Hey guys - I've been looking into home energy monitoring, and I'm curious if anyone has thoughts on the 2 main products I've run across. The Emporia Vue has been recommended by a number of people on the forum, but I also ran across one called
Sense that has intriguing features using AI as well as a separate solar monitoring option, but it's more expensive. Has anyone tried the Sense or otherwise of thoughts on the 2 products? The Vue supports a much larger number of sensors for monitoring individual circuits, where the Sense relies more on AI to somehow identify loads introduced by different types of devices, but I'm not sure how much stock to put in that claim.
I love the idea of sense. After having it for a year, it died. They honored the warranty and sent me a knew one, so kudos to them for that. However, when the new one arrived, they didn't have any way to migrate the data from my old sense to my new, so it had to start relearning all over again. (caveat: this was more than 3 years ago now, so maybe they've addressed this?)
At first, I was REALLY impressed in how fast it was learning things. My fridge, dryer, AC, freezer, even the dethaw stage of my ice maker. I honestly kinda enjoyed the game of "it detected a new thing, lemme go figure out what it is!" But then, it slowed WAY down. I had been told it had a hard time learning low-draw items like LEDs, so I was surprised when it learned the light bulb (incandescent) inside of my dryer.. But after it slowed down, it was only detecting things every couple of weeks. There was no way to train it. At least, not back then. Not sure if things have changed. But it would have been ideal to have some way to do something like.. turn a light switch on and off repeatedly and "tell" sense that this is a bedroom cieling fan.. (as an example)
Today, I use the emporia VUE. At first, it seems more limited than the sense, and more cumbersom to wire (I'll give Sense that. you give it power.. connect some CT's around the mains.. and you are essentially done). but I find the VUE to give me more complete and accurate information about the stuff I care about. It doesn't take long for the novelty of "oh, it detected a new thing!" to wear off.
If I had the perfect world, I'd take the AI learning ability of sense, and the per-circuit detection stuff of the vue, and combine them. Imagine how much quicker the Sense could identify stuff it *also* was aware of which CT/input the spike was on. But since that world doesn't exist, I currently rock the Vue, and sent the Sense back to them.
One other thing about the sense for those of us with "hybrid" inverters. If you use a critical loads panel.. and the inverter sends power to it from batteries, the sense never really had a way to deal with it. It's not like a microinverter scenario where you can clamp around a wire, and any current in that wire is "production". in the hybrid inverter scenario, when you clamp around the wire.. you don't have a way to detect if the current is coming from battery, from AC passthrough, or from solar/PV. so, it's not quite as informative with hybrid inverters as it is with straight "grid tied" setups. *I* personally didn't have an issue with this (I collect metrics in a bunch of other ways) but if you are looking for a single pane of glass.. I don't think either the VUE or Sense is ideal for hybrid inverters.
