Emporia Vue 2 Installation

hey everyone thanks for checking us out the video is all about the vue2 install on the circuit breaker the sensors the controller and registering with the app and actually going through a lot of the functionality within the app a review of the accuracy and usefulness of it may come at a later time when it's collected more information during the install i'll use wrong terms ground neutral rca jack versus headphone jack just follow through and i'm sure you'll understand as you see exactly how the install goes thanks all right so we have our emporia view two we can go ahead and open it up let's see what we got inside all right so looks like maybe trolling it sensors sensors [Music] and accessories so nicely packed accessories there's your phase monitoring we have our sensors here looks like each one's right by the size of a thumb long enough cord to plug into the main unit check out this guy not much to him but we got eight plugins on either side and probably your phase is on the top and he's got a numbered on the back so abc is probably i guess maybe three phases but we're only using two at least i'm only using two see if there's anything else on this side it's not so that one's empty sensors phases some accessories here [Music] short cables we have our wi-fi plug and a nut i guess over power cords is probably two feet so one phase two phase power cables here's your plug in the back phase on top sensors on the side and then we have our wi-fi antenna extender for outside the box these are all 50 amp and 50 amp so the unit doesn't come with any instructions so we're just gonna have here it says scan the qr code to download the app so go ahead and get that and install wait for it and see what it says all right so we got two 200 amp panels with 150 amp breakers on the outside just have one view two right now so we're going to take off the first panel as it has some of the main main circuit breakers that we're trying to monitor so we'll go ahead and take that panel off and get inside okay so we got our first panel here and on this side i have three open circuit breaker slots so we have these bottom two and then one on this other side and we need to monitor both phases coming in so we have phase one phase two and then our ground and so what i'm going to do is just put two new circuit breakers down here at the bottom so we can monitor both phase one and phase two and then we'll work on connecting that up into our view too so all we should have to do is take this guy and kind of snap minute again if you're not a licensed electrician don't do this it's very dangerous and you can kill yourself so we don't want to be messing around with any of that so it's got a rocker just pop it in i do have them turned off so we don't have to worry about that so both those guys are in so now we can monitor phase one and phase two on here all right so based off the instructions with two empty breakers and monitoring the two phases we're gonna take your cord and we're gonna take the white and blue and put them on the neutral and take our red and our black and attach one to each breaker that we put in so let's just pull off these little cuts they already have for us i'm going to run these up on the side again don't be doing this if you're not a licensed electrician just be extremely careful because obviously you're dealing with hot wire if you haven't turned it off make sure you get that screw right on there so you get a good contact all right we got both done now we need to get both our bait is connected up and the breakers are off just to make sure it's not a problem go ahead and get these guys in okay so now we got both these guys in there nice and tight those right around there turn these guys up a little bit and plug them back into the bottom of the view where the port is now both these breakers are off so we still don't have any power associated with it just yet hey guys just doing a quick follow-up and inserting this in the video after i was watching it and you couldn't get a good view of where i was grounding the wires on the grounding bar and so there is your white and your blue on the ground bar itself and then you have your black and your red going into the breakers themselves so when you're hooking up the power for your view that is how you want to get them done alright so the next step is to connect up the phase one and phase two to the view so we have the large clips that go on here and it's you have to put them on a certain way other you actually register negative voltage so easy way to tell is the symbol is on the front for the name there's not one on the back and they also tell you if we can see that there is a k to l and the arrow goes towards the breakers so we'll go ahead and try and get that hooked up here of course i wrapped up a little too much but we're good all right now of course with the metal going down make sure you don't touch anything depending on how you wire it and get it in there because you don't want to be causing any problems so i'm just going to put this right here and then feed it down the side behind these wires i like to try and keep it a little clean usually just do a few at a time and then we'll work our way all the way down now just take this one again with the symbol on the outside the arrow going towards the breakers and clamp it around this first one all right and you'll hear it click and they may not have heard it there and let it sit right there should be good pull it all the way down and then on your box it is labeled abc and so we'll plug this first one into a right nice and clean and then we'll have to repeat for the second one so i'll unwrap this guy saran wrapping twisty ties all right same process careful pull these guys down back a few wires at a time make it easy and you could leave them in front if you want to this is just the way that i like to do it so whatever you can do to be safe make sure that don't cause any problems there we go all the way down and we got it turned around so we got to do this way quarry in the front k to l with the arrow pointing towards the breakers so go ahead and snap that one on let it come down so probably can't see that but notice the wires are both going out to the left and the arrows are pointing on the bottom pointing down towards breakers and we'll go ahead and take this one and put it into b okay so we've got our main phases going we have our ground and then our two breakers here the breakers are off the next things i wanted to do was to put in