Monitoring energy usage with smart plugs, Prometheus and Grafana (opens in new tab)

https://www.zuidwijk.com/product/slimmelezer-plus/

Does that support monitoring each power circuit separately?

Price is generally a dollar figure for 1000W per hour.

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?

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 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.

And that they have done.

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 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.

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...

I don't know if there's an API or something to get almost-current data.