My IotaWatt installation.

[MurphyGuy]

So I purchased an IotaWatt home energy monitor this summer. I had it hooked up just laying on the yellow boxes with wires going everywhere like crazy spaghetti. Finally got around to finishing the installation so I could put the breaker panel back on.

I really like IotaWatt. It works without any 3rd party, doesn't require internet, has internal storage, and was relatively inexpensive. After owning it for almost 6 months, I have also found it to be accurate to within 0.25%.

Our utility meter gives us two readings 1) kilowatt-hours in and 2) kilowatt-hours out. To find out what our energy balance is, we simply subtract one from the other.

Using just the information from Iotawatt, I was able to calculate what the utility meter would say to within 0.25%. That's amazing!

Here it is, finally installed in a permanent way.

 

[400bird]

Nice clean install!
Can you share pics inside the breaker panel or of the web interface/app?

 

[zephyranthes]

That’s nice. My panel is flush to Sheetrock, but you gave me an idea to use a media cabinet next to it also flush mount, to put it and some other home automation goodies. You run it by itself or pulling the data into Home Assistant and Grafana?

 

[MurphyGuy]

Nice clean install!
Can you share pics inside the breaker panel or of the web interface/app?

Here's a simple graph showing solar production today. Blue line is Watts, green line is accumulated Watt-Hours of energy production.



Here is a graph showing net energy production. Positive values mean we had to suck energy from the grid for that day, negative values show how much we pumped into the grid for that day.



This one shows total daily combined energy use for the devices that I monitor. The living room circuit has a space heater plugged into it. Between the energy the dehumidifier uses and the energy the living room's space heater uses, you can see when we had warm wet days or cold dry ones. (On Nov 20th, the iotawatt was unplugged most of the day as I mounted the box and hooked up wires)



It's an amazing device, I should have bought it long ago. After being astounded at how much juice that dehumidifier was sucking up (what a pig!), I got online to see if mine was using more than normal and found out it was! That lead me to take a close inspection of it and I discovered two things. 1) The intake air filter was clogged (didn't even know it had one!), and 2) The exhaust air was blowing into some storage boxes which caused the unit to cycle on and off a lot. Once I solved those two problems, our energy use dropped by almost 2 kWh per day.

Then my "man attitude" kicked in and the wife and I cleaned the condenser coils on all the refrigerators and freezers, which saved us another 2 kWh's per day.

So basically, this little $300 device has saved us 4 kWh's per day of energy x 365 days a year = 1460 kWh x 0.18c per kWh = $262 on the first year alone.

And don't even get me started on how many times I have looked at the readings and had to tell my 9 year old daughter that she left the clothes dryer door open (because I can see the 5 watt light bulb in the iotawatt data!)

I already put the cover back on the breaker panel. It's easy to take off, but a major pain to put back on. Trust me, it is stuffed full. Between the solar input, the off-grid input, welder, and all the other crap in there, its packed like a can of tuna.

Iotawatt lets you do a lot of things most other energy monitors don't, but you have to install some extra computer hardware like a Rasberry device. I just use the basic functions that come with it, it does what I want it to.

 

[MurphyGuy]

That’s nice. My panel is flush to Sheetrock, but you gave me an idea to use a media cabinet next to it also flush mount, to put it and some other home automation goodies. You run it by itself or pulling the data into Home Assistant and Grafana?

I tried figuring out Grafana and Home Assistant and I gave up. Tried mostly with Grafana using my desktop pc but couldn't figure out how it worked. Seems like a steep learning curve and since it wasn't "mission critical" sort-to-say, I stopped messing with it. There isn't enough aspirin in the house to deal with that right now.

 

[zephyranthes]

I tried figuring out Grafana and Home Assistant and I gave up. Tried mostly with Grafana using my desktop pc but couldn't figure out how it worked. Seems like a steep learning curve and since it wasn't "mission critical" sort-to-say, I stopped messing with it. There isn't enough aspirin in the house to deal with that right now.

Home assistant has been a steep learning curve, so yeah, but after SmartThings crapped the bed on the custom stuff I had made in it, I had to dive in.

I’m buying an iotawatt for sure, this post just cements it.