mark out for the antenna wireless antenna so it should be pretty short and it does have a little thing here so we'll just knock out a little hole in the bottom of the panel and stick it in there and then we'll be able to get our wi-fi antenna out of the box and it has to be out of the box because within that steel box you just don't get very good signal anywhere so all we need to do is take a screwdriver and a hammer and finally these holes on my panel have a whole bunch down here at the bottom and we're just going to pop it real lightly with a hammer and it pops up inside and put those down and then you probably to get with your fingers just bend it back and forth until it just kind of pops off and then you'll have your little piece of metal out with a hole and we'll take our antenna and pop that black piece into the hole on the inside kind of cover it up so we don't leave any holes exposed in the box and it fits in there very nicely and then on our emporia box it's got the antenna at the top where the phase one and phase two connect in or your main power feeds and we'll just screw that in there and that is now good to go so now all we're left with are the individual monitors on the circuit breakers themselves now when this comes in from shipping they have saran wrap on every one of these and i have 16 monitors it took about 15 minutes because you kind of got to play with it and find out where that wrapper is there's no real sign for it and unwrap it looks nice but it's really a hassle then unwrap the twist tie and then we'll have our cord here it looks maybe i guess about three feet and again one of the little clamps so you just lift up your finger on this little clamp here on the side it opens up put it over the wire clamp it back down now i did read an instruction it doesn't matter which way you put these on there let you know as far as the power is currently the emporia logo does not have to be on the outside so now we have 16 of these to put on probably what everyone should do and certainly your own choice i went through and listed out the panel and listed out every circuit breaker and there are i don't know there's probably around 35 in this box itself so i can't monitor all of them so i specifically will highlight the ones that i want to monitor and where they're at so now in this app when you have a dual breaker power going out things like we're 240as and we're using two phases you should be able to monitor just one line because the power draw should be the same on both sides for this install and to make sure that that's accurate that's what i've been reading i'm going to actually put one monitor on each line and then we'll pull it together now in the app currently they cannot add two lines or two sensors to total up for one monitor if you will or one unit of power being used to monitor how much power this breaker is actually drawing or these breakers you actually have to add them up manually however if once i do that in my case and i make sure that the equal power usage between both of them i know that i only need one sensor and in the app you can double or triple the amount of uh power going from one line for the number of power feeds that it has so in other words i believe this is my dryer i'm going to put two on there so i'm going to monitor each side of this 40 amp feed and they should end up being equal when the dryer is running and so then i come back and take the monitor off the second line and put it on one of my other breakers that i want to monitor and in the app i'll go into the dryer feed for this sensor and i can just double it so that it shows accurate of usage between both lines and you can do that for any one of these guys at our dual breaker so now for our first one let's see we have the furnace so i'm going to pull this one guy in and pop them on there you can hear them snap so you got a good connection and i'm going to leave these on the outside because these may change at some point in time and also in my sheet that i went through and created i also labeled each one of the sensors so that i know which one is which so when i come back through here after we get all these on i'll go on the bottom of them and i'm going to label each sensor 1 2 3 all the way through 16. and then if i want to move them i just change them on my sheet spreadsheet so i know which ones be a monitor and i can go ahead and change them in the app and change the description assuming they have have something like that and you can see also from just another note on these power sensors if i want to put another one in i have enough room down here at the bottom at least right now to put another employee in there so i can monitor every circuit or almost all them since there's 36 but if i get away with monitoring just one on these double ones that'll at least free me up three more and there's actually two more down here for the water heaters and i have plenty of room up here to attach two more feeds so you could actually in my box anyway you could put two of them in there so now i'm just going to go through and hook up all monitors and plug them in and make sure that like this guy in my sheet he's sensor number one and on the box itself on the back they're all labeled one through sixteen so make sure i plug him in a little rca port for number 16. so we'll go through and get all that done [Music] [Music] just counting everything off and you can see we have nice big mess of wires here one more thing on the antenna is don't forget to screw on your antenna down at the bottom i just use a huge mess of wires but we'll take care of that here in just a second or a little bit because what we're also going to do is i'm going to go through and number all these sensors and then i'll number them down here on the bottom on these individual rca plugs that go in and that way when i go to move them around i know exactly where i'm moving them and i don't have to trace them out or anything like that especially after we get some cables kind of nice and uh cleaned up in here so now we'll go ahead and turn on these breakers and we should hear a little sound based on from what it says so okay there you go very high pitched sound and i got a green light and now it's off to the app because i want to make sure everything's working before we go back in here and clean everything up so i don't know if you can see that or not but it does have see i can hide the light from it a little bit it does have a nice green light on it so now i'll go see what the app says okay so there's