For anyone interested I went through and flashed it with esphome to get it into home assistant and it works great! The update time is much better. It does require popping it open and flashing the firmware directly but after that it works great over the air with esphome.

oh please make a video about hacking the emporia. this would be too good to let it be like this, especially after reading those terms of service

12:13 - I'm on the same page; I have a few parts sitting in a box to do this (just lack of time), after looking into all the other prebuilt solutions, none of them were really open with their data, and I'd rather keep it all inside my home. My plan now is to integrate energy monitoring into Home Assistant, which keeps it all local and feels like a solution that will continue working for many years.

Absolutely agreed on setting up your own server. That EULA, that too many click without reading, is ridiculous.

Hi Matthias, I'm not generally much of a commenter, but this is highly intriguing. There's also someone who seems to have been able to reverse engineer and replace the emporia FW. Just search for "flaviutamas reverse engineering emporia". Maybe I'll also give it a try some time. Cheers

Love seeing this! I literally just installed an emporia energy monitor last thursday. Ive been obsessed with analyzing the data! I ended up flashing the board with ESPHome to keep all my data local so I skipped the app. I also noticed the same issue with my 240v circuits. Doubling a single leg doesnt always work out so I ended up monitoring both legs separately.

1. Brilliant idea on routing the 2nd leg backward thru a single CT. 2. Fashion is to stuff a fridge into a cabinet with minimal air; you might help fridge longevity & reduce watt consumption adding a small fan & quality air circulation path. Excellent subject matter & video coverage, thanks

The moment I saw how you measured a dual-pole circuit with one 50A monitor!!! Thank you.

You could also look into Home Assistant if you haven't already. A great place to bring stuff like that together into one interface.

You had me sold on this right up to the points about the absurd ToS. I agree with your conclusion, it's more prudent to build our own.

I bought one of these last year! helped me find the big energy wasters in my home and actually dropped my energy bill by identifying non led lights I though I had changed out when I moved.

You are my hero. The comment about the oven was just great 😂

Definitely make a follow up if you reconfigure it to output to your own server. That would be fascinating to see.

I have had pretty good success with iotawatt which is a similar kind of unit hardware wise feeding into influxdb and displayed in grafana, there is a little setup of the UI, but it's pretty straightforward just writing queries to pull the data into plots, easy to add other sensors such as temperature too, and all local with no cloud.

Dryer 240v is the same way as the motor runs off one leg. I've had an Emporia installed for 18 months and and absolutely love it.

Shame you missed out on the IotaWatt device It is exactly what you mention in the end of the video. It is very similar to the Emporia, but allows for totally local logging and updates. It can push to cloud if you want to, but you can also push to influx and visualize in Grafana.

Relevant Joke for the dads: A man is on his death bed. He calls his wife's name and asks "Are you here?", "Yes". He calls his son's name and asks "Are you here?", "Yes". He calls his daughter's name and asks "Are you here?", "Yes father". He says, "If you're all here, why is the light still on in the kitchen".

06:04 - Flying Spaghetti Monster!

I've been planning to do this since I bought a hot tub last year, bought a few bits and pieces to play with but haven't gotten around to it yet. I'd recommend trying to flash the existing system if you can, in any case, as it is just an ESP32 and has its own power supply, that's likely worth keeping. Top quality content, I love to see this kinda thing!

i wish i had the time to sit around in my house all day gathering data about how much power i use, i have no clue how much i pay for my utility bill and i really dont care. but for some reason i always look forward to watching your videos.

Hi Matthias, cool video as usual - your experimentation here is close to my heart. However I've gone down the line of using single DIN energy meters with isolate pulse output (rather than using current clamps), because they are cheap, accurate (or at least they should be within the standards spec) and really quite reliable. I monitor the pulses myself and can monitor larger circuits like Solar injection, Grid power in, what goes to the house, and what goes to the office. Although these measure energy, its trivial to work out what the instantaneous power is within the time base accuracy of the microcontroller. All this data goes into an Influx DB time series database which is displayed on a Grafana web interface, both of which running as servers on a Raspberry Pi - all free to use, and all running on a local subnet 24/7 without having to connect to the cloud. I know it sounds like a lot of work, but actually I don't think it will take you that much time to learn the stuff. I can even take you through the process if you'd like - just email me.

