IoTaWatt VS Home Assistant

If anyone is interested in having this type of real-time usage data for their own own home, I highly recommend IoTaWatt: https://iotawatt.com

It's a completely local energy monitor that you can install into your home's circuit breaker panel, and then view dashboards or read data via an API from a local web server running on-device. You choose how many sensors you want, but you can monitor your whole home as well as individual circuits.

For example, I track and trigger automations when my various appliances (laundry, dishwasher, microwave, etc) start/stop. It's very cool. Just be warned that it does require some research, basic understanding of electricity, and comfort working with high voltage mains connections if you plan to DIY it but I found it approachable and easy to setup.

What it looks like: https://i.ibb.co/qBVmBD1/IMG-1595.jpg

I use an IotaWatt system. It's super easy to install and manage. It uses inductive sensors at your circuit breaker so you can see your total usage and per circuit usage. It also easily hooks into HomeAssistant but that's a bit more advanced of a project.

I have an IotaWatt and am pretty happy with it. It was not the cheapest option; but is simple, reliable, and local only which checked all my boxes. I did install it myself; BUT this involved opening up and poking around inside my breaker panel. AFAIK this is pretty much required for any per-circuit home power monitoring. Insert "The power inside your breaker panel can kill you instantly and painfully" warning. My panel is mounted on the wall (rather than inside); and I guess I could have put the clamps on the wires where the exit the panel. But it would have been much harder to identify circuits. Also it would probably be much messier.

For individual circuit energy monitoring, I use Iotawatt. This involves installing CT clamps in the main breaker panel to monitor the circuits you want to monitor. I’m comfortable doing it myself but if you’re not, DO NOT mess around with it, hire a professional electrician instead because you can get electrocuted.

IoTaWatt https://iotawatt.com

If you really want to mail down your sources of current draw, I can’t recommend this enough: http://iotawatt.com

Since you have home automation, you may already know of IoTAWatt - it's a little cheaper than others, and works really well on its own or with HomeAssistant etc.

Sense is really good at measuring overall usage. Their neural network analysis to identify individual devices is anything but reliable. If this is important to you, I suggest you monitor individual circuits with something else (eg. iotawatt).

Home Assistant

This time, I attended Monitoring your home, with DevOps observability tools. I thought it would be about OpenTelemetry for your home. After the speaker mentioned Home Assistant, however, I didn't pay much attention to the rest.

The rootless .container files go into ~/.config/containers/systemd. I'm using one to run Home Assistant.

ha-aws-cost is a project from Diego Marques for folks who use Home Assistant (a very popular open source home automation system), and provides custom component interacts with AWS to get the month to date cost and forecast cost and make it available on Home Assistant. It adds two new entities 1/Month to date cost: The current cost of your AWS account, and 2/Forecasted month costs: The forecasted cost based in your current consumption. Check out Diego's post on LinkedIn that provides some more background to this project.

Nice!

For a home-rolled solution, I use a GE CYNC ST19 Edison Style bulb in a socket right outside my office door. I have it configured through Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/), and then use Hammerspoon (https://www.hammerspoon.org/) on my macbook to make an API call to Home Assistant when the camera state changes.

If my camera turns on/off, so does the light bulb. Works really well for letting my family know I'm busy in meetings.

Given these changes, I thought about reintroducing Homebridge. But upon researching, I discovered Home Assistant.

🏡 Project: Home Assistant 💡 Why Contribute: Home Assistant is an open-source platform designed to manage smart homes. With its vast community and growing list of supported devices, you can contribute by adding new integrations, fixing bugs, or improving documentation.

I think you're looking for Home Assistant:

https://www.home-assistant.io/

Looks very similar, yet not as polished as https://www.home-assistant.io/.

Looking at their example "show me the camera in the living room" I'm reminded of this blog post:

https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/06/07/ai-agents-for-...

> As we have researched AI, we concluded that there are currently no AI-powered solutions yet that are worth it. Would you want a summary of your home at the top of your dashboard if it could be wrong, cost you money, or even harm the planet?