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 personally like the circuit setup boards. Running an esp32 with esphome. Can be configured for anything you want them to do. On virtually any size or voltage system.
I setup up one system on an industrial 500A 3ph 480V site to track phase imbalance and trigger balancing loads.
The utility meter provided by the distribution company has an LED indicator reporting the consumption. I use this zigbee device which converts the LED pulses to a numerical value, and sends it to homeassistant.
Yes, on the outside meter. It comes with a magnet with a double sided tape which you place around the LED, and the sensor itself just hangs on the magnet. But I’m not sure if american meters provide such interface.
I’ve asked the utility provider for some kind of official, approved, solution, but all they have to offer was to replace the entire meter, and even that would only report a 15 minute average via some proprietary API. The frient device is clearly a better solution. No wonder they were sold out for months.
Not sure where you are in the world, but I’m using OpenEnergyMonitor
Personally, I’m using their Raspberry Pi version (EmonPI) to monitor my total house energy - grid in, solar in and solar export and pull the data directly into HA.
But there’s other options available too, like the 6-channel monitoring, so you could potentially monitor separate circuits and / or high energy systems like heatpumps, etc. They have options for 3-phase too…
In my case, power in AND power out to the grid both flashed the LED on the supply meter (mentioned elsewhere here), so I had to go with CT sensors which I put inside the consumer unit… had a little trouble with calibration due to the electrical noise in there, but +/- a few W is nothing when I have to heat my home with electricity at 4kW+
I have the aeotec zwave HEM that I imagine you are talking about, and have been using it for 4 years. Mine is on its own zwave modem, separate from the one I use for everything else, but you can also try increasing the reporting intervals, and maybe disabling reporting for anything you don’t care about.
Yes. It generates a lot of traffic. Once you get it reporting reliably, I struggle to see the benefit of a more expensive solution unless you want more channels.
Channels would be nice. Its just annoying at this point to have to keep resetting it. Makes the logs useless.
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:
