Home Power Monitoring with the Emporia VUE and Home Assistant.

hi there today we're going to take this energy this emporia energy view energy monitor and we're going to place it in this electrical panel make sure you're using a licensed professional and you're doing everything according to your local code so let's get started [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] here's the completed install there's just no way to get those wires to be any shorter than that so you have this bundle of wires right here and that's just the way they are plus my panel is recessed in the wall and typically you would take that wi-fi antenna and you would put that wi-fi antenna outside the bottom or side of your box through one of the the little uh cutouts here but because my panel's recessed i don't have any of that i could potentially put it out the front of the panel if i really needed to but i'm so close to my ap i don't think there's going to be an issue with that but here is the completed install i've wire tied things or wire wrap things as best i can one thing to note too is that when you install these make sure that you have there's a little labels on here make sure you have these pointed the right direction all of these should be pointed away from the breaker and these should be pointed towards the breaker as you can see there all right so the next step is to go ahead and get it installed into the app get all the stuff configured and then we'll jump into home assistant and see what kind of sensors we have for the energy portal and home assistant okay so we're going to go ahead and install the integration that we need to have emporia talk to home assistant and that's a github link uh this uh individual here magico13 has created an integration and we're going to use the integration today and i'll link this down below and what you do is you copy the integration or the repo so we're gonna do that copy that we're gonna go over to h-a-c-s now this is an h-a-c-s uh um an h-a-c-s integration not a direct home assistant core integration so click on hacs and in the integration section here you're going to click on the three dots up here on the right and we're going to do a custom repository and under the custom custom repository we're going to paste in that link that that i just copied from the other uh github site and the category category is going to be integrations and so what we'll do there is then add it and it'll show up now as a new integration or a new repository to pull the integration from you can see it here once we do that we can close this down and we can search for emporia and you can see we have the emporia view here and we're going to install this integration and once you install this you're going to have to restart home assistant with hacs most of the integrations you install require a restart so we're going to go ahead and do that now before you restart you always want to make sure that you check your configuration and make sure nothing is wrong with it so we're going to check the configuration now and then we'll go ahead and do a full restart of home assistant and that'll take a minute or two depending on your hardware and then we'll come back right after that all right now that home assistant has restarted we should have an hacs integration but we also need to go into home assistant and we tie our hacs integrations into home assistant using the core integrations click on integrations and click on add integrations and if you've got the hacs thing installed correctly you should see the view emporia view listed here is a new integration so we're going to click on that and it's going to ask you for your email and your password that you set up on your emporia account when you first install the device so i'm going to input that now and when you see success here you're going to have an option to select all the areas in which all these devices show up so if you have the emporia view with all of the extra 50 amp sensors the little clamps you're going to have all of these devices show up here as you had set up in the app in addition if you have the two main clamps you'll have those as well up here so there you have it click on finish here and you can go over here and look at your 18 devices and your 54 entities and they're ready to use right away so the first thing i want to do is i want to go over to my energy and i want to set up energy set these devices in my energy portal on home assistant and for that we go back over to configuration and we're here now looking at energy we have consumption here which is my main uh clamp that i have outside on my 220 circuit coming into the house i can add an additional consumption here which would then be my new uh device that i have on emporia and that's going to be this uh clamp 123 which is the the main clamps and if you look at the the emporia device you'll see uh when you put those main clamps in you'll put them in numbered slots one two and three and all of the rest of the devices go along the sides as numbers so i'm gonna choose that and right now i'm just not going to track the costs on it actually i can't select it here this has been an issue i've had with chrome uh for a while now i'm not able to actually put in here i can't select it so i'm just going to type it in and save it now and here's individual devices that i already have set up in my energy portal i'm going to add all the new clamps that i just added in here we'll go through one at a time and we'll add the clamps and it automatically selects things that are applicable to the energy monitor so kilowatt hour type devices and i'm just going to go through all of these and i'm going to select all of these one at a time now i'm going to do this in let me switch over to firefox because for some reason i can't click and it'll take me too too long to type each one of those in so we're over here in firefox now where i can actually click on this stuff you can see here i have my main energy meter i just talked about and i have the uh the new one i just added from the emporia device so now i'm going to add all the rest of my devices here one at a time and i'm gonna go for the one day this one d means one day i'm gonna go for the one day resolution or our entity so that it can reset every day like it should when that's uh that's how energy portal works in home assistant you want it to reset on a daily basis and i'm just going to go through and add all the devices okay i have all the devices added now and if you're curious what these numbers are after each one of these devices that's the port on the side of the emporia where this is plugged into so in addition to giving the names when you configure the device it automatically applies the port number on the entity so you know which which plug or which hole it's plugged into on the side there so i should have 16 devices here and the reason i'm putting these in first thing is because i needed to be able to i need to be able to start working and if you look at the energy portal he says anything that you add in here can take up to two hours for it to start arriving in your energy dashboard so i want to get a head start get all the devices added that i'm going to track in my energy