very happy - as long as they keep CLOUD ON
i'm big into home energy monitoring, I have two of the very powerful and open source iotawatt circuit monitoring systems.
I needed a third system that was lower cost to monitor a sub panel at my home , so I bought two of the Emporia view two kits at $99 each.
i'm actually very impressed with this app and it's abilities, as long as Emporia keeps their cloud service running and does not hinder the ability of my home assistant server to pull in my Emporia data from the cloud, I will keep this at a five star review , and recommend Emporia products to anyone looking to get started in Home energy monitoring.
while iotawatt is much more powerful, and does not depend on the cloud (at all!), it is also quite a bit more expensive and is for those more technically savvy.
I needed a third system that was lower cost to monitor a sub panel at my home , so I bought two of the Emporia view two kits at $99 each.
i'm actually very impressed with this app and it's abilities, as long as Emporia keeps their cloud service running and does not hinder the ability of my home assistant server to pull in my Emporia data from the cloud, I will keep this at a five star review , and recommend Emporia products to anyone looking to get started in Home energy monitoring.
while iotawatt is much more powerful, and does not depend on the cloud (at all!), it is also quite a bit more expensive and is for those more technically savvy.
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Good in General
The emporia app and the hardware is surprisingly polished at the price point they’re sold at.
I’m not a fan of how the app prominently puts buttons in the main screen that most of us are unlikely to ever use. For example, the App main menu prominently shows lots of device control line items for appliances, plugs, etc. even if none of these devices have been added to the system. Meanwhile, day-to-day menus are comparatively neglected. Do better. If a consumer only measures power, then focus the app around that use case.
Homes with multiple panels cannot consolidate all the panels into one home re: local power consumption. Only nesting within panels is supported.
Also, weirdly, a lot of the functions like local electricity rates, etc. cannot be set from inside the App.
Solar panels allegedly producing 30w in the middle of the night, every night, suggest that the algorithms and precision of the system have improvement opportunities.
Lastly, the developers do not seem to have focused on ensuring that measurements are gathered / presented coincident in the App. Turn on and turn off heavy loads in a nested sub panel to watch your home allegedly produce power excesses, as the app struggles to understand where the it’s measuring power is actually going.
In summary, a lot of first world problems, as the hardware and App do allow the homeowner to start focusing on loads that make a significant difference re: home power consumption.
I’m not a fan of how the app prominently puts buttons in the main screen that most of us are unlikely to ever use. For example, the App main menu prominently shows lots of device control line items for appliances, plugs, etc. even if none of these devices have been added to the system. Meanwhile, day-to-day menus are comparatively neglected. Do better. If a consumer only measures power, then focus the app around that use case.
Homes with multiple panels cannot consolidate all the panels into one home re: local power consumption. Only nesting within panels is supported.
Also, weirdly, a lot of the functions like local electricity rates, etc. cannot be set from inside the App.
Solar panels allegedly producing 30w in the middle of the night, every night, suggest that the algorithms and precision of the system have improvement opportunities.
Lastly, the developers do not seem to have focused on ensuring that measurements are gathered / presented coincident in the App. Turn on and turn off heavy loads in a nested sub panel to watch your home allegedly produce power excesses, as the app struggles to understand where the it’s measuring power is actually going.
In summary, a lot of first world problems, as the hardware and App do allow the homeowner to start focusing on loads that make a significant difference re: home power consumption.
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Lower my energy usage
I was going crazy trying to figure out why my energy bill has drastically increased since a year ago. With the emporia vue 3 now I can see what items, rooms, additions/efficiency are consuming most of the energy. It turns out that 50% of the 116kwh per day I consume is from the A/C unit alone. This also has made me conclude that my a/c needs replacement. After the findings, we decided turning off the ac when going to work and just turn it on remotely when we reaching home. Now we are just consuming just half of past usage amount.
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Needs a serious UX overhaul
While the system appears to be good (good hardware, responsive backend architecture and preference, an app on web and mobile), this app and the software front end in general is very sub-par. It must have been made by a bunch of engineers that don’t understand how people think. It is not intuitive. It needs a course just to understand how all the elements work.
It needs to highlight energy versus power far better. It even has a mistake that is hard to get your head around. The real time is KW and any other readings need to be in KWh (power over time is energy). The graph could be a lot better: rather than having intervals it could be continuous. The changing scale between intervals makes it hard to understand what is happening with your energy. Even accessing settings is strange: you have to click into several menus to make any changes.
I have solar and the whole process of setting it up was difficult. Why is the polarity so difficult? Then the whole balence is sooooooo hard to understand. Yes: it’s the remainder of the electrical activity but mine makes NO sense. I have broken down every single electrical element in my home and it doesn’t add up. The power reported for my solar system is also way off from what the app reports. There is a scale that you can set for single poles but it isn’t adding up. Why is there factions of a scale?? You have single and double poles. Yikes.