not a whole lot in the instructions as far as what to do next other than download the app and install it so i've downloaded the emporia app i used a qr code that was one of the boxes or you can just search for it in the apple store or google play and i could use the create account option that emailed me a passcode and entered that and now we're ready to go so as we can see here we do have the emporia view 2 or gen 2 so we'll click on that guy and we've already done the installation so we'll go to setup and i don't have any solar so we'll keep going all right so tap the number all right so we got our box handy here still i'm going to assume that is correct since we don't have anything else going on let's double check though 252. okay that matches up so note to you if you're installing it make sure you have the box handy or the last few digits of the upc on the back so now it looks like we'll go ahead and connect up wi-fi and your phone does have to have bluetooth enabled all right so we'll put in our password here three next connect to wi-fi all right so this guy is in what i call panel one so we'll name the panel and we are in eastern time minus five okay and we'll save it so we can just see that okay so that seems simple enough let's see if it's working and i'm not seeing anything yet so i don't know if that's just just not set up yet or not all right so here we go i've gone through and i've started labeling all these circuits so i can see what they are and when i first opened the app as expected there wasn't any values but we actually did start seeing numbers populate about 10 minutes 15 minutes afterwards which is good because now we know it's operating correctly so to go in and actually name each circuit that you should have from your sheet so you know where it is as far as what you're monitoring so we go to settings and then we'll go to manage devices and panel one in circuits and panel one is what i named it here's probably going to be different then we have last one here with circuit 16 and that is my water heater and it is the second breaker in it so we should be like so and then we can hit the circuit type little down arrow and scroll down and hit water heater and i don't think this really matters necessarily but you can probably pick anything i think it's more they may be collecting data more than anything else once we validate that both circuits are collecting the same amount of power then what we can actually do is remove the second the second sensor on the second feed and then use this multiplier that's right here and just set the multiplier to two so that when we're looking at one feed that has two breakers it is actually just doubling the power so like on the water heater that has two 40 amp breakers assuming what we're doing right now is monitoring both but that should end up being equal and if it is then we can remove the the monitor from the second breaker and then just double the power right here for a multiplier on the first breaker and that will give us an accurate reading and we can have an extra sensor to monitor something else so we'll save that and we can see that if we go backwards and go to home we have the two water heaters right here that have been running for some time and you can see the usage is exactly the same between the two of them and if we look at see what else we could find well i guess none of these other ones really have usage as of yet so i'll have to wait so the next thing we want to do is to set up the cents per kilowatt hour to give us an accurate reading on our bill so now if we go to settings in the bottom right and we go to household info we go to set utility rate and panel one which is what i named it and let's go instead of 13.2 i'm going to say it's 9 cents now i have different cost per kilowatt hour based on the amount that's actually used versus time of day and it goes up and there's a little bit of a surcharge on top of that and i'm just kind of rounding it up to nine cents so i won't be 100 accurate but should be relatively close so we'll save it and then we'll go back back and home and now we can actually see what is actually costing us the most as far as power usage and of course over time it'll keep picking it up we're updating about every minute we have a minute let's see if we look at our you can see it's different the water heater here is obviously higher something to good that will pop up over time okay so now we have the app done we verified everything is working and we have this rat's nest of wires that we need to clean up one thing that i did go through and do is on each one of these guys i labeled it or really numbered it for the monitor that it's plugging into so we have one through 16 down here on this box and then based on where this wire goes i've labeled one and then this one's 13 11 6 and so forth so that if i ever want to move one around i know exactly what plug it is and what it should go to so now we'll take a second and we'll go through and clean all this up so it fits nicely in here okay well here we are with the finish so as mentioned we got our two feeds or really two phases coming in we have the monitors going down and if we can see the k through l right here the arrow is pointing down and it's easy because just make sure your emporia logo is up at the top so then we have all of our sensors numbered for where they plug into the main unit on their own wires and then down at the bottom we have the main unit everything in it and i've also numbered all the numbers for all the cables down here so if i unplug one it's really easy to know exactly where it goes back in which i did several times trying to get all the wires best situated as possible so now with the breaker box everything's in nice and tight i could probably get another one in here i think it'd really just be tight down here at the bottom of these wires but i'm sure i could get it to work so the next thing to do is just put our panel back up and cover everything back up and don't forget we did put these two breakers in so when you put the panel back up you gotta pop out that metal switch cover so that these breakers can come through okay so we have the panel back on we have our two new breakers labeled and i you could use a much lower than 20 hand breaker i just use that so that in case if i ever did want to wire something else in that breaker that i would have plenty amperage i don't have to worry about swapping anything out and then if we close that up down below we can see our little wireless antenna