portal and then uh come back in a couple hours and see that they're there if we look at energy portal now we'll see that we have both of these things here but they don't have any data yet so we're going to give that some time to populate and then we'll come back and look at it and see what it looks like in a couple hours while we wait for the energy portal to populate let's talk about the application for just a moment now i didn't go through and i didn't show you all of the application i didn't show you everything that or the whole install process when you first open the box and start installing the emporia there's a step-by-step uh setup process that the app will show will take you through it's very detailed it works very well one of the things you do have to remember though is make sure that you have uh the clamps pointed the right direction i actually had to reverse a few of my clamps because when i first set it up i didn't read the directions correctly and i had some of the clamps pointing away from the uh or towards the breakers when they should be pointing away and vice versa so make sure you follow the directions but follow everything you do when you install it if you're going to do this make sure you use a licensed professional if you're uncomfortable with electricity you are sticking your hands in a live electrical box uh or you're in electrical box that should be shut down uh but make sure you're doing this safely and you're using a licensed professional if needed all those are all my disclaimers make sure you're doing it safely however you happen to do that all right so let's take a look at the actual device right here i'm going to take you through actually how the energy use is set up in my device when you've when you configure this and you go through the steps you'll be able to name all of your devices and you can see here that i have all my devices named for the different breakers so as you go through and add these in there you'll have to understand how your breakers are set up and name them appropriately but now what you have is you have your total usage it's a second by second resolution so you can do seconds minutes hours days weeks months and years now i don't have anything more than a day yet because i just installed it but you can see on a second by second basis what is using the most energy and in my case right now it's the attic and we can kind of watch it as it go goes along here now my attic includes both my furnace slash air conditioning uh fan the big fan that sits up there in addition to some electrical equipment some computers and radios and stuff that i have running up there so what i say attic in this case it's all of that stuff up there and you can look at it on a minute by minute basis you can definitely tell here from this image or this graph uh when the the big fan is running for the air conditioning distribution system because i had it turned off and then i turned it on a few minutes ago and then you can kind of watch it on an hourly basis but you can go through all of these devices and you can look at if you look at home you're looking at the overall usage for the entire house and again actually i think i need to look on there we go total usage and then i can graph it and you can look at total usage for the day for your entire uh load center and that's coming from the two main clamps that are in the in the mains coming into the house and you can look through all of this stuff here it's a really neat app there's a bunch of options you can set up here they do sell thermostat smart plugs and i guess ev chargers or at least you can connect to some of those i don't use any of that stuff because i have all of my sonoff and uh taz tasmania stuff i don't need their smart plugs but you can get that in there as well and then here's a circuit graph if you want to look at it that way and then you can set up notifications for various things approaching your monthly peak this is interesting if you have a oven you can notify yourself that you left it on unusual consumption energy saving opportunities home mechanical issue so there's a bunch of stuff on here that you can set up for that i i may want to know when my emporia is offline that one i will set up so i assume that comes in the application you can export your raw data to csv uh and other stuff now they do have a web link and i talked to them on chat yesterday and when i talked to them on chat yesterday i asked them uh if i could share it's a beta test link and you can log into their web portal on their beta test site and they want feedback so you would do you would send an email to support an emporia uh what i'll i'll link this all down below but they said it was okay to submit or to send the link out so they can get feedback on their portal and then they will release that as a production portal at some point the caveat to that and this this is preventing me from doing it right now is that the portal in the the beta portal is not um is not ssl secure so you're sending your emporia credentials over the open internet that's a problem they said yes we know that because it's a beta well it doesn't matter if it's a beta or not you have to secure your credentials so although i'll link that down there i caution you probably not to use it until they actually get it up and running unless you want to try it out and then you'll have to go in there and change your emporia credentials right after you use it otherwise you're gonna you have a potential to have um to be hacked or whatever else all right so back on the uh back on the the um the app it's it's just it's pretty basic right you have a management section so you can use uh time of use management you can set things for your smart plugs and your ev chargers uh you can adjust them based on your rate throughout the throughout the day um of course you have pc uh you have mana peak demand device management uh optimize excess energy uh and yet some of this stuff requires uh some additional devices like the smart plugs and what not to use but one of the things they do is if you set your location it can try to get your rate now i haven't played with that too much there's a notifications tab for all your notifications i haven't tried to do that yet to see if that really does work um so right now i'm just going by basically kilowatt hours or watt hours kilowatts usage and you can see it as it as it circulates here on a second by second basis when you do set this up by the way you need to make sure that you're close to the um that you're close to the device that uses bluetooth for initial connection to do the configuration so make sure you're doing that um and other than that it was super simple to set up it's 2.4 gig only uh so you'll need to make sure that you're using a 2.4 gigahertz wi-fi access point most of us have the dual band so that's probably not an issue for you and that's about it so let's let this populate uh we'll let this populate in the energy portal here and then we'll come back in a little bit and see if we get some more data here and once we do that what i'm also going to do is show you a little bit of stuff in grafana uh to to plot this in grafana in addition to just using the energy portal here