclosed (necessarily) so endures some pretty extreme temp swings and humidity changes. There is no cloud requirement, and it offers contactor control.
The Vue 2 from Emporia is built for a single indoor panel, provides no control over the circuits, and requires the cloud to operate unless you get out the soldering iron and reflash it with ESPHome, which isn't horrible, but the OOTB cloud requirement is your starting point. (I think that's still the case, but if I'm wrong, happy to be corrected)
For Shelly, their additional clamp solutions are all high-amp (50-100+) so not really designed to be put on individual circuits, especially at $50 per. You might use these on whole panels, breaking your whole house calculation down into zones by panel or monitoring high-amp devices.
If you tried to replicate the Vue with only these devices from Shelly, then yes, it would be an order of magnitude more expensive. But I don't think that's a good way to use them or the right way to replicate the Vue capabilities.
For the high-grained monitoring, it's hand-in-hand with control. Shelly's deployment model for fine-grained resolution is to put power metering down closer to the consuming devices, and with it, a relay for integration into home automation. You can add power metering along with control to outlets, switches, or hard-wired devices in house with things like the 1PM Mini G3 for $13 per.
In this sense, you get far greater granularity than something like the Emporia Vue which can get no higher resolution than a whole circuit. Here again it must be stressed that with Shelly, there's no cloud requirement for that price and you're also getting remote control of the power distribution. On the balance, you're getting far more for your money with this approach.
For my needs, I combine Shelly's approach with some cheaper sonoff/tasmota plugs with power metering for things like the washing machine (alarming mostly). But for more critical devices or always on devices (like freezers), or switched devices like ventilation fans or lights, I think the build quality and deployment model of the Shelly devices is a better fit.
But definitely different target audiences. If the Vue is the right fit, it's the right fit.
My latest automation: when the white noise machine is on for the baby, the doorbell volume is turned down.
And that they have done.
Just about to try some ikea zigbee sockets, seem cheap(7e) in comparison. I hope I can also get them working command line based, just trying to setup a sonoff usb stick with some python package (bellows) as we speak.
[1] https://hackaday.com/2023/11/03/just-how-dodgy-are-cheap-usb...
You need to open it to flash it the 1st time.
There's at least one unused accessible GPIO. On one I soldered an DS18x20 temperature sensor. Now it controls the heating in my shed based on the measured temperature stay above zero degrees in the winter.
I want to buy more and they don’t seem to be available anymore.
you can "simulate" power of fairly stable appliances.
Then you chart that in a nice Sankey chart or in standard charts and enjoy
So I can just take my EspHome plug and very quickly generate a standard set of mapping values for voltage and wattage.
The level of integration you choose is entirely up to you. I don't do this kind of thing much, so I'm OK with kludging together a test rig as-needed with a handheld meter and tearing it apart when I'm done. This makes good use of my own time and tools, according to my personal proclivities.
But if I were doing it often, then I might buy the equivalent of the HOPI meter that Big Clive uses in many of his videos. It displays current and voltage, multiplies them to get power, and also displays power factor -- concurrently, on separate digital displays, in real time.
Or I might build something: A box with a current shunt with some panel-mount meters and appropriate connectors would not be too challenging to put together in an afternoon with parts from Amazon and Lowes, depending on one's ability and desire to deal with sheet metal at home. (I use galvanized steel handy boxes and cover plates from Lowes for all kinds of small-ish stuff. They're cheap, common, and durable-enough.)
Whatever the approach, a simple space heater with multiple literal-speeds seems like a cheap and useful way to make it happen unless you're trying to automate every part of it.
(But by then, making a dumb multi-speed space heater into a "smart" multi-speed space heater that can be activated programmatically with software like ESPHome and some relays is probably pretty much a no-brainer, isn't it?)
HA is great, but it's not the answer to everything
HA can export data to Prometheus. Setting up and running HA is much easier than figuring out how to get a set of different smart devices to export metrics to Prometheus/Influx. Let HA deal with that.
I live off grid, so energy monitoring is a big deal for me. HA is fine for “at a glance”, but if I want any kind of detail, I use grafana. I actually have my old openhab instance still running purely as I can’t be faffed setting up all the piping from MQTT into influx again.
It’s also possible to integrate the usage over time using a dynamic time window to get Wh figures from wattage, which is enormously useful for me, and is more accurate than the figures HA gives in their power system.
HA is dead useful for getting alerts when the laundry finishes, though - dumb machine, smart plug, look for a sudden drop in power. Also does all our climate control.
So different tools for different jobs.
The Home Assistant authors' hostility towards simple native distributions is now a show stopper for me. Long term reliability is more important than quick initial setup.
Demanding the authors who gave you the software for free also provide support for an installation method they've offered up with no support is a bit ridiculous, don't you think?
That attitude is what causes open source projects to die though...
There seems to be a sonoff usb stick that might act as a hub and allow command-line monitoring of all devices, should be perfect for feeding into grafana/prometheus.
For instance, their overvoltage protection might not align well with what the local regulations say. For example, in my region of EU, the upper voltage tolerances are such that 264V must trigger an instant poweroff, and also anything producing power must shut off if the average voltage over the last 10 minutes was 253V or more. However, TuYa sockets which pretty much are the only in-wall variety I was able to find on the local market, shut off at 260V. This tends to be somewhat problematic in an area saturated with PV installations, like the one I'm living in.
This problem is compounded by the fact that the reported measurements of sockets sitting on the same phase tend to differ quite a bit. Some sockets tend to overstate the voltage compared to neighboring sockets sitting on the same wires. Thus, they shut off when they think it's 260V, while it might just as well be 255V.
Just saying that if you put lots of those in your walls, you might suddenly find yourself in a need to prepare some automations to try and bring the sockets on once the voltage is back to normal. This particular variety of sockets won't come back on after the voltage drops.
Mine only gives me a month-to-date, end of month for billing, and month-over-month for the last two years (plus the outside temperature for comparison).
I don't know if there's an API or something to get almost-current data.
Wifi is just not meant for this use case, it will be unhappy if you start adding a lot of devices, and it will slow down your main use of WiFi for your phone.
Note: Powerline ethernet should not be confused with Power Over Ethernet which is perfectly fine.
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