Amazon returns go to landfill. Which drives up prices for all of us.
Energy monitoring: Emporia Vue vs. Sense
- Thread starter AZ Solar Junkie
- Start date
Upcoming Vue 3 (in beta testing now) should have AC battery monitoring. Vue 2 does not.
Ampster
Renewable Energy Hobbyist
The CT clamps of the Emporia will only work on 120/240 volt AC legs, not DC battery voltage.
Ampster
Renewable Energy Hobbyist
I presume there is some filtering by Amazon based on price? They must have figured out it is less expensive than processing some returns so I concluded returns per se drive up prices and sending some to landfills has less impact on Amazon's cost than processing small ticket items. As an Amazon user, the return policy definitely has value to me.
MaikaiLife
Solar Enthusiast
Really, then where do all the used Amazon warehouse deals come from? I'm perfectly happy to purchase something someone tried and didn't like/understand for less money.
Ampster
Renewable Energy Hobbyist
I agree and earlier mentioned that there must be a filter of some sort on whether returns go to landfill or someone who buys them in bulk and has the labor to sort and list them for sale.
AZ Solar Junkie
Maricopa, AZ
Their solar supplement installation guide seems to imply they can be bi-directional, but maybe I'm missing something - the quote below is from the doc...
zanydroid
Solar Wizard
The main is definitely bidirectional
The question is whether branch will only handle grid tie combiner only situation (in this config the branch code can simply assume all power is pushing towards grid). Vs more complex situations where power can go either way. I have two combiner only situations monitored on two CTs
The question is whether branch will only handle grid tie combiner only situation (in this config the branch code can simply assume all power is pushing towards grid). Vs more complex situations where power can go either way. I have two combiner only situations monitored on two CTs
BentleyJ
Solar Wizard
We have 2 grid-tie systems, One feeding into a main panel and 1 feeding into a subpanel. The 200A main CT's are bi-directional but the 50A ct's monitoring the subpanel are not.
fromport
Solar Addict
You mean this ?
Landis+Gyr Partners with Sense for Better Consumer Energy Management - Landis+Gyr
Our partnership with Sense provides the benefits of in-home energy monitoring built into Revelo, the latest addition to our family of meters.
&
Sense Closes $18M Series B with Schneider Electric as Lead Investor
/PRNewswire/ -- Sense, whose intelligent home energy monitor provides real-time insights into energy and device activity in the home, announced the close of an...
www.prnewswire.com
Sense - Recent News & Activity
Sense specializes in tracking devices and home automation solutions for its customers.
Later fundings rounds (C series)
Sense Closes $105 million Series C with Blue Earth Capital as Lead Investor
/PRNewswire/ -- Sense, the leader in real-time home energy intelligence, announced the close of a $105 million Series C financing led by Blue Earth Capital....
www.prnewswire.com
&
Sense Adds to Series C, Totaling $127.6 Million, with Volery Capital Investing
/PRNewswire/ -- Sense, the leader in real-time home energy intelligence, announced the close of $127.6 million in Series C financing with Volery Capital...
www.prnewswire.com
That is some burn rate !
The idea of a startup is to be bought, not to have rounds of investments after each other.
They haven't been bought yet, so in my book still a startup and after this many years, not a successful one
I had a very cloudy/rainy day testerday where the majority of my house is behind a All-in-One hybrid inverter.
Sense reports it like this:
So according to Sense:
To Grid: 8.1 kWh
From Grid: 2.1 kWh
My utility reports this:
To grid: 8.05 kWh (within margin of error with Sense)
From grid: 23.08 kWh
2.1 != 23.08
Sense is totally useless for me even it does have all the data needed.
At least we agree on that point!
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fromport
Solar Addict
I don't think that is completely true.
Companies like these
Bulldog Liquidators | Your Retail Liquidation Specialists
Bulldog Liquidators has been delivering the best value on quality products since opening our first retail location in 2007.
bulldogliquidators.com
They sort and/or test the items and sell them for a lot less than new.
But for sure, not 100% of returns are going to the landfill
My Enphase batteries provide 240 AC with the IQ8 Inverters built in.
My question with the Vue work with Grid, Solar, and battery AC in/out. Can you program it that way?
Anyone using it like that.
Edit. Just found out that I can do this with what I got already. Looks like vue is really too basic for my needs. I have the enphase app but don't really use it much.
