Home Energy Monitoring – Techno Wizardry

Accurate, Local Home Energy Monitoring: Part 1 – Hardware

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Home Energy Monitoring

Ever wondered where the energy is going in your house and know exactly when and which circuit is consuming the most electricity? How much is your air conditioning unit costing you each month in kWh?

Home energy monitors are devices that you can use to monitor how much energy you’re using at any given point in time. You can use them to figure out how much each device or circuit you’re using overnight vs the day. If you have differing energy costs at the day vs night, you can use them to ensure devices run at lower cost time of day, you can use it to as part of a smart home automation to automatically notify you when your washing machine is done, or even identify when you need to upgrade a circuit because your server room is pulling too much.

In this post, I’m going to walk through the different products I considered for a project at a friend’s house, pros and cons, and how to order the appropriate equipment.

Accurate, Local Home Energy Monitoring: Part 2 – Network Config

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Home Energy Monitoring

This post continues from the previous post in the series where I walked through the decision process on what energy monitor system to use and how to install Brultech GEM Monitor. I ended with the hardware physically installed and all Current Transformers (CTs) connected.

In this post, I continue from that point and walk through the network and software configuration defining each circuit size.

Accurate, Local Home Energy Monitoring: Part 3 – Software Config

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Home Energy Monitoring

In the previous post in this series, I selected an energy monitoring system that is purely local based (no cloud), integrates into the breaker box, and showed how to connect it to the network and configure the size of each circuit. In this post, I’ll show how to connect the BrulTech GreenEye Energy Monitor to HomeAssistant and create some useful monitoring dashboards.

Visualizing Home Energy Usage in InfluxDB and Home Assistant

This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series Home Energy Monitoring

In previous posts in this series, I walked through how to get data flowing into Home Assistant.

In this post, we’ll get it flowing into InfluxDB for long-term retention.

Local Energy Monitoring using the Emporia Vue 2

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Home Energy Monitoring

I’ve previously explored the world of home energy monitoring systems and in the past arrived at using the Brultech GreenEye Monitor for a project in a friend’s house. It had the advantage of being local out-of-the-box and had a wide range of compact CTs that made fitting the electronics in the breaker box a lot easier, but it had one flaw that made it not suitable for my condo. It had to be mounted outside the breaker box with wires running into the box. I had no space in my condo, so I instead explored other options.

I came across the Emporia Vue2 and identified that it was running a standard ESP32 device and was easy to reflash with custom ESPHome firmware. ESPHome is an open-source framework for creating firmware to collect data from a variety of different sensors and publish it to MQTT/Home Assistant. This sounded perfect, so I ordered a Vue2 and here’s how I made it work.