Monitor Your Smart Home Energy Usage EASILY!

many of you will know smart home company shelley for their affordable yet powerful smart relays that fit into your existing light switches or sockets here we have the original shelley one and shelley 1pm put these into existing light switches or sockets and they can make them instantly smart while still having the ability to work with your existing manual light switch but recently shelley announced their pro series line of products and along with it the shelley pro 4pm which instead of going inside of your light switch is actually designed to go inside of your breaker box and has a number of other really cool features over their existing non-pro line of products and i just happen to have one wired up right over here as you may have noticed so let's take a look fill transparency as always this unit was provided by shelley for review now let's talk about what makes the shelley pro line of products different to the non-pro line of products because obviously we have seen smart relays from shelley before so what we have here is the shelley pro 4pm and this is a four channel relay with 16 amps available per channel up to a maximum of 40 amps for the entire device there's also a one channel and a two channel version available too all of the pro lines fit onto a standard din rail making it easy to install inside of your breaker box the four channel version that we have here features a 1.8 inch display with three physical buttons for navigation and the keen among you will have noticed the pm in the name which stands for power metering it will actually measure and display the power consumption of each channel or circuit that you may have connected in terms of price the four channel version that we have here comes in at 79 euros which is just under 70 pounds and the one channel and the two channel versions will be less than that those aren't actually released quite yet but the four channel version that we have here is available on their website to buy right now there is a few other things that make it different to the non-pro line of products firstly its safety features so the shelley pro line has inbuilt temperature protection actually measuring the internal temperature every 100 milliseconds to make sure everything is in line if the temperature gets too high it will automatically cut power to the outputs and send you a notification it's also got over voltage and over power protection same thing again measuring every 100 milliseconds for either of those parameters to get out of range and it will automatically cut the outputs and send you an alert finally they are built with flame resistant materials just in the event that they are exposed to high heat which should give you extra peace of mind then the last difference between the pro line is the connectivity options in the normal shelley line we have become accustomed to seeing wifi that's one of the things that makes them so popular is that they are easy to integrate without a hub or another smart gateway well this time we do indeed have wi-fi and also bluetooth but we also have ethernet right on the bottom of the unit so that you can hardwire everything into your network for the best reliability there's actually a difference in who they are actually marketing these products to so the pro line is more designed to be aimed towards professional professional installers maybe businesses and perhaps new builds as well you can definitely integrate these into your existing uh house build if you're just like me and you're a homeowner you can definitely integrate these into your existing setup but that's who they are aiming this and more towards as professionals uh businesses and also new builds as you may have noticed this fabulous contraption right behind me this is to help demonstrate the different ways in which you could wire the shelley made up for me by the local electrician aka the legend that is my dad so on the right here we have it wired with no physical switch we have a light in there at the moment but this could represent anything you may want to control smartly with a relay it doesn't necessarily have to have a physical switch then in the middle we have a single light switch for rooms where you obviously only have a single light switch and then on the far left hand side we then have a two-way light switch for rooms with multiple physical switches in them again we are just using light bulbs up here for visual purposes but it is a relay and so it can be used to control just about anything you want after you power the unit on the display will come to life and instantly drop you into the main dashboard and you can use the arrow keys to select each channel which will control it on and off once you turn on you will see exactly how much power the circuit is using right on the display up at the top you'll see the time and connectivity status and if you press and hold the ok button it will jump into another menu to turn off or on different network options like bluetooth or wifi or you can see some basic stats and information and finally you can reboot or reset the device itself you can see that with our visual wiring that we have here that no matter how i toggle the relays or lights in this case from the controller itself i can still use the physical switches to operate them and everything works perfectly as it should now it wouldn't be all that useful if you had to go into your breaker box every time you wanted to switch a light on or off or look at how much power you were using so that is where the smart aspect comes in shelly in the past has been known for their open approach to using their hardware providing many options of control so they have their own shelley app that you can use to control shelly products either locally or through the shelley cloud and you can turn that on or off totally up to you but also with their non-pro line of products we've seen local apis web servers local integrations with home assistant mqtt support and even allowing you to flash your own firmware onto the devices with a pro line of products i'm really glad to see that none of that has disappeared with all of the same options still available so that you really can set these up and configure them however you want and you can make them work with whatever smart home platform you want also in terms of setting up with the shelley app this is probably the worst part of the experience for me that is not a fault of the product itself though that is just the shelley app setting up the shelley pro 4pm is pretty easy you just add a device select which wi-fi network you want to join it to and it will automatically find the pro force hotspot connect to it and join it to your main wi-fi then in the shelly app you have all of the usual controls it will show you the power consumption of each channel allowing you to toggle it on and off and everything else you would expect the shelley app is a little slow and clunky and it does take a little bit of getting used to but that's a good thing that as discussed you don't even need to use it since shelley provides so many options for control integration with home assistant was incredibly straightforward as soon as the shelley came online it showed up automatically inside of home assistant click a few buttons and it's added you can also instantly start using them with the energy management feature inside of home assistant as well you can select one or all of the relays that you want to show up which will instantly start tracking your total energy usage it really doesn't get much easier than that to be honest before we close this video out i wanted to discuss some of the limitations that the shelley pro 4pm has now earlier we talked about how it has 16 amps per channel for many european countries that should be fine and it seems like this is the spect that they have actually designed it for but here in the uk that unfortunately makes it unsuitable for some of our wiring particularly this isn't suitable for our ring main socket circuits here in the uk as they normally are protected by a 32 amp mini circuit breaker obviously this is only half of that it could be used on a radial circuit where they are often protected by a 16 amp mcb but that is just something to be aware of if you're in the uk and you're looking to pick one of these up there are tons of good uses for the shelley pro line of products obviously having that inbuilt power monitoring is an incredibly useful feature for those of you using the new home assistant energy management feature which we discussed in terms of what i plan on using it for over in my dad's house aka the ultimate smart home which they are in the process of restoring he has some large pumps for their bio mass boilers which this will be a perfect application for for being able to control the pumps through home assistant as well as monitor the power on those will be a nice little task for the shelley pro 4pm but that's about going to do it for this video hopefully you guys enjoyed it let me know down in the comments if you like this more visual test bench setup what guy my dad is for coming up with this say i literally just gave him the shelley and said can you add this to your breaker box so i can test out because he is in the process of rewiring their entire house a couple of days later he was like uh so i came up with this which is a bit more visual way of seeing how it works for your viewers do you think that will be okay i was like yeah that will definitely work anyways let me know what you guys think down in the comments let me know what you think about the new shelley pro 4pm are you guys planning on picking one up if you want to support the channel then you can do so by becoming a patron on patreon and your support allows me to keep on making these videos thank you jump my current patreon supporters as always your support is very much appreciated make sure to drop this video a like in fact drop my dad a like for coming up with this make sure to get subscribed and i will see you in the next video

Channel: Everything Smart Home

Views: 31,011

Keywords: shellypro4pm, shellypro, shelly, shelly pro 4, home assistant, smart home, home automation, shelly pro 4pm, smart home energy, home assistant energy, home assistant energy management, home assistant shelly, shelly home assistant

Id: 5Cpi0DQlkik

Length: 9min 41sec (581 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 05 2021