Raspberry Pi Home Energy Monitoring System

I haven’t seen any other posts about this here, so figured I would share a new project I came across: Lantern Power Monitor

From the project page: The Lantern Power Monitor allows you to see the energy usage of every breaker in your home; any number of meters, panels, or breakers.

It looks like a Raspberry Pi + custom PCB that you use to connect current probes to each breaker in your electrical panel. Given Home Assistant’s new focus on energy management, this seems like it would integrate well, if it can integrate.

I messaged the creator about this and he said that getting this data sent over MQTT should be possible: The hubs can already post all of their data to MQTT with a little extra configuration. Some work needs to be done to build a template for the json payload to get it ingested into Home Assistant’s sensor model and to conform to their meter resetting concept before it will completely work.

Thoughts? Are there other similar devices out there?

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There are a few other similar devices that run off an ESP based device.

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Nice! I wish the HA integration was more polished.

I’m leaning toward trying the CircuitSetup board @silvrr posted, since I already have some ESPs kicking around and this fits right on them. Seems like it would be almost plug-and-play.

I’d love to see what others are using for monitoring power use on individual circuits or components.

That CircuitSetup ESP solution is pretty interesting, but would be a lot more expensive to get the same capabilities. Since it only has 6 channels, I would need 2 add-on boards, which with the current transformers and ESP board would bring the price close to $400, vs $200 for the Lantern.

Is another example.

Thanks for sharing! I didn’t know there were so many things like this already in existence.

One annoyance with the Lantern and IoTaWatt I just noticed is that both require an AC power supply and a DC power supply. The CircuitSetup rectifies and steps down the voltage from the AC transformer to power the ESP board, which is convenient.

Also, it seems that the creator of Lantern has found an incredible deal on current transformers, as the ones from the Kickstarter end up being ~30% less expensive than the ones offered by both CircuitSetup and IoTaWatt, which combined with the inexpensive base board are what make that system so much cheaper.

Oh, one big upside with IoTaWatt is that there is already an integration for it:

Don’t let having to custom order circuit boards scare you. He provides the easyeda files and I was able to order 10 boards for $13 total including shipping.

I have one of my boards assembled now. Waiting on the 3.5mm jacks, but I wired up 2 CT to give it a try.

MQTT info here…
https://www.reddit.com/r/LanternPowerMonitor/comments/p7ssnp/heres_my_setup/