(This is for the US, not sure if other parts of the world have better systems).
So I live in a condo building and while we have smart meters, the best integration with the power company only provides “near” realtime monitoring with a 2-3 hour delay. Useful but not as much as noticing the immediate impact of turning on an appliace and seeing the spike.
It turns out you can attach a monitor to the circuit breakers (I’ll have a professional electrician do it if I go wit hit). I’ve done a bit of research and the 3 companies’ products in the title seem to be leaders in the market.
Question – does anyone have any experience with those and how reliable they are and how well they integrate with HA? Also, it seems like none of them are local which sucks majorly. If anyone is aware of local-only solutions, pls do share.
look at Home Assistant Glow it is a unit you attach to the blinking diode of your meter
easy to make with a esp32 and a light sensor
it is not real time but pr blink. but i have used it for 2 years now and it is as close as realtime you need
it just shows total consumption not per phase
Thanks for the suggestion!
I don’t have access to the meter (it’s in the basement of a large condominium building). My only option is something with the circuit breaker.
Don’t have any of the mentioned one but remeber that “Sense” was/is(?) quite catastropihc and not much more then marketing bla bla regarding their “smart” secrete sauce detecting all/some of your appliances automagically.
I never heard about “Generac” but as far as I know the “Emporia” is build with a esp inside - so that one allows full control and (full) ownership. It’s possible to install own *ware on that device and extend functionalies if wanted If the company files for bancrupcy you don’t need to worry that your device turns into a (which happens already to more than one product in the past!)
@orange-assistant thank you very much for the background, really appreciate it!
Sounds like Emporia would be my choice!
As an aside, I really don’t care about their ML-based device detection feature set. They themselves admit it is a very hard problem to crack. All I want is just realtime overall usage. Of course, if I could detect specific devices automatically that would be great but it’s really unnecessary for my needs.
Thanks again!
Thanks for the recommendation! Sounds amazing with full control, sick budget and a great project but I’m not uncomfortable doing this on my own, at least for now. I just started with HA recently. I have already moved everything to local control (other than the Miele dishwasher which has no such option) so fully cognizant of the benefits of not relying on the existence of a company, its cloud strategy and an internet connection. I’ll keep this in mind for the future! I’ve marked your other comment as the solution as it most directly answers the question in the title. Thanks!
I’ve had very good luck with my iotawatt, unfortunately the guy who created it stepped out of the business of selling them and handed it off to a distributor network, but there are currently no distributors in North America.
If you’re willing to buy from overseas I think the Australian distributor ships internationally.
Definitely would be a good idea to get an electrician to put the main CT’s on your live service conductors, I’m a DIYer who’s done a lot of electrical work, so I was comfortable doing it myself. The biggest draw of the iotawatt for me (besides the fact that it’s all open source), was that you can connect a dozen CT’s (the current measurement sensors) to get actual values for all the individual large loads, rather than just metering at the service alone and getting an aggregate. So I can see detailed info on how much energy my hot tub is consuming, or my dryer, or my hvac. I could use that info to run automations if I was so inclined, though I haven’t yet lol.
I’ve had it a few years and I believe I got all the hardware for under $500 at the time. I’ve also moved the CT’s a few times, like when I switched from an electric dryer to gas, which is fairly safe to do if you shut off your main breaker so the sub-breakers are de-energized.
Makes sense, thanks! I’ll def hire an electrician.
Yes, from everything I’ve read having such a huge number of circuits monitored is unusual, I think usually – if you are lucky – they let you measure 2-3 individual circuits and I have a lot more than that.
My motivation is entirely to just monitor real-time energy use but I admit being able to monitor each circuit individually would be pretty dope! I’m a glutton for data while at the same time recognizing that a lot of time data in and of itself ends up pretty useless in changing behavior or driving automations :P.
Thanks again for the info. I wonder if there will be room to do clamps around each circuit and how easy it will be to find an electrician for this but we’ll see. I also hope I can still get the units in the states from abroad.
Hey, just wanted to pop in again to say that I saw a project the other day to flash esphome on the emporia vue. Not sure if that’s something you’d be able to do, but might be an option to keep the data local if you went with the emporia hardware.
oh interesting, thanks! I’m bookmarking this post as I’m going to focus on a smart lock right now and finishing up a few dashboards since i’ve added a huge number of sensors at the moment
i’ll revisit the topic in a month or so and i’ll definitely look into flashing as well
granted it might still be a bit too advanced for me but it seems interesting!
oh just checked – there is 0 chance i’ll be doing soldering in order to flash these things (sorry i’m ignorant about this stuff so i thought it might just be a usb you plug into it and flash the custom software).
appreciate the idea but 100% no chance i’ll be doing that (famous last words haha)
If the company files for bancrupcy you don’t need to worry that your device turns into a 
(which happens already to more than one product in the past!)
the cheapest (still very accurate) solution I found is a pzem004tv3 (sells for around $10) paired with a esp. 
(famous last words haha)