As soon as I saw that device I was about to post about it all talking to their backend and you don’t have any access to the data locally and the fact they could drop or charge you to access the app - glad you spotted that and told everyone

That data agreement is wild.

Thank you for doing this so we don't have to! There are so many like-minded engineers subscribed to your channel and this content really serves that audience well.

I've been using one of these for about a year. They provide great insight. Very helpful for optimizing efficiency and planning a future solar PV system.

I (and my friends) have been using some sonoff / no name brand tua etc.. power monitor / smart switch devices. All are some variants of esp chip. We flashed them all to tasmota firmware, and using mqtt to push data to a influxdb database. This ensured ownership of data, but you have to make the dashboard / data charting yourself in influxdb. Haven't tried this type of multi circuit device, this looks very interesting (if supported by tasmota). I had a plan once to balance house's electric load across two sources evenly by monitoring daily/weekly power usage of different circuits and toggle their Source automatically, So at the month's end, all sources (Electric company power meter) have equal power usage.

Best part is the TOS review at the end!!

If you ever market one, I'll buy. Great video. Very interesting.

I have been using a pi4 with docker containers for a year now for home monitoring and love it. Jertel/vuegraph is on github; portainer, influxdb and grafana come together with that nicely to let you save your data locally. I am using an Emporia system for energy monitoring. It does rely on their server which is not a problem right now. It took a while to sort stuff out and it is by no means polished but the data is being saved with what I believe is an "infinite" retention policy on influxdb. So I can spend occasional winter nights tweaking it and perhaps correlating my temperature readings with a local "official" weather station. My readings go through a python script into a separate influx time series on the pi4.

I have been surprised by the accuracy of the system. I have one and have recorded the data from an emporia for a while to an influxdb database as well as data from a Tesla powerwall for many months. They agree quite closely. When the house is using >1kw, the difference between the measurements is on the order of 5-10 watts, and averages to near 0 watts if I average more than a few seconds of data. This means their spec of 0.1% accuracy is probably correct if the powerwall is accurate (the powerwall is a revenue grade meter, so it is accurate enough to sell power based on the readings it provides, so I trust the values it gives).

Love the no-nonsense comments about the EULA and the idea of building your own to take ownership of your data!

I'm very glad you included that conclusion in the end. I was worried up until then =)

That's my exact washer dryer set! Love those old things!

Excellent, thanks for all the details. The rights explained at the end were very important

That's a pretty cool power monitoring unit. Hopefully they get the connector issues resolved.

I don't know about Canada, but in the US, that electrical panel would be illegal - breakers either need to be sideways or have on at the top, but are not allowed to have on at the bottom.

Great point about how to monitor 240v loads that might be not balanced! (Flip direction of one phase and put both in the CT)

Oh boy, Matthias, do I have a hint for you! You may very well already be aware its existence, but if you want a rabbit hole of data collection and home optimization and analysis to jump in to, Home Assistant is absolutely amazing. It executes 100% locally and is open source and community driven. Nobody but you own and have rights to the data you produce. It has amazing addon support. For instance InfluxDB and Grafana. The former is a database optimized for time series data, such as utility read outs, temperatures, relative humidity, prices, etc. The latter is essentially a very powerful graphing tool, which can query the aforementioned database for which ever data you put in it. I see other comments mentioning that people have already integrated Emporia into Home Assistant. That would solve the data and logging issue as well. Anyway best of luck.

"The nice thing is, it's already built so I don't have to build it." "But I'd rather build it myself" 🤣

I completely agree with your assessment. I have an emporia vue and I do like it for what it is. I was going to get Brultech GEM, but it was significatnly more expensive. Ths Emporia has allowed me to monitor with less cost now while I investigate and prepare for the Brultech GEM (which requires it to be mounted outside the box, which I can't do to the location of my box in my master bedroom. WAF). the Brultech offeres local connectivity and monitoring. Emporia has refused to open that up (even just allowing you to set your internal endpoint to collect the data yourself).

