Bought a replacement for my emporia house energy monitor system

[Crowz]

I ordered one of these to try out as a replacement for the emporia vue 2's I use now.

Its basically the same hardware but supports you using your own server for the data. Will run 100% offline with full privacy. Feeds data to any mqtt server you setup like what I have for home assistant now.

$128.99

Amazon.com

I'll post how it does when it gets here but I think it will be my new go to since its 1/2 the price and no internet required. Sucked not getting data when the net went down which it does if the power goes out so no monitoring stuff that is running off the inverters during that time.

 

[mciholas]

Let me know how it goes.

The audio jack connectors are like the Vue 2 which suck. The Vue when to pluggable headers, much nicer.

The Vue 3 also added Ethernet which is a huge win, IMO. Wifi never really works that well for this application and you can hide the whole thing inside the CB panel with an Ethernet cable to the box.

I'm curious how you go from the device to logging to viewing the data, particularly with fine time resolution.

The Emporia logging and viewer suck, the hardware doesn't.

Mike C.

 

[Crowz]

Time for some updates !

Ok this thing works PERFECTLY as in it does what it claims to do.

I have it sending data to the mqtt server in home assistant. I have access to all of the data the unit collects.

Now the tricky part for some will be the fact that while it does provide all of the data it doesn't update but every 30 seconds. Its a tad annoying but you get used to it.

There is no "integration" plugin provided so you have to code everything yourself which is rather hard but they do provide an example home assistant yaml file. Took awhile to notice that they provided that on their site. Once I found that I was able to get it working like I wanted.

Another nice plus on this one is you can have as many of the things as you want and since your making the software basically they all will work together on one home. So no limit on the number of circuits you can monitor. You just have to buy another unit every 16 sensors worth.

Since its so much cheaper than the emporia one you can spend about the same money as the emporia unit costs and monitor 32 sensors in place of just 16.

I have it set to send info to my mqtt server and still report to their server. This allows me to use their phone app which is nice and allows me to double check my own local work against their info.

I read somewhere that they were working on an update to make it send data more often to the mqtt server. If they get it to once every 5 or 10 seconds I would be ecstatic.

You can also tell it to not use their site at all for the paranoid types

Good product. Highly recommend it.

 

[Quattrohead]

Interesting to see how it goes.
I am going to hack my Emporia soon if I can figure it out.

 

[EnergizerNate]

Will it use the Vue 2 CTs? I have 3 Vue 2s in boxes attached to my main panel via conduit. If I can use the same CTs, it's a an easy pull the Vues and install these.

 

[Crowz]

Will it use the Vue 2 CTs? I have 3 Vue 2s in boxes attached to my main panel via conduit. If I can use the same CTs, it's a an easy pull the Vues and install these.

Yep it uses the vue 2's ct sensors. All I did was unplug the emporia unit and then plugged all of the emporia's wires into the new one. Worked perfectly.

 

[Quattrohead]

So I finally managed to figure out how to reprogram the Emporia with ESPhome, soldering the header pins was easy for me but figuring out how to actually do the programming was laborious, however I figured it out and on the first reboot all of the data immediately appeared in Home Assistant, absolutely fabulous.

 

[mciholas]

all of the data immediately appeared in Home Assistant, absolutely fabulous.

I've not used HA, what tool do you use to graph the data historically?

The SA tools for this are well designed, wondering if HA has similar properties and that might motivate me to ESPHome the Vue3 box I have now. The Emporia website is basically unusable.

Mike C.

 

[Quattrohead]

Home Assistant has an energy portal build right into it, all you need to do is add all of your circuits into it. You can also add water consumption, gas consumption, solar in out, Grid in out etc

 

[mciholas]

Home Assistant has an energy portal build right into it, all you need to do is add all of your circuits into it. You can also add water consumption, gas consumption, solar in out, Grid in out etc

What does that look like? (The HA online docs didn't show any examples)

What controls does one have over plotting such as selecting the time interval over which to view?

Mike C.

 

[Crowz]

What does that look like? (The HA online docs didn't show any examples)

What controls does one have over plotting such as selecting the time interval over which to view?

Mike C.

 

[Crowz]

It's actually a heck of allot easier to pull date ranges and time ranges from home assistant than solar assistant.

 

[mciholas]

It's actually a heck of allot easier to pull date ranges and time ranges from home assistant than solar assistant.

What resolution is your data? It looks like it is chunky time resolution, like 1 hour per point.

SA has it to 10 second resolution. Example, I went back 4 months to look at less than 2 hours with fine time resolution:



Seemed pretty easy to do that. Can HA handle that much data and keep it accessible?

Mike C.

 

[Crowz]

What resolution is your data? It looks like it is chunky time resolution, like 1 hour per point.

SA has it to 10 second resolution. Example, I went back 4 months to look at less than 2 hours with fine time resolution:

View attachment 287872

Seemed pretty easy to do that. Can HA handle that much data and keep it accessible?

Mike C.

The data is coming from solar assistant. So what it has home assistant has.

Heck you can copy the database off the solar assistant itself if you wanted to.

 

[Quattrohead]

The esphome hack onto Emporia reports data every second, what home assistant does with it after that I do not know and frankly I'm not too bothered.
The energy portal is highly useful to see what your whole system is doing per day, that is what counts.