Analyzing my power with the Emporia Smart Home Energy Monitor!

i feel like if you've been watching my channel you probably know that this next video is leading up to another video which is a natural evolution of the path i've been following which is getting all these batteries and basically being obsessed with backup power so today's video let me get into this it's my circuit box breaker break it's my circuit breaker box i'm going to be monitoring my power i want to actually see what i'm using to better understand what i'm about to do so i got this in the mail this is a sun gold power pure sine wave combined inverter and a charger and this thing is freaking huge i mean seriously hand for scale like holy bananas but this thing has a 6 000 watt inverter it does have two phase i really doubt it's going to run anything super big like an air conditioning unit or anything like that but what it made me realize is that i realistically have no legitimate idea of what i consume in my house and furthermore i don't know what different things in my house consume like let's say over a night if i wanted to make through a night running certain things like my server room stuff like that so i'm basically about to jump into the solar game with a full-on inverter i got batteries on the way i am just yoloing the crap out of this to try to figure out if i can do it and not blow myself up but before i do that i'm gonna install this this is basically a home energy monitor it connects to your phone it's smart and it tells me it tells you if you want to get it to how much power ir you use i i or ah roll the intro [Music] now emporia did not send this to me this is another thing that i purchased on my own believe it or not sometimes it's just easier to buy stuff yourself you don't have to deal with them and their requirements so basically this is the smart device and these are the accessories these are the hookups this thing is supposed to be super easy to install because all these little electrical clamps once i take this panel off just kind of loop around things the only thing that i saw online was that these cables are super long and it's kind of turns into a nest like a rat's nest on the inside so uh we'll see how that goes but let me get all this unboxed look at that look at that don't be afraid this is only enough power to kill me like 20 times no big deal but just if you're doing this at home be really careful and ideally i should you know turn off the power i mean i totally turned off the power so look at this look at this you see on the bottom here right this is the load and this is the source so it's showing you which way the electricity goes this is going to clamp around both of those i mean there's two of them here as you can see so that is measuring because there's two phases to your electricity so that is measuring both phases that are coming in and it's going to basically measure the entire flow of electricity through your panel and then each one of these individually see that see that also has the uh the flow and the load right so those go around each individual wire and then you assign it say hey that's for the washer it's for the garage server room whatever it is and then i mean as simple as that sounds you just have to plug them into this now really they plug in with headphone jacks which is kind of what i've seen online as far as why it can turn into kind of a big cluster f in there because pretty much you can't snip these wires and make them shorter without potent i mean you could i mean would you want to though you're going to end up with a bunch of extra wires and it could look like a rat's nest in there i've seen some installations where they just looked really terrible i'm gonna try not to do that but you never know so this device can monitor up to 16 different circuits and this is going to be the wi-fi hookup has this little wi-fi antenna basically this runs off 2.4 gigs and you take this and you create a hole and you shove it through the hole that way you can get wi-fi there's not really a lot of holes up there so i'm going to be shoving it down a hole down there once you get that installed though get all this connected oh yeah i guess you have to hook up power too but you know small stuff [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] so [Applause] [Music] [Music] i got to be 100 honest here that was probably one of the most nerve-wracking things i've done like i was so nervous i started sweating like these things scare me like they really do rightfully so i mean i mean just one touch and i'd just be like but what i did do is i hook both of these up with the correct flow you see how it has an arrow so this is going up to the meter this is going down into the box so i got correct flow and i kind of sort of try to route them behind stuff just to you know make it somewhat clean on both sides and this is going to be just kind of sitting down here somewhere you know like like right there there it is install now this is the power supply this plugs right into the bottom i got power neutral and then blue and red i gotta be honest on what the blue and red for but they did give me a nice little two clips of wire here so i could tap in somewhere on this board uh obviously i have plenty of neutral to tap into that's not a big deal but i will have to come off one of these breakers i don't know which one not sure there we go now if you guys don't know this uh you have a two phase system right basically you have two of these main powers so it's different phases but as this goes down it kind of zigzags so when you have a circuit right here and right here it's actually running off two different phases they use the same neutral but it has two different phases so the red wire i hooked up to one phase the black wire i hooked up to a different phase and then the white and the blue wires i just hooked up to neutral so now that that's done turn it on again look at this so these are all these are double circuits that are just on one thing but um you can see how kind of