The setup was AWEFUL. The process was slow and I had to do the whole thing over several times. For the smart plugs it took 3-4 tries for each it simply connect. The hardware is simple but the software was just frustrating. I’m a professional electrical engineer so I know what I’m doing.
In general the app is NOT polished and poorly planned. It feels like an internal tool rather than a public facing product. This needs to be improved if this product is going to penetrate markets other than geeks like me.
It needs to highlight energy versus power far better. It even has a mistake that is hard to get your head around. The real time is KW and any other readings need to be in KWh (power over time is energy). The graph could be a lot better: rather than having intervals it could be continuous. The changing scale between intervals makes it hard to understand what is happening with your energy. Even accessing settings is strange: you have to click into several menus to make any changes.
I have solar and the whole process of setting it up was difficult. Why is the polarity so difficult? Then the whole balence is sooooooo hard to understand. Yes: it’s the remainder of the electrical activity but mine makes NO sense. I have broken down every single electrical element in my home and it doesn’t add up. The power reported for my solar system is also way off from what the app reports. There is a scale that you can set for single poles but it isn’t adding up. Why is there factions of a scale?? You have single and double poles. Yikes.
The setup was AWEFUL. The process was slow and I had to do the whole thing over several times. For the smart plugs it took 3-4 tries for each it simply connect. The hardware is simple but the software was just frustrating. I’m a professional electrical engineer so I know what I’m doing.
In general the app is NOT polished and poorly planned. It feels like an internal tool rather than a public facing product. This needs to be improved if this product is going to penetrate markets other than geeks like me.
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New Graphs are a step back
I love emporia products and the previous version of the app. The new graphs are a huge downgrade with inability to scroll. Unintuitive time ranges too now.
Would have been five stars but
My home consumed more than double the neighborhood average kWh. This made solar untenable and I tried everything I could think of to reduce usage to no avail. The Vue 3 answered every question within 24 hours of installation. AC had been installed incorrectly, triggering the AC every time the fresh air fan turned on even when the furnace kicked on over winter! This translated to 15 minutes every hour of the AC running all day every day. The following weekend it showed me the AC started short cycling for about 24 hours which led to finding a broken damper stuck in normally closed causing the coils to freeze. I could never have recognized these problems without the Vue’s data. Saved me more than $1000 by allowing me to diy the damper replacement and remove the control wire for the fresh air intake without needing a technician. Five stars!
Fast forward a month and the app updated to not allow continuous scrolling of the data; it now shows data in segments per screen instead of being able see contiguous timeframes. I can see a specific hour, but not say the last 15 minutes of one hour and the first 45 minutes of the next. This makes identifying usage very difficult having to flip back and forth between screens. I wouldn’t have been so easily able to identify either issue above with this interface. Lots of great features and easy to use but it’s far less useful without continuous scrolling.
Fast forward a month and the app updated to not allow continuous scrolling of the data; it now shows data in segments per screen instead of being able see contiguous timeframes. I can see a specific hour, but not say the last 15 minutes of one hour and the first 45 minutes of the next. This makes identifying usage very difficult having to flip back and forth between screens. I wouldn’t have been so easily able to identify either issue above with this interface. Lots of great features and easy to use but it’s far less useful without continuous scrolling.
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Refreshing
Wow I much prefer the new usage display and I’m able to combine my solar circuits into one which applies back in time as well! 💪
I’d like the option to hide unused circuits from the graphed circuit dropdown and would be better to have my combined circuit at the top.
I’d like the option to hide unused circuits from the graphed circuit dropdown and would be better to have my combined circuit at the top.
Missing 1 min Real time updates
Nice upgrade but not ideal. The 1 hour chart is reporting on the previous hour and not the current hour, resulting in the inability to view realtime 1 min time interval updates.
Powerful App for Energy Monitoring
The Emporia service and mobile app have proven to be very useful for monitoring both the production of power with our solar array and the consumption of power by our geothermal, hot tub, heat pump water heater, and other major appliances. In addition, it enables me to independently verify the accuracy of the power company’s new smart meter.
The latest release includes major improvements to the graphing functions of the mobile app, making it easy to visualize when the solar array delivers power to the grid (exceeding the power consumption of our house) and when our house is consuming power from the power company.
Great job Emporia!
The latest release includes major improvements to the graphing functions of the mobile app, making it easy to visualize when the solar array delivers power to the grid (exceeding the power consumption of our house) and when our house is consuming power from the power company.
Great job Emporia!
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New version’s graphs less convenient
I use this app since 2021 but the newest version’s graphs make it harder to scroll or browse the last few days of hourly graph. It makes it 1 page per day, changes the scale for each day which makes it harder to see the trends or compare one day to the other. Same goes for daily graph or the one by the minute.
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