Hello everyone, first of all I have to say that I’m new HA. I’m planning to build a setup of HA mainly for power consumption monitoring, at least as start project.
When I talk as offline House is because I don’t have internet access on my home WiFi, but I can provide some access for installation propose if needed but I can’t stay all the 24h online.
My idea is to use an Raspberry PI, or an Orange Pi, to install the server an connect to it using my home WiFi.
Then for the entire house I think I will build two (one for each phase) energy meters like in this post:
Or maybe buying one device for that but that’s where the problem start. As I’m new in this world I’m not sure what devices or systems will work on a 0. internet environment. I read something about ZigBee (which I didn’t understand) and Tuya, and Smart life that needs internet access
So for example if I want to monitor the power consumption of some particular devices, for affordable price I don’t where how to start, or what to buy.
I look into AliExpress and I see a lot of cheap wall sockets with energy monitoring but I only see of two types the ones that say WiFi or ZigBee. I think that the ZigBee ones are not for me, but it’s only a guess. So searching for the WiFi they all say compatible with tuya/Alexa/Google/smartlife (like this: https://a.aliexpress.com/_msMpoj8) but they don’t mention of Home Assistant, and all this services depends on internet so I don’t know if the work for me, only connecting them over my home WiFi to the HA.
I’ve been very far down the energy metering road with out of the box solutions and, for my money, I find the ThirdReality Zigbee devices to be by far the best energy monitors in my network and I have 30+ of varying manufacturers. I found these on Amazon at $40 for a 4 pack and they are far better than the Z-Wave ones I have that constantly trip up. I bought 20 of these last week and have been replacing them all.
In general, it really depends on what you are after. For whole house monitoring you could consider clamp style that go into your circuit box.
Zigbee is an ad-hoc wireless network. Doesn’t use WiFi but works like it. It’s actually a very good solution for disconnected setups. All the devices talk to each other and with the home base, which itself may be WiFi, or may be a dongle.
I’d be careful of most WiFi things, because they may require a connection to a cloud service, and oftentimes they don’t advertise that outright. Many HA integrations link to the cloud service, rather than directly to the devices.
Yea I only linked the basic one since they mentioned only 2 phases so 2 clamps, if the 3M suites the setup go for it. I have a shelly button 1 acting as a doorbell via MQTT so all of their devices should work both local wifi and via MQTT for usage.
This is why I am moving off my tuya based smart plugs when I can, its a hassle to go through and do the tuya local setup since you need to use an older versioned application through bluestacks to pull the device ID’s etc once your trial of the dev portal of 3 months runs out; which I did not know was timed until I went back to start migrating over.
) which is close to useless for loads with a power factor lower then 1 