clustered together they are all right i only got a few more so i shouldn't have a problem getting them all fit but you can definitely see with all these wires hanging out how easy it is for this to become a rat's nest over here is going to be a little bit different because they're way more spaced out it'll be a lot easier up there the same thing as well but this area right down here is definitely the roughest [Music] oh jesus look at that okay hear me out so after combining stuff i have two left over right because i just double tapped a lot of wires over here double tapped a couple wires over there pretty much what i'm gonna do now is set this up with bluetooth and wi-fi and everything that it needs to do and then just kind of sort of play around with the app and see what i think about it and then before i make this look better which it will look better i just want to make sure that this is what i want to do because i want to use all the sensors but i don't know where i want all the sensors to be so yeah and it keeps beeping i don't know why and there we have it look at that i have the app downloaded configured updated installed connected to wi-fi it's showing me i'm using four kilowatts right now four kilowatts for the entire house i am not running a furnace or an air conditioning at the moment right now it's nice outside so i don't have air conditioning on but four kilowatts that's interesting so i'm going to spend a little bit of time with this device because i don't want this to just be like hooked up oh cool and then make a video so uh i want to play with the app i want to configure all the sensors and i want to get everything going so i am going to pause this video and pick up later and fast forward exactly one month later that's right october 17th is when i installed the emporia vue smart home energy monitor today is november 17th so i gave myself exactly one month there's a couple things that i've learned with this that i wanted to share and i definitely don't have the experience in a different home energy monitoring system to compare things apples to apples so i'm just going based off of what i've learned with this device so far first of all wow kind of a clutter when i left the video i was like oh well i'm just gonna run this for a while and i literally just now finished it up today to make it look better that took a little bit i had to go through each one unplug it run it behind the power wires making sure i don't accidentally touch the wrong thing and die and after repeating that process you know about 16 different times i finally kind of sort of got it to look a little bit better either way it does close and i was able to get the lid back on but it did take a little bit of velcro to help clean it up now it didn't come with any kind of way to stick it to the panel and i don't know that might be against the rules or something but i thought to myself why not stick it to the panel so sticky velcro was i stuck some velcro to the back and then to the panel and then i stuck it to the back wall and then after i rerouted everything as you can see it all kind of sort of fits and is a little bit cleaner and i kind of use my expert computer cable management skills and velcro wrapped the wires you know just generic stuff but it looks a lot better the cover is now finally on and here we are i'm going to pull this up on the screen so you can kind of see what i'm talking about as i talk about it but one thing i noticed after everything is said and done after all the testing and everything like that is that well i use a lot of power for computers no way it turns out that i actually use anywhere between 30 to 50 percent of my daily consumption is with computers uh so if you've been following me along i've installed this sub panel i'm doing solar stuff and like i'm i've been dabbling a lot in electricity which is why i got into the smart home monitoring thing because i'm trying to gauge what i would need for electricity in my solar array and i really just kind of figured out that i'm pretty much running just rms at like 1500 to 2000 watts for my computers yes i am mining i have a 2080 ti a 1080 ti a 3080 or i'm sorry a 30 90 and an rtx 4000 so those are all active and running wait i take that back right now the 30 90 is not running but either way with that running it's 30 to 50 percent of my power if not a little bit more right now it says i'm using 3 800 watts 3 800. 50 this is without the 30 90 50 is just my computer rack that's just my computer rack and if you see on the screen right down here where it says basement slash bathroom i actually run another miner which is on the up against the wall in the crafting room or whatever you want to call it 3d print area uh that one is running 595 watts that is the miner running the 2080 ti and the rtx 4000 so realistically you start adding all this up it's like 65 percent of my power currently is in consumption of uh computers i use a lot of power running the subpanel and then monitoring both the sub panels which that's kind of the thing with this is that if you have a 240 you can put it on one and then just multiply it by two but since i wrote i ran a sub panel and then ran some outlets from the subpanel it's going to be off balance so i'm going to run that for a while and just kind of keep two monitors on it just to just just to keep it like that just to see if it's always balanced and trying to get the best possible readings there's only 16 slots in this device and here at the bottom you can see there's 15 percent of my power usage unaccounted for that's 586 watts i did not hit every single line with this device you just you don't have enough i mean this already has 16 slots it plugs in with headphone jacks and it's just that's it that's all you get it's 16. there's a couple lines that i took two lines and merged into one and i personally have not tested out whether or not it makes a difference if you wrap two lines into one or not so it is a chance that some of that you know miscalculated or unbalanced power is being