Tracking Energy Use

[DSteiNeuro]

My electric bill is too high. I want to try to track down the high utilization appliances. I have a ton of the usual HA stuff, several computers, whole house audio, dedicated audio....
I have a smart electric meter and use Rainforest eagle to monitor. I have the Rainforest plugin, so can track current usage and use Jon00 graphing to plot it out.
I also have the Rainforest App as a screen on HS Touch and like to monitor usage from there.

What I'd like to do is to track what appliance are on and correlate to usage. For some appliances it may be easy if there is an associated HS device that is either on or off e.g. my central vacuum. For others, I may need to track manually. For this, I guess I could create a bunch of virtual devices.

Curious on how others are doing this and for any suggestions?

DSteiNeuro

[prsmith777]

I just started energy monitoring project in the past few weeks. Bought the Bultech GEMs and use Ultras plugin. Having a few issues with a couple of the units disconnecting but Ben at Brultech is very responsive to problems and he is going to issue a new firmware to resolve the issue.

Other than that, they are very nice. I went full enchilada and put current transformers on every breaker off my panels, so I can monitor power output on everything in the house. I too have a lot of computers, etc, but surprisingly they don't contribute as much to the power usage as I had imagined. The real culprits are AC and the electric tile floor heater that suck down electrons unforgivingly.

Cost is up there especially if you have multiple panel as I do, but its a hobby right?

[jon00]

Curious on how others are doing this and for any suggestions?

DSteiNeuro

This may assist: https://forums.homeseer.com/forum/3r...eer-3?t=169790

[mulu]

I went to their website and looked into their solution. So this system isn't measuring consumption for individual devices but for each 'section' in the electrical box. We have a main panel and one sub panel. So I guess we would need two GreenEye monitors (one for each panel), one DashBox and as many "Type B CT" (want to measure amps rather than volts) probes as we have circuits. It looks like I can have the DashBox next to the router and have the two GreenEye boxes connected to it wirelessly. But where do you put the DashBox? I don't think it fits into the electrical panel. Also does it require an adapter? That would be an issue because the next outlet for the circuit breaker box outside is kind of far away and for the sub panel in the garage I don't want to have wires showing.

[DSteiNeuro]

I just started energy monitoring project in the past few weeks. Bought the Bultech GEMs and use Ultras plugin. Having a few issues with a couple of the units disconnecting but Ben at Brultech is very responsive to problems and he is going to issue a new firmware to resolve the issue.

Other than that, they are very nice. I went full enchilada and put current transformers on every breaker off my panels, so I can monitor power output on everything in the house. I too have a lot of computers, etc, but surprisingly they don't contribute as much to the power usage as I had imagined. The real culprits are AC and the electric tile floor heater that suck down electrons unforgivingly.

Cost is up there especially if you have multiple panel as I do, but its a hobby right?

Definitely an option. I also have two panels. The large appliances run directly off the main and I have one circuit in the garage. The rest of the house runs off the sub.

[DSteiNeuro]

This may assist: https://forums.homeseer.com/forum/3r...eer-3?t=169790

Thanks Jon, not exactly what I was looking for as I want to tie the actual "On" period to the energy usage.

Still useful, so I will give it a go.
I actually do something similar by triggering a cumulative timer, for example when the shower fan runs but this is a better solution.

David

[DSteiNeuro]

Anybody try Sense?
Seems like it might be worth a try?