What is the best, money is no factor solution for monitoring home energy. The goal is no cloud. I was using a zwave solution however it keeps falling off the network and now I cant get it back on. Looking to upgrade.
Edit: I live in the states.
I have two Emporia Vue 2s one in each 150a panel, flashed with esphome so they’re only reporting locally and it works great. 16 circuits per vue.
Same, but the Vue 1.
Works very well by my panel looks a fuckin’ mess because of it!
OP, it’s not ‘money is no object’ because it’s actually pretty cheap, but it’s actually very easy to flash and install, so, if I were to do it again, I’d probably choose the same hardware since it went pretty smoothly.
I use an Emporia Vue device, it uses an ESP32 internally and you can find instructions on how to flash it with esphome code onto it. No cloud dependency, just wifi.
You can get various kits for one/two/three phase mains, and monitor up to 16 individual circuits via passive current clamps.
I can recommend BrulTech. I put in a system (3 GEM’s and a Dashbox logger) to cover 3 full panels (plus water, gas, and temps) about 2 years ago and I’ve been very happy with it.
Quick review: It’s all local and is well documented and open at the integration level - with HA there’s already an integration built in for it out of the box (I recommend getting the latest from github as they are actively developing it). Firmware is proprietary but low level (read sensors, send via serial->ethernet convertor, sleep 5 secs, repeat; configuration UI). Support is technical and high quality, install/setup docs are excellent and give good examples setting up and and configuring the CT’s.
My setup: I have the dashbox set up to proxy the raw GEM data to HA’s Brultech integration which then feeds all the HA power/water/gas/temp features. The GEM’s I have read 32 CT channels each, plus have 8 ‘counter’ inputs (gas, water) and several 1wire bus I/O’s to talk to temperature sensors. They send a data snapshot of all readings every 5 seconds to the logger and to HA (greatly filtered).
The dashbox and 3 GEM’s are on wired ethernet, they also have integrated WIFI as an option. They talk on my local net between each other and the dashbox pushes messages to HA - nothing talks to anything on the internet or needs any connectivity to set up.
The HA integration reads GEM-packets, the dashbox repeats the packets received from the 3 GEM’s to the HA integration in my setup - but you can also skip the dashbox and just point the GEM straight at HA.
Some examples from the data logger dashboards:
I just got a 6 channel from Circuit Setup and it’s pretty great. I still want to do some tweaking to make sure it’s calibrated but so far so good. I’m waiting for some smaller current transformers to come back in stock.
Monitoring the meter itself with an espcam should be the way to go. Where you located? :)
