Recommendation for best Home Energy Monitoring System

I have 200A service in the U.S.
I am looking for a whole-home Home Energy Monitoring system with the following features:

  • Monitor both “phases” of my 200A mains
  • Monitor 8+ (ideally 16+) branch circuits (15-50A)
  • UL Listed and NEC code compliant (so that I don’t void my home insurance)
  • Integratable with HA (ideally without requiring reflashing as I would also like to benefit from any app that comes with the system
  • “Good” accuracy and reliability
  • Affordable (<$250)

Ideally, I would like to be able to mount the central module itself exterior to the panel so that I can divide the branch monitoring CT clamps between 2 adjacent panels in my basement (the main 200A panel and a 100A subpanel just adjacent to it).

I am currently looking at the Emporia Gen 3 Vue which has 16 branch sensors plus 2 for the main. It has a 3rd party HA integration or one can install ESPHome on it. It’s now $199 on Amazon.

But before I buy, I want to know what other and perhaps even better options are available.

The Emporia Vue 3 is really good, especially with the option to flash with esphome. Their app is not great, but useful in a pinch if you’re not home. For the sake of offering an alternative, I’ve been using this for the past few months which is basically a Vue 2 knockoff that supports local MQTT out of the box without flashing:

I also used an Emporia Vue Utility (Zigbee monitor) with the HACS integration to pull data from their cloud, it worked ok but went offline a lot so I switched to the Fusion to have branch circuit monitoring and remove the Internet dependency.

According to the level of DIY effort you can also look into the KinCony N10, also in 20 and 30 channel versions.

I don’t have one, but I am also looking now into a whole home energy meter and this popped up.