I use it with home assistant and I'm pretty happy with it.

Connecting to a remote server, sigh, the bane of all such devices. I say it'll work for two years, until they stop the service. Less if Google buys Emporia.

I use the sonoff S31 "smart plug" which is just an esp8266, flashed with tasmota, store the data via Openhab. I don't know how accurate they are, but they are good enough to show me what is going on. I think those sensors are a cleaner way however because you need fewer sensors. Thanks for digging deeper for us.

Emporia should pay for your advice! If I owned my own home and was interested in a similar project, I'd buy something that had your input (and suggested improvements applied) over other options!

Matthias, I have a similar system called CURB Energy with 20 current transformer sensors....I also have the kilowatt meter, and a Fluke 335 true rms clamp meter, that gives me good comparisons.... The curb system is quite accurate, and I get Email "colour" graph reports monthly with no charge for it for the past 5 years I have owned it, and they also upgrade the software with more additional information often, with no charge, which is quite the thing really... I am also able to insert the KWH cost from NB power, and actually get a cost comparison report. I have a generator and generator panel, and recorded the rush or start up currents for various appliances and necessities, such as my water pump so that I could manage power usage in a power outage.... This is valuable, as I cannot run everything on my 7200 watt generator at the same time, however, I can run everything singularly including my water pump that has around a 1700 watt start up current by managing my circuits at the generator panel so that not everything is on at the same time......All good.

Highly recommend getting on the Home Assistant bandwagon. That way you run your own server and no cloud nonsense, all local control :)

Do not trust them. Good call. Love your videos! Thank you for this.

I built my own version of this with an esp8266 and a nano. I store the results on the local raspberry pi. In a perfect world you could store one sample per second from 12 sensors for 2 days on The for megabyte flash memory of an ESP32, and hooking it up to an SD card via the SPI would also give you plenty of storage. It definitely seems like you need an external ADC because the ESP32 ADC's are super noisy.

This is why we need a strong Open Source community.

I've also noticed that ceiling mounted enclosed light fixtures kill LED bulbs in a noticeable time period, where end table lamps don't.

Bonus points for using a shielded CAT5/6 cable and it even looks like you grounded it.

I agree with you! They want the data and we get nothing in exchange.

Very informitive. Thanks for making the vid. I'm with you on the EULA notes.

As someone who's deep in the "Home Assistant" woods I say to your final comments 'hear, hear"

Thanks Matthias. I just turned off my range at the breaker.

Hey Matthias, I used a C library called emonlib (short for energy monitor library) and although it wasn't great and had some confusing aspects, I was able to successfully use it to track the current draw of a 3 phase motor for a project. It may be a useful starting point for a homemade logger.

I have been looking at this unit, as well. Interesting and helpful video!

My smart meter has an LED which flashes once for every watt hour used. I count those flashes with a Wemos running Tasmota to then log and live-graph the results with gnuplot :) Sure it's only 1 channel, but it was almost free to implement :)

Really cool to see, I've seen this has an integration into home assistant

Oh man this is so cool! I have some smart plugs around the house monitoring energy usage but it really doesn’t give a full picture. Would love to see something like this integrated with Home Assistant

I did a similar thing with the IoTaWatt (kzfaq.info/get/bejne/rbNhebCDq83aqo0.html, no affiliation with the company) to monitor my energy usage. It's an open device and keeps your data stored locally on an SD card, and you can see the data in realtime by navigating to the device's IP address. I think the graphing functions for the IoTaWatt are a bit better than the Emporia, too. The instructions for it recommend looping the 240v phases as you did to properly count both legs. I never thought of doing two circuits of the same phase in one CT though, so may have to give that a try.

Great video. Really enjoyed it all the way through.

If you have interconnected smoke alarms check those. Been a while since I checked that but I want to say the ones I have were drawing an amp at idle. They just don’t bother with efficient power supplies on those.

As others have mentioned: you can replace the firmware on the things. But it shouldn't be necessary. I wish that by law, all these products would have to also offer an open standard way of working, like mqtt

Thanks for the interesting video. B.t.w. SAMD09 is 32-bit (ARM Cortex M0).

