IoTaWatt vs Emporia Vue 2.0

Energy
1

I’m trying to decide between IoTaWatt and Emporia 2.0 for home energy monitoring of 120/240V loads. I have a net-metered solar array with battery backup (Darfon inverter and battery system), and a subpanel for loads to power by battery backup during grid downtime events.

My main user story is being able to track energy consumption so that I can find energy ‘hog’ uses so that I might be able to live within the yearly net output of my 5.5kW array (with winter heating virtually entirely woodstove supplied).

I am not completely comfortable going through the full ESP software flashing software process so well described in the youtube by digiblurDIY, so will focus on existing integrations (which for the Emporia is of course custom via HACS). My HA hardware is an RPi4, so there are those limitations as well.

I would like to look at this strictly as an engineering feasibility analysis, as while data privacy can be a concern, I’d prefer to set that aside for this discussion.

From what I can gather, the pros and cons for each are:

IoTaWatt:

Pros

  • Local (30 sec poll)

Cons

  • Cost is more than double per circuit monitored
  • An outage can result in missed data

Emporia Vue 2.0

Pros

  • Relatively low cost
  • Larger number of CTs and smart plugs available in one unit

Cons

  • API is deprecated per Emporia feedback, may not exist in the future, potentially even near term.
  • Polling rate of the API is low (2+ mins?), may render some notifications too late to be useful or missed
  • Going local requires ESPHome hacking skills

Question: Does the slow polling rate of the Emporia integration result in any data loss, or does it just mean slower (or missed) notifications?

I’ve also looked at Shelley, CircuitSetup, Smappee, and Sense, and found them too expensive for the user story, or not complete enough (as a number of people report that Sense only finds a relatively small number of devices and all the rest are in “Other”, which is too little information for me). If Sense had a user-initiated device training process, I’d be more likely to go with that, but that’s not on the roadmap as far as I can tell.

If the API were not a risk with Emporia, I’d likely go with the 16 CT, 4 smartplug bundle on sale right now. But if that API goes away, then I’m not going to be happy, as I already monitor my Juice Box EV charger and a few Z-Wave devices via HA now. Of course, I could monitor my home energy completely separately from HA as a less desirable fall back.

Have I missed any pros or cons?

Any advice?

2

Check out GitHub - emporia-vue-local/esphome: ESPHome is a system to control your ESP8266/ESP32 by simple yet powerful configuration files and control them remotely through Home Automation systems. . It requires some soldering and flashing, but it lets you use the Vue 2 with fully local control. I have not soldered in 20 years, but managed to solder two units and get them installed. They interface perfectly with HA.

1 Like
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@OmenWild I’m using an RPi 4 64b, so “If you’re using a 64-bit ARM OS, unfortunately you are unable to build this.”

Nevertheless, thanks for the response! Who knows, I may switch to 32b for this.

4

You can build it on pretty much any other system you have, there is no requirement to use your hass system for the build/install. I built it on a M1 Mac laptop, and there are full instructions for installing esptool.py on a Windows system.

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@OmenWild , thanks, though I’m going to stick with the RPi 4 due to the simplicity in having just one platform dedicated to this, and the very low RPi energy consumption, which I’m trying to optimize.