IoTaWatt VS emoncms

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).

I think I have seen others do this with some smaller dedicated timer thermocouple controllers.. but I wanted to be able to write software to do more.. like email me start/stop emails.. and the openenergy monitor emonpi gives access to emoncms.org which lets me see the kiln temps 24 hours a day from anywhere in the world.. and they have an iphone app that you can use to see the data.. so all I had to do was figure out how to publish the data to their service.. and then write a if then loop python script to check for the kiln temp at a time.. if low..turn kiln on.. if high.. turn it off.... I have dreams of a cleaner simpler script.. but no time to get it done.

Take a look at CircuitSetup.us for their EmonESP whole-house energy monitor. I got their single phase with two current transformers several months ago and it has worked perfectly. It has a web page, sends out MQTT messages and can simultaneously send out emoncms data (see emoncms.org ).