Emporia Gen 3 Smart Home Energy Monitor with 16 50A Circuit Level Sensors | Home Energy Automation and Control | Real Time Electricity Monitor/Meter | Solar/Net Metering

My electric bill was over $1200 a month and since it’s just my wife and I in a small 1,500 square ft house I needed to figure out what was using all the electricity.My circuit breaker was not labeled so I had to find out what each circuit was. I purchased a circuit breaker finder and then found and labeled each circuit.I found one circuit was just going to the doorbell, but we haven’t had a working doorbell since we purchased this house 20 years ago. I didn’t give it much thought though.I then installed this. And the install was simple finished it in about 30 minutes. Since my internet setup was next to the circuit breaker I hard wired this to the Ethernet.After getting it setup I got the app setup and quickly found what was eating a ton of energy… that doorbell circuit. I found the relay for the doorbell and put my hand on it and almost burned myself! I turned that circuit off and saw instantly my usage drop down!I then found some other things around the house which were plugged in but were not being used including an empty freezer and unplugged them. My energy usuage went down even more.But the real proof in the pudding was when I got my electric bill where my $1200 a month bill dropped down to under $400! Was I paying big $$$ for the malfunctioning doorbell for the past 20 years. Possibly but honestly I would not have found it if it was not for this device. Not to mention the possibility of a fire from it as that thing was very hot!Since finding and eliminating the energy wasting things I still check the app about once a week and checking things to see if there is something new eating a lot of power.Honestly now that I found and corrected I could probably take it out but now to me it’s a security blanket so I will know of other things that may go south and start eating power too.This was money well spent, For the last few years I have been asking my wife for one of these to figure out what was using so much power. We were looking at the Sense but glad we found the Emporia. My wife didn’t want me wasting money on this for years but now that we have one I can only think of the money it would have saved us if we got it a few years ago when I first started looking.If you can’t figure out why your energy bill is so high get one of these.My only wish is that they had one that offered more sensors, however with the way I got it setup now only 2% of my other electricity usage which is not shown in the app.

I just received my Vue 3 this week and it has been online for less than 24 hours, but I'm already impressed with the value this system provides. I installed it myself, and it took less than two hours. I'm not an electrician, but I am pretty handy with household DIY, and am used to working with electronics, etc. Working in a breaker panel is very dangerous, so if you have any doubts, please just pay an electrician a few hundred dollars to install it for you.The installation documentation is very good, and straight-forward. Emporia also has a lot of information on their website. I had a complete gameplan and realistic expectations going in. I have a total of 20 breakers, so i knew I would need to be creative to get full coverage. The only 2-pole breaker that I didn't use a single CT and multiplier on was my dryer, because I knew dryers are notoriously unbalanced. This was confirmed by my readings washing and drying 4 loads of laundry last night. Good call. My HVAC and water heater seem balanced enough to use one CT and a 2x multiplier going by my readings so far. I also combined several circuits on the same legs (2 wires/alternating breakers) to achieve full coverage with 16 CTs. This works well. I also have a couple of breakers for items I rarely use, like a floor heater in the basement, so I opted to just leave them unmonitored and if I do use them, they'll show up in the "balance" from the mains. The last atypical part of my setup was to connect the hot wires for the monitor to 20 amp breakers instead of the recommended 15s. This was just due to their proximity to the monitor and required me to replace the supplied 14 gauge pigtails with 12 gauge THHN. Easy peasy.I also bought a four-pack of Emporia's smart plugs to cover one outlet at the panel that has its own breaker, and to give me the flexibility to drill down individual appliances on a monitored or unmonitored circuit.Adding the Vue and the SPs to the app literally could not have been easier. If you prepare by reading their documentation first, you'll be ready to hit the ground running. Write down the circuits and ports to which they're connected. Know any CTs that will need to be merged, like my dryer. I also nested my unmonitored SPs under the main device, and monitored SPs under the appropriate circuits. All was easy to do in the app.So far, the balance, or the difference between the reporting from the mains and the totals from the monitored circuits has been negligible. I know this will vary, but I think I've got it as good as I'm going to get it with 16 CTs. I'm happy.The provided data in the app is great. If I could make any suggestions, one would be to make it easier to look at a specific time on the graphs. You have to slide the graph to the right to go back in time and you're limited by the width of your screen. Going back several hours can take dozens of swipes. That's annoying. Put a drag-bar at the bottom, and/or allow me to pick a time manually. Also, you can only see spikes (such as HVAC startup) at the "second" resolution, so if you're trying to determine peak loads for an alternate energy source, there's no easy way to get them in the app. The export feature certainly helps by generating granular spreadsheets at all resolutions, though. It just emails a link once created, which is pretty slick.The whole Emporia Vue system is meeting or exceeding my expectations at this point. If anything changes, I will update my review.

The system has worked very well for me. Was easy to install and get running. The app has been stable and has given me good information about how my electricity is being used.I had one bad current transformer and Customer Support quickly sent me a replacement with no hassle. They were very friendly, easy to get in contact with, knowledgeable, and answered some other questions I had.I have two main electrical panels and after installing Vue3 on the first panel, I'm planning to order a second unit for the other main panel.I wish they made a version that would monitor more than 16 circuits so I could monitor all of the circuits in my breaker panel.