My Solar PV Battery app
A couple of years ago @sysriqo adapted the MySolarPVdivert app for use with batteries. The pull request was never merged as there was an unfinished discussion on whether to split the app out into its own separate app. Picking up from that point, sparked by recent discussions on this topic...
community.openenergymonitor.org
Thanks...
.
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zanydroid
Solar Wizard
It's going to get confused about the direction, based on the above discussion, right? Because battery discharges and charges via AC.
And I don't think there is a way for you to bypass this by cleverly putting in CTs within the battery itself.
zanydroid
Solar Wizard
Are you going to end up with one of those open source monitoring things that ingest from the API of various stuff and then present it in a single graph? I'm pretty sure it will have Enphase integration.
You can also get a Vue to monitor loads and ingest it into the same system. Vue can also be flashed with OSS firmware; I don't know if that has bidirectional capability on all channels. It probably has lower latency reporting, and reporting of stuff that is internal-only within Emporia (it doesn't show you everything in the app that it has internal metrics for).
EmporiaEnergy
New Member
Hi OP, thanks for considering the Emporia Gen 2 Vue Energy Monitor. We're here if you have any specific questions!
Hi, when is Vue Gen3 coming out? There was an email sent out for beta testing 3 months ago. Will it have bidirectional AC battery monitoring? Will it also have backup battery option for the Vue itself in case of brief power interruption to prevent Vue from rebooting?
AZ Solar Junkie
Maricopa, AZ
So I ended up getting 2 of the Emporia Vue Gen 2's - one for my main panel and one for my off-grid load center fed by the inverter. Both were working flawlessly for several hours and then all of a sudden all the values for both total usage as well as the individual circuits went to zero and stayed there for about the last 16 hours or so. Then they suddenly started reading correct values again just a few minutes ago. It seems apparent they were having an issue on the cloud side that finally just got fixed.
My question is if this is a rare occurrence or not. Is the system generally reliable or does this happen periodically? Since these give you no access to the data locally, the system is entirely dependent on the reliability of their cloud services, so hopefully this was a one-off situation...
My question is if this is a rare occurrence or not. Is the system generally reliable or does this happen periodically? Since these give you no access to the data locally, the system is entirely dependent on the reliability of their cloud services, so hopefully this was a one-off situation...
zanydroid
Solar Wizard
I saw that too today. Pretty rare.
My bail out plan is to put the open source firmware in it.
My bail out plan is to put the open source firmware in it.
while I would like to be able to get to the data locally, I also like to be able to see it away from home thru the cloud. If you do the flash update then you lose the cloud. Cant have it both ways. That was the good thing about Iotawatt, which cost more and now disconitued I believe
zanydroid
Solar Wizard
IotaWatt didn’t have cloud either and required you to do some hole opening and DNS stuff to get remote access.
With Vue modified to use esphome you would have an equivalent starting point to IotaWatt — metrics on a local service. Then you have to expose this service externally
There is another project to grab the data off Emporia into Home Assistant. I would guess So as long as the emporia cloud is up you can copy data to HA. And then go back and view this even if emporia is down. HA is most likely also faster than emporia’s servers
With Vue modified to use esphome you would have an equivalent starting point to IotaWatt — metrics on a local service. Then you have to expose this service externally
There is another project to grab the data off Emporia into Home Assistant. I would guess So as long as the emporia cloud is up you can copy data to HA. And then go back and view this even if emporia is down. HA is most likely also faster than emporia’s servers
I already have emoncms setup and have been using it for a very long time. Just have never integrated the enphase batteries monitoring into it yet.
I lose my view of my Vues for two reasons:
1) Their cloud service goes down (very rare). I have three Vues in two properties so I can tell this is happening easily. Happens maybe 1-2 x/year and only for a few minutes, usually.
2) A Vue loses wifi connection. One of my units does that 1-2x month as best I can tell because it's the only thing on that end of that house that requires wifi so the AP is on the other end. Reconnects on its own after a few minutes. The others seem to be more reliable.
Overall I like them. Have tracked pretty well in line with the power company and allow me to figure out loads as we plan for possible off grid at another house we're building. Biggest complaint is the crappy CT connections into the unit. I'd much rather have less wire and screw terminals so I could customize the install and make better connections. Also wish they allowed for local data capture rather than cloud, but they're better than anything else I saw on the market at a reasonable price.
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