I’d do some tests to ensure the error is linear across the likely power ranges before setting a constant correction ratio with the multipliers.

I basically did the same with a Shelly 3EM and monitor my main 3 phases. Works great and the UI is basically local. So if they stop their services I can switch to VPN whenever I need to know my usage when traveling. Which is not that often anyway.

To be honest it might be easier to reverse engineer the device than build from scratch. It already has the micro for an adc, multiplexers and power supply. It's likely just a serial connection between the two micros, with the ESP just doing the wifi data. Shouldn't be the hard to check all the serial UARTs in the ESP and figure out how it's getting the data. Then either rewrite the ESP firmware or even better swap the ESP for a Pi.

Matthias, Niceley done! I;m sure you will come up with yourown program to not only read the sensors but store the data for long time result comparison. Gonna be interesting to see them all onm one graph over time.

Very eye opening! That 20 watt idle oven is obnoxious and so are those license agreements(re-flash time).

I absolutely agree with you. I hate devices that require internet access and store data in the cloud and do not use them. I've done several home automation projects and they all work independently of the internet (well except for email notification) as long as our LAN is running. But they don't have a pretty user interface so no one but me uses the info. I guess that would be a good winter project learning data presentation.

I bought a regular old analogue style energy meter few months ago, (it has a voltmeter and a coil ammeter inside, with a mechanical counter) At first I used it with inverter, to check idle usage , and comparing lighting circuit vs power circuit. Then I found out it's not really useful, so I took it out and connected it to my AC. It also has a blinking LED, I can count the number of blinks to calculate it more accurately. here is my data. Energy bill per month is 270kWh. So it's around 9kWh per day. In idle, if I turn off all my breakers and only connect the inverter, it uses 20W, even when it's not charging the battery. Entire lighting circuit in the house uses only 1kWh per day. Which includes lights, fans, TV, fridge, phone chargers, etc. Which means the power circuit is using 8kWh per day. The AC, as it turns out, uses 5kWh per day. Yes. A crazy amount. Which means the rest of power appliances use 3kWh combined. Which include, Washing machine, mixer, convection oven, induction cooker, water heater.

I always thought you would build something like this yourself, but I understand with kids it's limited how much time you have. Maybe they'll get interested in tinkering and will be able to help you build stuff like this in the future!

Seeing as the sensors are analog, will extending the sensor wire affect accuracy at all? Did you do any accuracy tests with extended wires before putting them in the wall?

Love these videos. Great job. Thank you.

You want to talk about obsessing about power consumption, we installed a 10kW grid tied solar array two years ago, and I've been compulsively trying to make use of every bit of power we generate given the draconian net metering terms here in Georgia. We're paid out every night at midnight for our excess generation, so I've been using a Sense home energy monitor to track our production vs our usage. It's been very handy, but quite expensive. Every year or so on average, the main unit fails and I'm forced to buy a refurbished replacement at a not-insignificant cost to myself. Also, for some bizarre reason you can't re-use an email address to activate the replacement - you have to use a new email address for each serial number. Very annoying! I'd love to see what you come up with for a monitoring solution, and I guarantee you there's at least a few of us out there who are desperate for a better way to keep tabs on our energy usage. It'd be great to have a way to monitor individual breakers, as I also installed mini splits throughout the house and have a dedicated circuit for EV charging, which is the primary way I've been banking my excess solar production.

Dude!!!! I didn't know you had another chanel, you must inform us. I just subscribed to this channel to now

Matthias maybe Home Assistant is solutions for Your need? There's Emporia Vue integration for Home Assistant. ESP Home supports it also.

Brilliant video!

The reason of the different reading for killawat and courant sensors is that kilawat sees the voltage and the current together, so it is able to compute rms accurately, but the current sensor only rely on current, and make hypothesis about voltage, missing both the real voltage and the power factor.

The Sense device seems to have a more balanced EULA, and a great app, and it’s possible to get the data from their server via a third-party python library. But it doesn’t have individual channel monitors… but honestly I prefer the ease of installation. It’s easy to measure individual devices just through timing their on/off.