 

[heyhew]

I am waiting for permission to operate my new install and looking to order an iotawatt. Is it easy to install and configure to track for solar production, grid import & export?

I was looking over the documentation that I could find and it didn't seem all that straight forward but I haven't bought a unit yet.

 

[MurphyGuy]

I am waiting for permission to operate my new install and looking to order an iotawatt. Is it easy to install and configure to track for solar production, grid import & export?

I was looking over the documentation that I could find and it didn't seem all that straight forward but I haven't bought a unit yet.

Stupidly Easy.

That was what I wanted.. to be able to track import and export and then see a graph representing how much we made, how much the house used, and how much was sent to the grid.
I track a bunch of other stuff too, but that was the main reason I got it.

Very simple to set up and install. From the time I opened the box, to the time I was reading info on my computer, was about 3 hours, and most of that was spent troubleshooting the week wifi signal in my basement. I got it working, but I ended up buying another router to act as a wifi access point in the basement for the iotawatt. It won't let you hardwire it, has to be wifi.

 

[heyhew]

Stupidly Easy.

That was what I wanted.. to be able to track import and export and then see a graph representing how much we made, how much the house used, and how much was sent to the grid.
I track a bunch of other stuff too, but that was the main reason I got it.

Very simple to set up and install. From the time I opened the box, to the time I was reading info on my computer, was about 3 hours, and most of that was spent troubleshooting the week wifi signal in my basement. I got it working, but I ended up buying another router to act as a wifi access point in the basement for the iotawatt. It won't let you hardwire it, has to be wifi.

Thank you. Now to either sneak it in or convince my "boss"/better half on the expense or just ask for forgiveness later.

 

[MurphyGuy]

Thank you. Now to either sneak it in or convince my "boss"/better half on the expense or just ask for forgiveness later.

Let me help with that.

Less than 2 months after I installed it, I noticed that the fridge and dehumidifier in the basement were, by a wide margin, the biggest energy hogs in the house hands down. (there wasn't even a close second place to those two pigs).

So I got online looking at other similar appliances, looking at their energy use, and became suspicious that maybe something was wrong with mine since they both were using over twice the calculated energy.

The dehumidifier was first since it was sucking up 9 kWh a day. Found the intake filter clogged. I didn't even know it had an intake filter. I also noticed the discharge port where it pushes the dried air out was partially blocked by a piece of furniture 4 feet away. Not something you'd normally think about since one can easily walk between them, but what was happening is that the air would leave the exhaust port, hit that big piece of furniture and then roll back. This caused the dehumidifier to short-cycle on and off every 10 minutes.
I fixed both problem and now the unit draws about 3 to 4 kWh a day depending on how much rain we get. So remember that, I saved 5 kWh per day.

Then the fridge. We inspected the coils UNDER the fridge and found them all clogged up with dog hair. Cleaned them out, and the fridge when from 6 kWh a day to 3 kWh.. That's 3 more I saved.

5+3 = 8 kWh every day x 365 days a year = 2920 kWh per year.. Multiply that by $0.16 per kWh = $467 on the first year and year after year.

The stupid little iotawatt box has already paid for itself.

Your mileage my vary, past performance is no guarantee of future performance, this is not legal advice, staring at your energy screen may cause drowsiness, batteries are not required.

 

[svetz]

How do you think it compares to the Sense or Emporia Vue

 

[MurphyGuy]

How do you think it compares to the Sense or Emporia Vue

The iotawatt does not require an internet connection to function. It stores all data on site and does not require a 3rd party to have access to your data.
As for the graphs and other functions of the user interface, I have no experience with Sense or Emporia.

 

[Shimmy]

I love my IoTaWatt system. I have three units installed and will add a fourth this year when I upgrade my main panel. I will say though, my accuracy is not that good, +/-2% is about where I sit.

Because I have multiple units I did go with an Influx database back-end so I could do thinks like separate house from car consumption. I saw similar benefits in troubleshooting energy consumption and prioritizing energy upgrades. I much prefer Influx to Home Assistant as a historian, Home Assistant is a little inflexible with things like positive/negative power flow (by convention solar should be negative), and long-term data is less easy to evaluate.