because i want to see stuff over time if you've watched any of my other videos you've seen my grafana stuff where i like to watch stuff uh there it's a it's right now a better interface for me to be able to track in over time right so we'll come back in a little bit whenever this is uh populated and see what it looks like okay so i've given it some time and it's populated the new devices into my energy portal here again remember it takes up to two hours once you add something for it to start showing up so you'll notice right away here that i have a stacked block or stacked bar here and it's comprised of both my home energy meter g2 and the new emporia device that i have now this could be problematic because i'm adding the value of two different devices that are measuring the same data and what i mean by that is this device here measures all of my incoming power usage to the house on the 220 legs that that also feed the washer the dryer no the dryer uh the air conditioner and the oven stove those are all 220 devices in order to get um readings on those i had to put the meter outside in that box this is the meter i've been running for a very long time that you've seen in some of my other videos the new emporia meter is measuring the 110 legs that are on the garage panel and they don't include the air conditioner the dryer or the oven stove because those are all 220 that get fed directly from the outside box so what i'm essentially doing here is measuring all the 220 stuff plus the 110 stuff and then adding them together ultimately that's probably not the best idea so in this case i don't really need this to be monitored i only need the main outside panel to be monitored for my overall power usage of the house this is nice to see and i can maybe make a sensor or template or something that then does some math here to see the differences to know how much is running on those three big ticket items versus what's running just on the internal stuff all right so in addition to that we now see all of our devices coming in from the individual clamps individual circuits and as you look along here these any of these with the 1d the one day resolution are listed those are the ones i just added a little bit ago that you watched me do and we can see now they're sorted in order of uh in order of consumption so the disposal of the refrigerator those are on the same circuit uh the disposal thing in the sink that chops up the the food or whatever and puts it down the drain so anyway that fridge is running the most with the attic as being second and again the attic's got the big air conditioning slash heater fan in there that runs all the time or runs whenever the air conditioner is on so that will consume more and on we go down here some of these haven't had any consumption at all yet so there's nothing to report so there it is in the energy portal you'll start seeing all of these show up from the view over to the energy portal and you have a way to start measuring your household consumption on a per circuit basis so that gives you an indication of this type of display and you can you can bring it up by week or month or whatever so i like to graph things in grafana and i like to do things a little bit nicer there or they look a little bit nicer to me so i'm going to run over and let's do a little quick grafana graph of some of these values i already have a power dashboard that i've set up so i'm going to go ahead and add this to the power dashboard now i've got some videos on how i built some of these other dashboards so go ahead and check those out if you haven't seen them but i'm going to add a new panel and it'll be an empty panel i'm just going to call it emporia view as the title of the panel and it's going to be a time series and i'm going to start looking for kilowatt hour type devices so we'll select kilowatt hour and it shows me everything which i don't want and i'm going to choose an entity id and the tag value is going to be the actual entity idea we'll just start with the first one here so we have attic one day and because we're taking a picture every minute here you'll see a pretty granular view of usage here and let me pick another one so we'll go down here and add a query same thing we're going to select kilowatt hours as a measurement entity id let's do the fridge disposal fridge one day and now you have two values here and you can start playing around with stuff over here on the right hand side where you can set legends so you have kilowatt hour mean so we want to name these right so this is going to be the attic and the second one is going to be the fridge disposal and you'll see these show up on the actual graph so now we have attic and fridge disposal and you can see the different uh values here we can we can change to bars uh lines we can do smoothing so there's a lot of different options here because this has only been running a couple hours i'm going to expand it out a little bit more there so we can see more of what it is and then the points if we want to choose the size of the points i can make those a little bit smaller and then i always want to have a connected line and you can see the usage here as we go along a lot of options you can set to make this look just how you want it again there's bars versus lines and then you can do stacked if you want to do stacked to kind of give you overall for everything and give you a picture it's kind of like what you're looking at on the energy portal only in a kind of a different format so again you can start messing around and setting all of these things however you want to set them and just kind of look at your values over time so there you go with the energy portal we've we've installed it we've talked about getting it into the energy portal we've talked about using grafana here to show it it's a neat tool that you can use and again you've got notifications you can get directly from emporia you can set up notifications and home assistant if you want to so a lot of stuff you can do with energy monitoring to kind of keep an idea of your energy usage and kind of turn things off we know we've heard of the phantom devices chargers and things that sit there all the time if you have a circuit that should have no activity on it and you're seeing it check for those phantom chargers check to see how much those cable boxes or those you know streaming devices or are taking when they're just sitting there doing nothing so i hope this was informational to you um shows you a little bit about the emporia device by the way i bought the thing it was not sent to me as any kind of uh promotion or anything like that i just wanted to have more granular look at each one of my circuits so i didn't have to have a smart plug on every single device in the house and kind of get an idea of my usage if you have any questions or comments put those down below hit me up on discord if you're not a channel member i'd love for you to join if you would like to and we will see you on the next video [Music] you

Channel: mostlychris

Views: 5,980

Keywords: Smart Home, Home Assistant, Emporia, VUE, Energy Monitoring

Id: 2GM3ofBz4z0

Length: 24min 29sec (1469 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 24 2021