hanging out down at the bottom and that's it so now on to the app all right guys so we're back here to the app everything's installed and labeled and put back together everything appears to be running good and i just want to give you another run through the app so you can see what it looks like with some data now a little bit ago i changed my kilowatt hour price and i haven't seen the prices come back through we'll have to wait and see how that ends up going so right now let's see if we go to settings and i notice the notifications we can add specific alerts i guess if you want to know if something exceeded a certain kilowatt hour for an extended period of time and then there's also some interesting things here they'll be nice they all say future or not yet functional so home mechanical issues such that maybe your hvac or water heaters or something are pulling too much energy or out of normal you can get an alert for it we go back for unusual consumption same exact thing not feet not yet available but if something from the panel see something odd it will come through and show you enter saving energy savings options i'm already well aware of a lot of things that i could say i'm not interested in alerts about it money savings perhaps if they know your utility or certain rates like obviously if you run more stuff at night versus during the day if you have run outside of peak periods and then emporia notifications themselves so planned outages be good to know just in case so then if we get back all the way to the beginning or we can go back into household i guess first we got our utility rate you can set your time zone your square footage your house honestly a lot of this i think is more to collect information about you versus needed for the app i mean it has absolutely nothing to do with multiplying your power usage times your kilowatt hour rate but you can fill it out if you want perhaps it'll highlight something in the future at some point so if we get all the way back out and we go back home again we got all our devices here there's 16 of them because i'm using all 16 devices and if we go back to or 16 sensors and we could go back to graphs somewhat interesting so if you click over here at top where it has panel one or maybe this little finger icon there fuse 10 icon you go you can see all your 16 devices on here so i can go to my water heater and we can look at that and we can see how it's being used and then you can change between if you click see the dollar sign you can go to watts or we click dollar sign and go to amps and any one of these other features so you know your green stuff car miles carbon dioxide trees and again if we go back and we look at and so i'm clicking on this little icon on the top left and the green with the solid filled in circle and then the three open dots if we click on that we can remember i have two water heaters or two phases for each water here two breakers that are linked together for an 80 amps total and assuming these guys end up being equal in cost i can take one of the sensors off and move it on to a different circuit breaker so we can monitor more information and we have you know what a furnace it's summer it shouldn't be doing hardly anything and we go back to let's say one of the bedrooms and it's not really doing anything there we can click on a little tree at the top and go back to dollars since we're not reporting anything yet with dollars let's go back to just look at watts and we can see how many watts that room is using or whatever's on that breaker so good information a lot of ways to pull through and overall it seems pretty good so far it does have this savings app or button down at the bottom honestly it's just about a bunch of advertisements you can read through them if you ever want to talks about smart thermostats led bulbs managing energy for time and other things like that so that is about it and so now oh look so now we got well this is in watts so what if we got our dollars back yet nope no dollars back we can't see in watts where everything's being pulled so interesting so now we'll just have to monitor and see how things go and see how accurate it is so one final comment on the emporia vue two i looked at several different devices i looked at sense i looked at wiser i looked at idro e y e d r o smappy nurio engage and curb and all these seem like they would work pretty well there is a following forum on sense i would say if you want to monitor your whole house usage and you don't want to have all the wiring but just the top phases it might work pretty good best i can tell is discovery is haphazard at best and you may discover 20 of the devices in your house and so you'll never really know what's using the power itself by using the views monitors on each individual breaker you know exactly what is using that power because on that breaker you just have to know where that breaker goes on some of these other ones like hydro it was very expensive it needed multiple units that's one thing that's really good about the vue two it has one unit and it has 16 monitors and that's a fairly decent amount because most of the breakers in in a house rarely get used you know you might have like gfi outlets in a bathroom unless you're running a hair dryer or curling or other things like that to have a high draw there's not much going on there it could be like outlets in a garage and things so you can pull things out engage was also a really good one e-g-a-u-g-e but it's also very expensive and that's also where emporia vue 2 comes in right at the perfect piece we have we can download the data from the app as far as into a csv create our own graphs in excel or some other application so we have the raw data itself it has a small box with 16 sensors which is a lot compared to all the other ones most of the other ones only have four to eight and then on top of that it was relatively inexpensive compared to a lot of these other guys i believe it was about 140 dollars so overall has more monitors more sensors it has a single box you have control your raw data and the cost and so we'll see how this goes and hopefully i'll throw another update up a month or two and go through a whole nother review and see how everything adds up thanks for watching

Channel: Foray Fog

Views: 22,437

Keywords: Vue2, Emporia, Power Monitoring, Vue, Sense, wiser, eyedro, smappee, neurio, engauge, curb, home power usage

Id: wreTPTUnJR4

Length: 35min 13sec (2113 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 03 2020