Energy monitoring recommendations

Having got HA working, talking to my inverters, populating the energy graphs and automatically managing flux peak period discharge, I’d like to increase the scope of power monitoring to other circuits and appliances in the house.

Interested to learn what people are using and what they recommend.

I have four TP-Link Tapo P110 smart plugs which come with appliance power monitoring and they’re still £10 from Currys so I could buy some more of these as they seem to work OK. They communicate over wi-fi so lots of devices adds to the wi-fi network clutter so I do wonder whether zigbee be a better mesh network approach (I don’t have any zigbee at present)?

Althom smart plugs pre-flashed with ESP32 or Tasmota for the same sort of money https://a.aliexpress.com/_mNzL382
Is ESP32 or Tasmota notably better than the other or is it just a fashion thing?

Shelly do energy monitoring plugs, but at £21 its over twice the price https://shellystore.co.uk/product/shelly-plus-plug-uk/ - not sure what advantages it brings.

Energy monitoring.
There’s hard wired circuit monitors like https://toughleads.co.uk/collections/power-meters/products/din-meter-component?variant=44297945481538 but this one integrates to Tuya, so all the cloud delay/dependency unless I use Tuya local which wasn’t as full-featured for my existing Tuya devices.

Shelly energy monitors https://shellystore.co.uk/product/shelly-em-2x50a/ but at £68 for two circuit monitors that’s going to add up to a lot of money for reasonable coverage of the fusebox.

Speak to the geek’s article on DIY energy monitor https://www.speaktothegeek.co.uk/2022/08/esphome-ct-clamp-power-and-energy-monitor/ looked promising, but its only a single circuit and I really want to monitor multiple circuits. Oliver used a Mottram labs ESP monitor and they do a 4 channel monitor, but there are two different versions, blue and green, which is right? https://www.mottramlabs.com/esp_products.html

And then there’s a different (smaller) Mottram labs 4-channel ESP32 board on ebay https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/134557202607

Lots of options and the only videos I could find were very American focussed.

What do people use and recommend?

geoffreycoan Can't provide a view on all your questions but the Athom plugs work well. You can get them pre-flashed with ESPHome or Tasmota; both of which have integrations built into HA. My preference is for Tasmota, but I don't think it makes much difference.

I've also got three Mottram Labs 4-channel ESP8266 devices with CTs attached. My experience with these is that they aren't as useful as I had hoped. The sampling of the CTs should provide perfect results, but mine just don't. They are good to use to see if current is flowing (ie device is switched on) and to see when the current changes (another device switches on/off) but as for using them for energy monitoring; mine are not so good.

I wouldn't worry about "wifi clutter" - these things don't generate much traffic, and that's what wifi is there for. Zigbee is great, Z-Wave somewhat less so. But both are fine. I imagine you are already running a MQTT broker, so have a look at zwave2mqtt and zwavejs2mqtt.

ESP32 and Tasmota are both great, with each having its own tribe of followers. I'm in the latter camp and must have 10-15 of those plugs lying about. (Always useful - this week I found that my old Mac Pro trashcan is burning through 2kWh every day, for example.) It's pretty easy to Tasmota-ise plugs yourself if you are technically minded, but even easier to buy them already flashed (though you are, of course, then running the risk of having a bastardised version that "phones home" or worse). Shelly have a top notch reputation, but I've not dipped my toe in that particular pool

My personal opinion - Tasmota all the things!

Tim Thanks Tim, that’s useful to know some real-world experience of the Mottram 4-channel ESP8266. Sounds like its not going to give me the reasonably accurate power monitoring I am looking for.

I should have clarified, the initial things I want to monitor are:

• the air source heat pumps. I have 3 dumb meters for it, but they’re in the loft, and of course not real-time
• the GroWatt 4kW FIT array. Again has a dumb meter but its in the garage
• high usage things like hot tub, oven, ring main so I can see what’s using what power

If it came to it I would be OK with wiring meters in line with the circuit rather than relying on CT clamps.

I’m more interested in monitoring power of things like the dishwasher, washing machine, PC, etc. Probably won’t do a great deal of scheduling using smart plugs to turn things on and off as that relies on the appliance to start when the power is applied

geoffreycoan For your 3phase applications the EnergyMonitor seems to have a good following, active community and the products are being actively developed. I nearly mentioned them before as they use a calibrated power supply for the device to get a voltage reference which helps with power and power factor measurements. I saw on one of their community posts about using MQTT, so that'd enable easy integration to HA, although their own monitoring interface looks pretty impressive. You could use one of these for the ASHP/Growatt and then Tasmota plugs for the dishwasher etc?

Edit: Just found an HA integration for it.

Tim Thanks Tim. Just to clarify, I don't have any 3 phase devices, only single phase in the house. There's 3 dumb meters for the heating as there's two 9kW LG heat pumps (due to the predicted heat loss from house) and there's a 3rd meter for the immersion heater used for the weekly anti-legionnaire cycle.
Ideally would monitor them individually but frankly I amalgamate the meter readings today for monthly total heat pump consumption.

I saw the open energy monitor programme before, in some respects it's a similar ecosystem as home assistant but focused just on energy monitoring - current, temperature and flow rate- and in particular heat pump monitoring.
I think you need to buy the 6 channel energy monitor, power supply and a raspberry pi based hub to do the data logging and Web interface. If you want temperature monitoring and flow rate then there's more sensors (and plumbing!) so all gets to be a substantial investment. There's two HA integrations, emoncms history that sends HA sensor data to emoncms and there's emoncms https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/emoncms/ that sends emoncms data into HA.

OK, one decision made, I’m going to monitor my appliances with smart plugs from mylocalbytes https://www.mylocalbytes.com/products/smart-plug-pm?variant=41600621510847

Or at least I will when they’re back in stock again. They were in stock before the weekend and now have run out.

It came down to a decision between mylocalbytes and Athome. Plenty of people on this forum, Reddit and on the HA forum seemed to have used both, there were positive comments about both, and Athome were slightly cheaper especially if I bought in packs of 4 from aliexpress. However I found at least one comment that said that they’d had a number of Athome ones stop working within 8 months and they wouldn’t replace them, just give 50% discount, and from what I’ve seen on the mylocalbytes on the forums they seem quite proactive and better from a support perspective, and are a UK company. So I’ll pay the slight extra.

Now got to make a decision over how to monitor the circuits in the fusebox …