Firefighters will love this installation...😃

I have recently been lookin at this device. I have ofteh thought of making my own but kind of think about the time to build it... Its all simple enough. Recently have been playing with Home assistant. A completely locally run home automation system that runs on a Raspberry PI. It works well. If you punch a hole in your firewall you can even use it remotely. Maybe I should do an energy monitoring system using Home Assistant...

Have a look at Home Assistant on a local Raspberry pi, and the use the ESP32 connected to EPSHome to download firmware to read the energy usage. Here in Sweden we got new energy meters installed so it gave me an easy solution to read the raw data from the HAN/P1-interface on the powermeter to an esp32 and push it to my home assistant. Adding InfluxDB and grafana as secondary datastore and visulizer I can create graph and inspect all power usage with 10 sec update intervals. I have then got a some Shelly power switches with energy meters built in connected to the same installation so I can see each applience, combining with the energy dashboard and the Spot price for energy at Nordpool I now know exacly how much each part use and even how much it cost each hour. Since I have the total usage directly from my powermeter it also gives me Voltage/Current and Power for all phases (3). Combining with an other module connected to my heatpump I can detect when it is running and estimat the total usage of power by substracting all other sensors from the totalt plus my "standby" power (~120W). Super addictive to start with home automation so watch out for the rabbit-hole. :D One problem that you may get with the solution is if your phases dosen't have the same voltage in that case you might get wrong power usage if the meter only sample the voltage for one phase but are measuring differnet phases.

I have a feeling that the EULA might fail in the UK if challenged as being an "unfair contract".

I use the Iotawatt very similar device, But data is all stored on a local SD Card. You may want to look into it

Shouldn't actually be too hard to write your own firmware for the device which sends reports to a local server. Saves you the trouble of designing a bunch of hardware. Nice of them to use an MCU that is so easy to program.

You could probably flash it with esphome and gather the data localy in grafana or home assistant.

What you said at the end. Home assistant and esphome plugin is the way to go for you.

Since it does have one of those ESP chips I would not be surprised if someone hasn't already come up with a flash for the chip that lets you keep the data local. I want to do this myself but I'd probably go with an entirely DIY system. Motivation is to understand where/how I use power and when. End goal is to figure out just how much solar and battery I'd need if I ever wanted to off grid the house.

I love that matthias preffer to use a super complicated wood mount insted of double sided tape to mount it! lol.

Flashing that with the established ESPHome configuration will virtually remove all the complaints you have with this device. Combine that with logging the data to something like influxdb and displaying it in Grafana will give you the ability to graph to your hearts content.

Interesting. I have been using the Sense energy monitor for a couple years. The web app and the mobile app are pretty good. The Sense is supposed to be able to ID just about everything in your home, but I have had mixed results with that. I think it would be interesting to see you review the Sense monitor and compare it to the emporia. With the Sense you need only one pair of CTs on the mains into your panel. There are provisions for solar systems and sub-panels.

9:59 Hey we have those same fixtures over our kitchen peninsula and island! We do have LEDs in ours. Took me a few tries to stop blowing them but whatever brand we have now (I couldn't even tell you what it is) lasts pretty long.

I locally use emoncms on a raspberry pi and a esp32 based split phase clamp current monitoring system for my home and it works great and lets me use my data how I want. You might even be able to reflash that device to work with emoncms.

Look in to open energy monitor. You should be able to use same energy clamps.

Just like social media, the consumer and their data is the actual product. I'm looking forward to you writing your own server to use with this or just replacing it completely with something that respects our privacy.

Home Assistant for the win!

I wrote my own firmware for the esp32 using Rui Santos esp32 server and graphing videos and codes to start out. I store radiation counts of a GM tube and store them every 30sec along with an internet time stamp for 48 hours on the esp32, and if I don't download it within that time, it will right over it round robin fashion. It has OTA so upgrading the firmware is nice. It's outside on the fence post. If you want something good that does exactly what you want now and in the future, you have to make it yourself. In your case, I would reprogram the board with a custom firmware and be done with it.

esp32 works great with home assistant. I'll be installing this, and collecting all the data locally. That's the way to go. no dependency on the cloud services.