I haven't gotten Grafana working; there are a few visuali things I would like to use it for but not a high priority. My native Influx dashboard does a passable job.

One thing I love is creating histograms of long-term data to be able to see frequency of things rather than a trend line-- things like how many days of the year the fridge energy consumption is "higher than normal", or how many days is my PV generation greater than my house consumption, etc. But, the built-in graphs do a fantastic job of tracking a lot of things.

 

[MurphyGuy]

I love my IoTaWatt system. I have three units installed and will add a fourth this year when I upgrade my main panel. I will say though, my accuracy is not that good, +/-2% is about where I sit.

Our house is on solar so our utility smart meter counts energy sucked in and pumped out. When comparing our kWh balance between what the utility meter says and what Iotawatt said, I found our accuracy to be less than 0.5% and I attributed that 1/2 percent to the fact that the voltage reference transformer only monitors one leg.

 

[Texican]

I have 4 emporia vues on different panels at the house and outbuildings. I bought them before I started using Home Assistant. now I wish I had bought the Iotawatt systems because I could get the data locally instead of thru an intergration with home assistant that does not offer 1 second data, so the data from emporia only updates every 2 minutes and lags behind other data on the monitor that is more local. with 4 units however the higher price of iotawatt is hard for me to justify. If you only need 1 unit, the iotawatt seems much better
I just started using some of the emporia smart plugs, and I do like how they work

 

[billt1827]

Another Iotawatt fan here. I have 4 of them uploading to Open Energy Monito EmonCMS instances. One is in a holiday flat which uploads to EmonCMS running on a minmal Linode server; this lets me send reasonably accurate monthly meter readings to the energy supplier when we aren't there.

The other 3 are monitoring outbuldings and PV inverters and supplement the main Brultach GEM.

 

[svetz]

I've an old F22 air conditioner that belongs in a museum and cools the "old" (1961) house before the "addition" (1980) was added with it's own system. Not sure how old it is, but keep thinking when it dies I'll replace it with something efficient. The problem with that air conditioner is it just keeps running (I did replace the condenser fan motor a while back since it was cheap to do, only needed bearings but couldn't find them). I want to measure the power consumption to see if it would be better to replace with a minisplit which I could sort of figure out with a clamp meter and audit spreadsheet, but it would be nice to have a 24x7 monitor that alerted me if something was abnormally burning power.

 

[MurphyGuy]

I've an old F22 air conditioner that belongs in a museum and cools the "old" (1961) house before the "addition" (1980) was added with it's own system. Not sure how old it is, but keep thinking when it dies I'll replace it with something efficient. The problem with that air conditioner is it just keeps running (I did replace the condenser fan motor a while back since it was cheap to do, only needed bearings but couldn't find them). I want to measure the power consumption to see if it would be better to replace with a minisplit which I could sort of figure out with a clamp meter and audit spreadsheet, but it would be nice to have a 24x7 monitor that alerted me if something was abnormally burning power.

My air conditioner is old too.. probably a SEER 8 or 10 from the late 80's or early 90's. I'll update it sooner or later but here in Michigan, we only use it for maybe 10 or 15 days a year on the hottest of hot days, and we don't usually get many of those. Plus, the solar makes our electricity free so there's that.

 

[zephyranthes]

My air conditioner is old too.. probably a SEER 8 or 10 from the late 80's or early 90's. I'll update it sooner or later but here in Michigan, we only use it for maybe 10 or 15 days a year on the hottest of hot days, and we don't usually get many of those. Plus, the solar makes our electricity free so there's that.

I put in a mini split and realized I screwed myself by not going with a higher SEER, only heating down to 13 F, when a new one heats down to -17 F at a 1/4 the power of the old one.

 

[MurphyGuy]

I put in a mini split and realized I screwed myself by not going with a higher SEER, only heating down to 13 F, when a new one heats down to -17 F at a 1/4 the power of the old one.

Tell me more. Higher SEER? Every mini I look at online seems to be north of 18 SEER with some up in the mid 20's or more. So your unit isn't just an air conditioner, it's also a heat pump?