missed because i'm combining some power lines but uh yeah you have 16. so you really just kind of have to measure what you think is going to be the heavy hitters things like your washer your dryer your microwave your server room etc the thing i really like about this app though is that you can break it down uh obviously you can see it in real time every second so 3 800 watts 3 900 watts is what i use uh 30 seconds and then if we flip this over to uh hours so i use 70 kilowatts per day sorry not hours a day so i use 70 kilowatts a day that's interesting uh what is that in amp hours 70 kilowatts see it 240 volts i want to say like 300 amp no that can't be right that can't be right hashtag math either way 70 kilowatt hours in a day if i click on week this is nice it says i have used 264 kilowatts in a week and in the past month i have used 1536 kilowatt kilowatt hours kilowatts you know i'm getting these names probably mixed up but you can see what i see pretty much i use a decent amount of power and i just added the sub panel like very recently so it's not even counted into this so i can't get an accurate percentage because i've been messing with my power pretty much over the last month so 1536 over the last 30 days i feel like that's a lot one thing that i definitely learned is that headphone jacks are definitely not meant to be fondled as you're moving stuff around and trying to get things situated they can fall out very easily which is what happened when i installed a sub panel this is not a normal use case most people don't go around installing sub panels in their house for fun every month but i did that and then i realized later on down the line that some of my readings were being like thrown off and they just weren't they were less accurate i had like 25 percent unaccounted for versus 15 or 10. so i went in there and looked and i just literally had one just barely pop out as far as the wireless connection though it does have the antenna that you install and i just pushed it right through the bottom and i haven't had any issues i have great like fantastic wi-fi in my house so i didn't really expect to have any issues but still for those of you are wondering wherever your electric box is if you're going to be able to get signal just know that the antenna does pop through the top or bottom or side or wherever you want to put it probably the top and bottom and uh it will like be outside of the metal cage that is your electrical box other than that this thing was super simple to install it actually took longer to cable manage and make it you know fit in the box than it did for me originally to install it so if i were you i would recommend just cable management as you wire it that way you can you can do it a lot better than i did because you know i'm a terrible example i do definitely recommend however that you turn off power to your box okay don't yellow it like i did do not risk yourself okay there's a few times where i thought i got close never shocked myself though that was just surprising never shocked myself at the end of the day if you don't feel comfortable you know fiddling around in your electrical box i would probably recommend hiring a professional that's what i'm just going to stick with hire a professional dodging lawsuits like whoa if however you are willing to take on this adventure yourself i highly recommend it because before this i had absolutely no idea what my energy consumption was i had no basis like nothing i had no idea i really literally just look at my bill in terms of how much it was and sometimes i don't even notice that because it's automatic withdrawal so unless it's like super high i usually don't even notice it so i just don't know i don't look at my bill i can look at it it doesn't mean anything to me but now i know the solar inverter that i have that i installed with this sub panel is a 6 000 watt solar inverter it can peak up to like 12 for like 20 seconds if something kicks on but i got this because i wanted to know how far the 6000 watt inverter would go and based off of everything that i'm seeing here if the power goes down i could probably run pretty decent with some powers if i turn off you know non-essential stuff like power down the servers and computers or the heavy hitters like that if i power all that stuff down i could easily probably close by with 1500 2 000 watts but if everything is running we're talking ac miners computers servers everything is running i can get up to the seven to eight thousand watts it gets up there pretty quick so installing the emporia vue smart home energy monitor did help give me a baseline now i know where my numbers are i know what i use and i could look let's say next summer and say oh wow and the peak of the heat of the day this is what i use let's say 8 or 9 000 watts or from cooking dinner which i never cooked dinner but if i did i could say wow the electric stove uses a lot of power it also helps me prep for just in case power goes down so i live in tornado alley tornado comes through and powers down for a week and i want it eventually i'm going to have solar panels and all that other stuff and assuming those don't fly away in a tornado then i'll at least know kind of sorta what i should expect well guys that's it for today so if you guys have any questions comments or concerns post those in the comments section down below as always thank you for watching like and subscribe and have yourself a great day

Channel: Byte My Bits

Views: 7,739

Keywords: energy monitor, emporia vue, emporia vue gen 2, smart home, energy meter, home energy monitor reviews, sense energy monitor, internet of things, emporia energy monitor, power monitor, home energy monitoring system, home energy monitor, sense electricity, energy monitors for home, smart home gadgets, smart home ideas, smart home devices, emporia vue 2 installation, emporia vue energy monitor installation, emporia vue installation

Id: C--Sz2gTSoY

Length: 19min 45sec (1185 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 18 2021